Triple Your Leads with Better List Segmentation

Just what is a real estate prospect? That's starting with an easy question, as we all know that it's someone who wants to buy or sell real estate. Staying with this big picture viewpoint, many real estate CRM systems break down their prospects into buyers and sellers. There may also be an investors category, but for the most part, those are the three that you'll see in the top navigation of many real estate websites.

Idea #1: Stop Thinking Simple

Once you take this prospect segmentation approach, if you're doing lead generation right, you will be developing content, landing pages, calls-to-action, and lead forms to get your site visitors to give you their contact information so you can work them through to an ultimate transaction and commission. While keeping thing simple makes many things in life and business easier and less stressful, it can also cost you a lot of business and money.

Action #1: Drill Down Prospect Categories

As you answer questions, speak to prospects and clients, answer emails and website queries, start thinking about how there are differences between prospects in these three major categories. Different buyers have different goals or needs, as do sellers and even investors.

• Buyers – This one isn't difficult. You have first-time buyers, baby boomer buyers, price range buyers, single/divorced household buyers, and you'll come up with more if you pay attention to their needs.
• Sellers – Even though it seems obvious that a seller has a home they want to sell, there are differences in their needs that can help you to place them in different buckets (segments). Are they staying in the area or moving away? Is their equity situation tight or is there a lot of equity (makes selling price decisions more important). Have they bought and sold before, or is this their first time as a home seller (how much help/information will they need)?
• Investors – Are they flippers or rental home buyers? What is their price range, and what are their cash flow requirements to make a rental property a good target for them?

This is all about coming up with sub-categories to better segment your prospects based on their needs or requirements so that you can better market to them.

Idea #2: Expand Your Follow-up Marketing

"Expand" in this case means breaking down your new prospect categories/segments and considering specific marketing approaches for each. You can't just stick with your current landing page strategy, calls-to-action, and lead forms.

Action #2: Build Your Segment Lead Generation Plan

Let's use those buyer segments as an example. You're going to want to expand your follow-up contacts and marketing to specifically target each segment. Build a landing page for first-time buyers with special content offerings that will appeal to them, such as basic transaction process information.

For the baby boomer generation, you can create content and calls-to-action related to downsizing, getting top dollar for their home to help with retirement funding and even content about what to do with all of that furniture when you're downsizing.

The point is to take each new segment you've come up with and create landing page content, special offerings, and calls-to-action, as well as lead collection forms.

Idea #3: Follow Through with Follow-up

When you happily begin to see your leads coming in by segment, it's easy to just stick to your current follow-up email campaigns and marketing. It's also a major mistake. You want to create new email campaigns and follow through for each of your segments.

Action #3: Follow Through with Targeted Information

Create that first-time buyer's follow-up campaign to stick to the interests you found that made them their own buyer segment. Then have more questions, so maybe an email answering one FAQ at a time is a great campaign to keep them with you until they're ready to buy.

For the potential listing prospect, have a campaign that sends each email with a specific instruction or answer related to getting a home ready for listing, what buyers will be looking for, as well as current market conditions that influence listing prices.

All we've done here is to drill down from three top-level prospect categories to break them out into more focused groups, each with their own unique service and information requirements. If you do this, you will increase your lead generation and you will keep more of your prospects until they're ready for a transaction.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.