For real estate agents, clients are everything. They are the very foundation on which you build your career. Every agent chases leads, and while leads are essential, you must be able to turn leads into clients to rise to the real estate industry’s top.
In the old days, lead generation meant talking to friends, family, and neighbors to see if anyone was open to buying or selling property. You might chat up their spouse’s colleagues at a company party or casually leave their business cards out as they welcome in-laws to Thanksgiving dinner. But today’s technologically savvy world opens up endless options for finding new clients, and you are no longer limited to your immediate vicinity.
Enter the real estate sales funnel. This tool has proven invaluable for agents worldwide in attracting and closing new clients. The simplest explanation of a sales funnel is a process for guiding prospective clients through your website. A sales funnel includes a series of web pages clients move through as they transition from first-time visitors to solid leads and, finally, to signed clients.
This sales funnel playbook covers everything from what a sales funnel does and why it is crucial for your business to how you can implement this proven strategy to elevate your client list and take your sales numbers to the next level.
Find It Fast
The importance of a real estate sales funnel
You know all about the importance of a traffic-generating agent website. While a landing page and website are essential tools, how you use those tools makes all the difference in closing deals. That’s where the effective sales funnel works its magic.
Having a website without a sales funnel is like planning a fancy dinner party and failing to invite guests. Think of your website as a beautifully appointed dinner party. You have polished silver, gorgeous place settings, and top-notch cuisine. But without guests and interesting conversation, even the most lavish dining accouterments won’t translate to a successful party.
The engagement of your dinner companions is akin to the engagement your sales funnel should promote. The sales funnel acts as the host, welcoming visitors, guiding them through the house to the dining room, and asking engaging questions along the way. This conversation provides the visitors some time to share something about themselves and their problems or needs, which, in turn, gives you a chance to provide their solution.
The stages of a real estate sales funnel
While the sales funnel model can shift according to industry, it typically comprises six stages.
1. Awareness
The prospective client first becomes aware of your company and brand image. They become aware when you make a first impression. Therefore, you should have a sharp, professionally designed website, as the first impression can make or break their next step.
2. Interest
If your prospective client likes what they see at first glance, they will explore your website menu, read through your content, and get familiar with your brand.
3. Consideration
In this stage, a visitor transforms into a prospective lead. You’ve won them over so far, and they are curious to know more.
4. Intent
Now, you’ve gained their trust. The prospective client shows high interest in your service, indicating they have a problem you can solve. They have shared their information with you but aren’t ready to commit.
5. Evaluation
In this stage, the prospective client seriously weighs the pros and cons.
6. Closing
You’ve worked for this, for when the lead becomes a bona fide client. They will now schedule the house tour, sign the contract, or contact you for an appointment.
The sales funnel moves prospective clients through each step between the initial contact and the closing. Here’s how you can create an effective funnel.
How to create an effective real estate sales funnel
A successful sales funnel requires optimization and specificity. It’s not enough to state that you can help the client buy or sell. Instead, let them know you understand their particular needs. Here’s how:
Create property landing pages
A landing page is a stand-alone web page with a single focus. While your website as a whole invites exploration and likewise offers multiple links and navigation options, individual landing pages present solutions to specific needs. Real estate agents are well-acquainted with property directory pages outlining available homes for sale. However, using this information with the optimized sales funnel does more than merely place information in front of prospective clients — it considers what those prospective clients want and how they will engage with the landing page to get it.
Rather than offer only one database page of listed properties, create individual landing pages for each property. Designating individual landing pages for each property creates a strong focus per landing page, offers specific solutions to client needs, and provides more places to insert calls to action. You can display links to schedule a tour, learn more, or opt to leave contact information with updates for this listing. Best of all, Luxury Presence provides a user-friendly platform for creating stunning property landing pages.
Add popups
You want to make it as easy as possible for prospective clients to reach you. Popups are an effective way to make it easy. For example, add an exit popup to ensure visitors take advantage of signing up for a newsletter before leaving the site. Or try a click popup, which a call-to-action generates. In this instance, since the visitor chooses it instead of the site, it generates high conversion rates. Other options include entry popups, which appear as soon as a visitor arrives on the page, or scroll popups, which pop up about halfway down the page.
Popups offer something in return for visitor information, such as an informative newsletter, a first-time homebuyer guide, or a complimentary consultation. You can tailor the nature of the popup to track email lists. For example, a popup on a property landing page would gather information from prospective buyers, which you could then use to send out open house notices for that property. A popup offering the ultimate guide to staging could garner you a host of prospective sellers. Or an entry popup might invite visitors to share their information to join the exclusive list to get the latest real estate information before it appears on your website.
Create a newsletter
Now that you have gained visitor information, you can start working on converting those casual guests into signed clients. Every website campaign you lead, whether a property landing page or a popup, will funnel client information into specific categories or segments. Gathering the data into these segments makes your marketing job much easier, as it allows you to see the categories of visitors and determine how to reach out to each group.
For example, if you have a segment of prospective buyers interested in a particular home for sale, you can create a newsletter about that property. You might include photos and information on open house dates to entice the buyers to show up, or you could create a home-buying guide to send out to your segment of first-time homebuyers.
Segmented marketing is considerably more effective than non-segmented marketing, up to 60% more. However, it is critical to send this material only to existing subscribers. Sending to those not on your list may result in an undesirable reputation as a realtor who spams. It could also lower the likelihood of future emails being opened and increase the chances of your efforts being sent straight to the junk folder.
As you create your newsletters and content, take the extra step to include a few click options which will further funnel the reader to more information, such as a new property landing page or a new blog post, on your site.
Send internal and external emails
Now that you have segments of prospective clients and their contact information, it’s time to leverage it effectively. Get organized and strike the right balance of follow-up attention. You can automate internal and external emails for seamless ways to stay top-of-mind.
Once a visitor submits their information, you should send an internal email to the appropriate agent and an external email to the prospective client. The internal email acts as a reminder to add the client to any other lead generation databases and to follow up as appropriate. The external email serves a few purposes. The first is to send any content the popup or click promised, such as a buying guide or additional details on a newly listed home for sale. You can automate these to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
You may also include a click-for-verification option to ensure the recipient has successfully received the email and you indeed have the correct contact information. This external email will also have another prompt encouraging your lead to reach out, whether for a home tour, conversation, or whatever may be appropriate based on their particular segment.
Remarket using social media
Real estate sales funnels are having a moment with social media. In the past, if a prospective client visited your website and left without engaging or sharing contact information, they were like a fish wiggling out of the net, lost to the sea, and gone forever. But today, with the savvy marriage of social media and webpage marketing, business owners can recast the net and catch the ones that got away. The benefit here is that you build on the familiarity you have already established with those previous visitors. When you pop up again on another platform, it may be the push they need to convert to full-time clients.
Facebook ads and Google ads offer a brilliant way to focus on those prospective clients who visited your site but did not engage with your content. Facebook provides a custom audience tool that allows you to create a targeted ad and track the prospects who visit your page. With this format, you can reach those same prospects with ads designed for the market they explored on your website and then drive them back to your chosen landing page. Essentially, you are recapturing the traffic that has bounced from your website and getting a second chance at winning them with focused ads targeted at their needs.
Google Ads provides an even larger platform for getting your ads in front of prospective clients who have previously visited your site. It works in a fashion similar to Facebook and allows you to customize your audience. You can tailor the audience to include those who have visited specific links and exclude audiences from others. Once you create an ad, as you did with Facebook, you can make a second optimized landing page for return visitors, complete with updates. For example, if you have a property landing page, you can include a banner at the top stating that the home already has high interest from buyers or will host only one more open house.
Get started with your own real estate sales funnel
Luxury Presence has had tremendous success refining these real estate marketing strategies, and experts agree that the real estate sales funnel is a highly effective tool capable of making a business boom in no time. If you are ready to get started, contact Luxury Presence to see how we can optimize the sales funnel concept for lead generation and take your company to the next level.
