Video: Exceed Your 2015 Sales Goals by Leveraging the Power of Your Agents’ Sphere of Influence

Only one out of every 100 leads from online search portals results in a conversion, according to Anna Visioli, Coldwell Banker's VP of Digital Marketing. Visioli was one of three panelists in a webinar that RE Technology hosted today that explored where to find and how to convert high quality leads.

Those leads aren't anonymous needles in the proverbial online haystack. Instead, they're closer than you think--existing contacts in your agents' sphere. Today, we explored how data science can help brokers determine what those leads need, how to use that knowledge to segment your contacts and how to tailor your marketing to speak to those needs in order to create more transactions.

For those who couldn't attend the webinar, you can watch the recording below. For a quick overview, click through to our notes on the next page.

Special guest Ken Epstein was the first speaker of the event. His company, Retention Science, leverages transactional, behavioral, social, and demographic data to transform the marketing programs of major corporations like Target. By using this data, Target's conversion rate is six times greater than it was before.

The real estate sales cycle is very different from Target's, but brokers can achieve a better marketing ROI with the following suggestions from Epstein:

• Know who your customers are via segmentation
• Personalize messages – on-site and email
• Personalize direct mail, handwritten notes
• Optimize messaging via timing and frequency
• Segment based on demographic third party data

Who Are Your Leads?

So how can we apply this advice to real estate? For the answer, we turned to Anna Visioli, Coldwell Banker's VP of Digital Marketing. "One of the biggest challenges we see is that agents confuse lead generation—the act of simply getting a lead—with lead management and generating business from that lead," she said. The key to generating business, according to Visiolo, is "understanding how these leads convert to home sales transactions, and understanding which of the lead types are worth pursuing."

The leads worth pursuing are most often the ones that come from an agent's sphere of influence. In fact, 75 percent of an agent's business will come from their sphere. But even with a large pool of prospects, it's not always clear who is in the market to buy or sell a home, or how to target them.

"Successful lead generating companies aren't necessarily the ones that maximize the number of leads, but those that effectively work the haystack to find their needles," said Visioli. "We do know that most of these leads—if nurtured and followed up on appropriately, will convert eventually, but many agents simply don't have the patience to incubate them."

To make nurturing leads painless to their agents, Coldwell Banker teamed up with Imprev to offer a single platform that makes it easy for agents to create digital and print marketing collateral and continuously engage their sphere. "Agents can incubate these leads by creating campaigns specific to the target group, or a generic campaign such as holidays," Visioli said.

What Do Your Leads Need?

Visioli then shared insight into what types of content work best with specific target groups: "Owners really gravitate towards articles about storage and entertaining. Sellers want to be as ready as possible, they want to know exactly how they can plan and prepare before the home sale. And there seems to be a lot of trepidation among our buyers, as they are looking for things to avoid, and information about local areas to determine where they may want to settle down."

Here are Visioli's and Coldwell Banker's tips for generating higher conversions:

• Focus on the group or lead sources that are most likely to drive business
• Segment your sphere based on where they are in the homebuying cycle and/or their demographic.
• Use content available to you, articles of local interest, or eCards provided by a company like Imprev to provide an appropriate an engaging way to stay in touch with your base

To learn more about the marketing platform that Coldwell Banker uses, watch the webinar recording or contact Imprev for a private demo.