You must have read tons of guides about lead generation, website traffic, email open rate and none of them talk about the real stuff… Conversions!
But today, you will not be disappointed as this strategy successfully helped generate amazing real estate lead magnets for a number of customers and one of them is Action Realty.
In this guide, I will be covering a bullet-proof strategy on how to get real estate leads without losing your sleep over it. So if you have been bitten over and over again by useless articles it’s time to read something useful and result-driven.
Here’s what we were able to achieve for Action Realty with our chatbot-driven real estate leads strategy:
But wait, if you’re not from the same industry, real estate lead generation works pretty much the same it works for any other industry so if you are not a realtor don’t worry, this is going to be just as useful to your business too.
And of course, to all our dear real estate marketers/business owners – read it, bookmark it, (frame it may be, jk), share it with your team and most importantly, start practicing it!
So without boring you with long intros here are the 5 key things I will be covering that can effectively enable you to generate real estate leads:
1. How we worked to help this real estate client to get $500k worth of free leads through chatbots. (You can take this as a lead generation example for any business though).
2. Why real estate lead generation through chatbots will be global in the future?
3. How you can design and create amazing lead-magnets for any industry.
4. A quick look at this real estate leads strategy.
5. Some cool tips and tricks to generate more free leads and improve customer acquisition.
Action Realty, a 15-year old real estate agency, was looking for a way to get into the realtors’ digital market but kept struggling for the last 2 years but was unable to find its place among the overwhelming crowd of top-notch companies already ruling the internet.
Even after trying out several advertising strategies it managed to get just 50 leads in a 3-month period which cost them nearly ⅓ of their total earnings off of their real estate lead generation campaigns. Which, in my humble opinion is pretty damn expensive!
Keeping their ROI from online spendings in view, they decided to opt for an automated chat service to take care of their website and social media marketing. When they were doing the research they found out “Botsify” one of the most popular chatbot building platforms and we were lucky enough to get this email from their Sales Agent Molly:
Now that you have come this far reading, I am guessing you are interested in knowing more. But before I get you into this real estate leads strategy,
Let’s have a quick look at the overall strategy blueprint that generated 4500+ real estate leads in just 3 months.
Phase 1 – Target Existing Users to Try the Bot & Share with others
For the first phase, we decided that we would build a chatbot which generates engagement between their past customers and send out the email marketing sequence to list they already had.
This was to see if our chatbot is good enough to capture their attention & it can make them share the real estate listings in their circles for a quick commission. Also, we would be able to test that without spending a DIME ?
The first step to real estate lead generation or any other strategy consists of a number of trial and error and we were in the same situation.
The scope of their chatbot was limited as well so we started off by creating a messenger chatbot first to see how their Facebook audience will respond to it. We integrated a chatbot to Facebook to engage the existing clients and send an email blast to a list of 19,249.
We basically set up a referral program for existing subscribers on the list and asked them to click on the link provided. This link will redirect the user to our chatbot where they will see a bot message to share the listings with real estate images of “for sale” properties using the Facebook share option.
On each deal closing, we will be giving them a 1% let’s say one property was $100,000 dollars which directly converts to $1,000 dollars commission! Which was to ensure that more and more people will do it willingly.
EASY MONEY RIGHT? Here’s what the stats showed us:
4220 people opened the email, 2110 clicked on the link and out of which 780 shared the bot message with at least 5 people each resulting in around 3500+ shares
Guess what? The viral effect didn’t end there…People who received the message shared it further and this way, we managed to generate 2083 free leads! And these were real people, interested in real estate quotes and listings.
In just a month!
It was just the first phase and we were managed to generate this many leads.
And all this was made possible with the right use of existing clients.
They were already aware of the company so starting off with an audience with no trust issues was the key.
Although we were not expecting such an overwhelming response, we still had a long way to go…
Phase 2 – Ads and Engagement
There is no point in doing something spectacular and keeping it to yourself so it was time to take some action! We started off with a little social media advertisement and redirect the audience to the messenger bot.
The idea was to create an ad that would let people get access to an ebook guide. The ebook was targeted to certain demographics since it was titled “why you should live in Tennessee after retirement”. This would work as a bait to increase our real estate leads count.
We targeted audiences aged between 40-65+ male and female both and other demographics weren’t specified because we didn’t want to narrow down the audience too much. We set up a budget of $500 to run this ad for 3 weeks.
When the user would click on the send message button on this ad, it will be redirected to the messenger bot.
The bot will greet and ask for an email and phone number. We integrated conversation forms to collect emails and phone numbers of the users. It’s easier to click away from a web form and not submit information, but the chatbot managed to collect information within the conversation.
Because people are less likely to abandon a chat than a web form field! Even if they did, chatbot followed-up on each user in an interactive way rather than forcing it onto the person. So here, it will be increasing the chances of getting better real estate quotes and convert more often.
Once the information was provided, the bot would let them know that the ebook has been emailed to them on the given email address.
We did not limit the ad campaign to messenger only, the more people see the ad anywhere on Facebook or Instagram, the better the chances of clicking and eventually generating more real estate leads.
However this time the share was quite less than before as this audience came through paid ads and wasn’t as engaging as the existing customers. Mainly, because more than half of the people were not willing to provide the information needed.
The rest didn’t even bother clicking, But it wasn’t all bad!
We still managed to get 1167 emails and phone numbers from each user who those who clicked on the ad. The conversion rate of 0.428$ per lead was literally awesome. Then we added these 1167 people on our email list right away and the phone numbers came in handy for cold calling.
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Now we thought of another workaround using the same real estate lead strategy as an example but from a little different angle. We decided to use this ebook one more time, just to see how differently it will be received at the user end.
And if there is going to be a major difference in numbers, which will help us clear out confusions regarding the method used in the 2nd phase were less effective or it’s just how it’s going to be ?
Phase 3 – Website Traffic to Chatbot User
This time we decided to focus on website traffic and its conversion onto the chatbot. We created a Facebook post using the same ebook and this time redirected the user to the ebook landing page.
In order to read the ebook, people would have to subscribe to our Facebook messenger bot through the messenger checkbox plugin.
We created another ad campaign using the same text, same ebook, the only difference was that traffic this time was not going to the messenger. Instead, it was redirecting the user to the ebook landing page. This way, people will convert to our messenger bot and in return, will be able to download the ebook from the same webpage.
Guess what, this resulted in 250 chatbot subscribers. Which in comparison to our campaign before wasn’t a good result at all. A conversion rate of almost $2 per real estate leads.
Let’s recap Phase 1.
Now we decided to send the same affiliate sales message to these people using subscription messaging. This kept the real estate lead generation campaign active. Not just active, we eventually received 107 real estate leads through it and successfully managed to give real estate quotes to multiple prospects and finally, closed another deal!
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about in the next phase. So fasten up your seat belts and let’s get right into the…So if we compare phase 2 and phase 3, I would say phase 2 still performed a little better and it could be because of in-conversation forms.
Another thing we found that the click-through rate of the post was less than the click-through rate of the messenger ad which is a key point if you are going to advertise on Facebook anytime soon.
Moving forward, we noticed one thing happening quite often…People leaving queries about the listings in messages & comments too. Which could eventually be a great opportunity to send out real estate quotes to these commenters…
So we came up with a plan to capture these real estate leads with a kick-ass tool, that you will be learning.
Final Phase – The Comments…
We found out that people were constantly sending queries under the listed property posts on Action Realty’s Facebook page and also on their messenger chatbot. These queries were kind of repetitive and contained certain keywords. Such as “available” “info”, “more details”, “booking appointment“, “rental properties“, “visit”, “price”, etc.
At this point, our for-sale properties were getting a great response from the audience, It was time to get real estate quotes for the rental listings! And in order to make that happen, we decided to use these queries and convert them into qualified real estate leads.
Luckily, we found out that a lot of people were interested in the rental listings we posted over the course of 2 weeks. So we decided to use the acquire users from comments feature and convert these commenters to bot users.
We triggered bot replies to comments by selecting these rental listing posts, adding the keywords commonly found in the comment section, set up a bot message we wanted to send to each specific keyword and start converting them into chatbot users! Then we chose to boost these posts to increase engagement in the comments section. We received tons and tons of comments with these kinds of keywords:
We kept a close eye on the bot’s conversation with each user to see if the real estate leads strategy is even working or not. We figured out the silver lining of this entire strategy…
This integration of bot responses to comments helped us manage queries a lot easier! In fact, we managed to respond to at least 2000 comment queries over a month period. Which means more conversions, which means more real estate quotes sent!
Which converted to generating 1240 successful leads through comments and surprisingly enough, at least 1/5 people who commented on the posts were in fact, potential clients so each one of the listed property got rented out pretty soon after.
In merely 10 weeks of working with this real estate leads strategy phase by phase, it was time for us to share the results with our client, but just when we thought of sending our report over we got this email:
At this point, Action Realty had received 4740 Leads in less than 3 months and closed more than 30 deals with this real estate lead generation strategy.
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Not only this, but the company was reviewed 64% more positively for better real estate quotes and closing deals faster than ever by the clients?
Of course, you want to know the happy ending of the story and we certainly don’t want to deprive you of it either. After the 11th week of trying out our platform for their Facebook this real estate agency,
Managed to bag, not 100, not 1000 but 4740 free leads, successfully respond to nearly 200 thousand user queries, saved more than 99,000 hours of the users and…Closed 32 deals!
And all this in less than 3 months in total (yeah that’s just bananas)! If it seems a little show-off to you well, it definitely is… Jokes aside, let’s recap the whole AI-ed Strategy on how to get real estate leads:
- Integrating chatbot to Facebook and targeting the existing audience.
- Using Email marketing as our complimentary tool.
- Leverage the audience with an affiliate program so they can earn while on spreading the word for us.
- Not rushing into a big budget for paid campaigns and testing out a simple real estate lead generation strategy using an existing email list and then.
- Using Facebook advertisement to collect data and grow chatbot subscriber list.
- Strive for targeted and relevant reach rather than bigger reach.
- Collecting real estate leads, in exchange for valuable and relevant information to users.
- Using the information submitted by users for cold calling and email marketing.
- Using Facebook advertisements to convert the audience into chatbot subscribers.
- Providing value in exchange for subscribing to the bot through the checkbox plugin.
- Getting more engagement in the form of comments with boosted posts and automating responses to certain keywords.
- Resulting in converting commenters to chatbot subscribers to eventually free leads to buyers.
Just a quick reminder, this strategy is not limited to one specific industry, you can apply this real estate leads to your fishing business too (no offense to fishing business we love tuna)… or to your multi-million dollar clothing brand.
Aaaand, to spice things up, even more, we have a few interesting chatbot tips and tricks for your business to shine amongst your online or offline competitors.
Here’s a real estate podcast our CEO got invited for an interview. Find out what he has to say about online real estate and AI collaborating.
And just a quick reminder, this strategy is not limited to one specific industry, you can apply the methods to your fishing business for that matter (no offense to fishing business we love tuna)…
or if you are a multi-million dollar clothing brand.
To spice things up even more, we have a few interesting chatbot tips and tricks for your business to shine amongst your online or offline competitors.
You can implement these tactics to any other business, become a chatbot pro and set lead generation examples for your industry!
Also give a read to: Real Estate Marketing: Templates + Examples to Win in 2020
In case you want to work with us and fly your business in 3 months book a free demo meeting with us.
Have you tried using chatbots for real estate lead generation yet? What difference did you see in your business before or after using them? Let us know in the comments below!
Well worth a read. Got great insights and information from your blog. Thanks.