Capturing real estate leads through your realtor website is pivotal to beginning a relationship with your real estate prospect. It's through capturing real estate leads that the selling or buying process begins. This is basic to the realtor marketing scheme.
Cultivating a relationship with your prospects and clients is key to selling property and aiding buyers find their dream homes. If you are using a personal realtor website in your marketing scheme, this becomes a bit more difficult. This relationship begins with capturing the personal information of your prospects.
Capturing leads through a website isn't impossible though. The important thing to remember is to put your potential customer first. Website visitors are searching the internet for information and answers to their real estate questions. They're not looking to divulge information about themselves.
Your need to provide them with information on your realtor website that they are looking for and give answers to the most asked questions. It's through this content that you bring the prospect to your website and bait them into giving you their name, email address, and phone number.
Studies show that most website visitors are concerned about privacy and security. You have to provide them with this sense of security before they will give you their information and allow you to begin the relationship. It is essential that your website has a privacy page stating that you are not going to use their contact information for any purpose other than to contact them.
You need to assure the prospect that you will not sell their information and will not use it to "spam" them. The idea is to gain their trust. Trust goes a long way in cultivating the relationship with them that you desire.
The prospect needs to know you're real. So, you need to prominently display your email address, phone and FAX number, street address, and any toll free numbers for where to reach you. They need to know that you're a real person with a real estate business. This should be done near the top of your home page.
Further down in the web page or site, you can add details about yourself and put pictures of you and team members to give the prospect an increased awareness that you're not some sort of cyber-ghost trying to glean information about them that could be used for illicit or unprofessional uses. Pictures not only give them a face, but the person they are going to deal with.
When capturing the prospects contact information, be sure to ask their permission for you to follow up with them. On the internet, this is done with an "opt-in" form. You should tell them that they can cancel or opt-out at any time. Any email from you will include links to do this. This will bolster the feeling that they are in control in the relationship.
The opt-in should be verified before you begin sending them emails or calling. This is important. In the internet age, verification satisfies the "can-spam" laws and makes it so that your emails will go through smoothly.
Opt-in forms are usually connected to an autoresponder. The autorespoder is the means to instantaneously reply with the verification notice and follow-up emails. This is the standard on the internet and if you don't have one, you will look and feel amateurish.
The autoresponder can be placed on your own website host's server or you can subscribe to a reliable autoresponder service. I've tried both and have found that the services like
aWeber tend to be more versatile and reliable than an autoresponder you purchase and upload to your host server.
The aurtoresponder will insure that the prospect will receive a prompt reply stating their information was received and a more detailed response will follow shortly. This will work 24/7 and you don't even need to be in the office for the prospect to hear from you.
You can also use the autoresponder to send a series of follow-up emails (not spam) at regular intervals to the prospect, thus further cultivating the relationship with them. These could be answers to their most basic questions about selling or buying housing, additional information that's not found on the website, and listings in their area. Actually, just about any real estate information depending upon the opt-in form they are filling out.
The autoresponder will also place the prospect's information into a database, thus capturing the lead as you were wishing for. Once you capture the lead with their personal information into the database, you can follow up in a number of ways.
The opt-in form used to capture leads should contain a link to your privacy statement page. In fact, you should have a link to the privacy statement on each of your web pages within your realtor website. Along with the link, you should include a reassurance statement such as: "I respect your privacy and will keep your personal information completely confidential. I will not use your information to spam you nor will I sell your personal information to a third party. Click on my Privacy Statement link for more details".
Another method of gaining the trust of the prospect is to provide testimonials on your realtor website from other satisfied clients. People feel better about you if they read a third party testimonial. Plus it builds confidence in you doing a professional job for them. Include the name and city of the person giving the testimonial so they know they're real people.
Along with any testimonial(s) on your website, invite your website visitors to contact you for a list of people they can contact directly for recommendations, or post photos and comments of your happy customers. This will go a long way in creating the trust of the prospects that you are trying to capture their information.
Capturing leads is the first step to cultivating a relationship with your potential customers and clients. There are many methods to entice the prospect to give you their personal information. But the details of doing this need to be saved for another time. For now, just think about all the enticements that you could use to capture the lead information from you website visitors.
