Secrets to Managing High-Volume Leads

You must have had days when it seems that every buyer exploring real estate options is trying to communicate with you. The slightest mistake in handling such high lead volumes can turn away potential customers. To ensure that you never mismanage an overload of leads, we are listing some online tools that are easy-to-use and very effective. Our recommendations include:

Get Your Email Lead Management Right with Yesware

Handling the daily flow of emails can be very daunting. Despite the presence of many email organization software solutions, the problem persists. Email communication is at the heart of lead management. You should be able to identify emails that present high-purchase probability, track emails, and follow-up without fail. This kind of email systemization capability is offered by Yesware. Before buying it, you can try the free version. Every bit of information regarding email handling is provided through Yesware. This includes tracking if someone has read your email and creating personalized reminders. Using Yesware, you can easily segregate important email IDs from the usual clutter.

Gmail App with a Purpose: Rapportive

Fully compatible with Gmail, Rapportive helps to keep track of the leads that show serious potential. Rapportive extracts information from every lead. This includes social media profiling apart from basic data like geographic location. The free app allows you to interact with the lead in real-time, making your communication more direct and effective.

Get Your Automated Lead Management Right with FiveStreet

This automatic tool helps you route leads towards the right channels and manage the email responses. It is very useful for reducing the lead response time—a common grudge among consumers wanting quick assistance. Using this tool, you can create an immediate response in the form of text or email messages. Further, the leads are aggregated from leading online real estate resources. FiveStreet can search for information for each lead. This includes social media profile along with profile demographics such as location and current employment status. You can create an automated system to ensure that difficult leads are routed to specific employees only. FiveStreet also helps you analyze its performance. The weekly reports help you check the ROI and overall effectiveness with which each lead was handled.

Try to Distribute What You Cannot Manage

Unlike other recommendations in this list, distributing is neither an email add-on nor an online tool or app. It is a lead management method that is relevant for all businesses that thrive on bulk lead generation. Why do you need to distribute? Home purchases are often driven by the kind of personalized service a real estate firm can provide. However, it is almost impossible to allocate a dedicated agent for each promising lead. The solution lies in networking beyond your immediate area of operation. For instance, you can refer clients outside your region to other agents. This helps to establish your credibility across the entire industry. The benefiting agents are bound to appreciate this effort and share similar leads with you. By distributing leads, you are empowering yourself as a market player with long-term gains.

How to Switch Careers and Make a Transition to Real Estate

So you want to change careers and make a smooth transition to real estate? Well, that is no cakewalk.  Switching careers has never been easy. In fact, it presents lots of unique challenges. However, if you approach the process in the right manner, you will be able to accomplish your goal.

The Challenge

If you hail from an unconventional work background and lack any experience in the real estate industry, making a transition into this field can be quite a challenge.

To get experience, you will have to compete with fresh graduates for entry level jobs and internships. You may be willing to accept a lower salary; some of you might be even willing to work for free; however, employers will still prefer fresh graduates because they feel that they will be able to mold young talent better. If you find yourself in such a situation, what you should do?

One option is to enroll in a real estate degree program. These programs provide a great opportunity to network and learn useful skills. In addition, they impress potential employers. But what if you can't afford to spend 18 long months and $100K to master real estate business? Well, in this case, the way you approach the job hunting process will determine the outcome.

The approach

In most cases, your lack of experience or the competitive job market is not the main problem you face. The problem is the faulty job-hunting methods you employ.

Here's what you need to do to get a foothold in the real estate industry:

·         The first thing you should do is to decide what sort of work you are interested in.  Let the word spread. People should know that you are looking for a job in the real estate industry.

·         Create a list of all the companies you want to work for. Learn whatever you can about the real estate industry. It shows your dedication. You don't have to an industry expert, but you should have a basic understanding of the way the sector works.

·         Seek the help of your friends and family. They could serve as valuable references because they know your skills and trust you.

·         Network. Business is all about relationships. The real estate sector is no different. Your first opportunity in all likelihood will come from somebody in your network.

·         Think about creative ways to make yourself stand out from the crowd. You should be able to capture the attention of potential employers.

·         You have 100 % confidence in your skills. Show them you are capable of performing the job by offering to do free work.

·         You might have no relevant experience in the real estate industry, but you might still have some experience that might be relevant for this sector. The years that you spent running a business or working for a company are far more important than you think. Remember that some of the most successful professionals in this sector came from outside the industry.

Landing your dream job shouldn't be your goal.  That is more difficult than you would think. Your goal should be to find a position that offers enough scope for career growth. Making a transition to the real estate industry is not easy. However, with the right approach, you should be able to find an opportunity to prove your mettle.

4 Easy Ways for Businesses to Become Customer Centric

Most people understand what a customer centric approach refers to, but struggle to apply it in real life. This is evident in customer service operations where interacting with customers is at the core of job responsibilities. Frontline employees should be patient and alert when communicating with a customer. This involves thinking beyond the realm of what the customer is asking. Rather than merely providing straight answers, the employee should try to put the customer at ease. The idea is to impress the customer with the organization’s portfolio of services and understand the root cause of the customer’s problem. This helps in two ways.

Firstly, the customer is educated about the organization’s range of services. Secondly, more problems can be identified at their root level. This ensures that similar problems don’t arise in the future. Feedback collated from frontline employees helps the organization understand how present and prospective customers view their brand/services.

Here, we talk about how a practical and easy-to-adopt customer-centric approach can be established at an organizational level:

Get Methodical

For sustained customer engagement & retention, employees should work towards addressing every customer grievance in a timely manner and finding a quick resolution. It is better to chart-out the entire route of communication with a customer. This makes it easier to assess the readiness of a business to constructively interact with customers. Each point of interaction can be then handled individually.

Be Patient

It is highly probable that a newly-acquired, customer-centric approach doesn’t yield immediate results. Positive outcome will surface but it takes time. Maintain your patience and don’t change your customer communication protocols repeatedly.

Don’t Impose upon the Customer

Every business wants to create a certain kind of impression among its past, present, and prospective customers. However, it is also important to be sensitive towards how customers perceive your brand. A brand image cannot be imposed upon people. It has to be subtly expressed throughout the chain of communication.

Get Technical & Social but Don’t Overdo It

Yes, doing things manually is passé. However, don’t incorporate technology that confuses your staff and overwhelms customers. Try to select technologies that provide easy-to-handle interfaces and don’t restrict in-person communication with customers. For instance, after addressing a customer grievance, a note can be made in the organizational software for the concerned manager. Similarly, a schedule for customer dealings can be automated, but the actual interaction should have the human touch. Ensure that every bit of data is entered on a daily basis. The adopted data management system should be configured smartly. Relevant data should be shared with the respective department heads at the end of the day.

Don’t discourage the use of social media tools to communicate with customers and create brand awareness. However, chasing customers to comment on your Facebook page is not recommended! Use social media to keep your customers informed. An informed customer is more likely to be an engaged and a repeat customer. When on social media, keep it limited to groups/forums that are relevant.

5 Tips to Sync Social with Email

More and more social marketers are beginning to realize the power of email lists. Email marketers, too, have started feeling that they can no longer ignore social media. Even so, there are still very few strategies that work equally well on both platforms. It is a well-known fact that content that goes viral on social media does not always attract your hardcore email subscribers.

Both social and email have the potential to bring visitors to your website. That means by syncing them you can reap maximum benefits. But how?

Here are five insights that will change the way you look at social and email:

Social isn't for your loyal followers

If you want social and email to work together, you need to realize that these two platforms are very different and are intended for different kinds of audience. Many marketers believe that social media has the power to retain your audience. That may be true to some extent, but email is even better at retaining your audience.

Your email newsletters may reach up to 30% of your subscribers. However, your Facebook posts are unlikely to reach more than 16% of your fans. The average CTR for a tweet is 1.64%, whereas the average CTR for an email is around 3.5%. There are several reasons for this. Facebook organizes messages algorithmically and the newest messages need not necessarily appear on top. Twitter, on the other hand, is so cluttered that very few people will manage to see all the messages they receive. Emails are arranged by their date and it is customary for the user to delete messages they do not want. That means they will at least read the subject line. This improves visibility. Social networks do not impose any such restrictions.

The need for bite-size content

Social networks are the place to post pieces of bite-size visual content that is funny, interesting, inspiring, and cute all at once. If you can post these kinds of stuff, you will keep your audience engaged. But if you are trying to sell a product, a casual bunch of social followers sharing and liking your bite-size inspirational quotes are unlikely to help. That is where your email list comes in handy. Your email subscribers are far more likely to buy your products than your social followers. Therefore, you will want to encourage your social followers to become your email subscribers. This will not be possible if you do not treat your website / blog and social accounts as separate entities.

Attract your social followers to your site

While sharing images on social networks, don't forget to post links to the posts on your blog. This is a great way to attract your social followers to your site. You should also consider having two types of content: posts for your avid followers and posts for your social followers. People who arrive on your site following a link on a social network will expect similar content on your site. In most cases, they are expecting visual content. This makes it necessary for you to have this type of content on the site.

Getting your social followers to subscribe to your email list

Don't expect people to give you their email address for nothing. You should give them something valuable in return. One way of doing this is to offer your subscribers valuable ebooks or free online courses. Your email subscription box should be placed in the header or towards the end of your posts. As far as possible, avoid pop-ups. You should test different placements to see what works best.

Your email list can help grow your social following

Include social buttons in emails to improve click through rates. You should also have social sharing buttons on your site. You may also ask your social audience to share the posts if they like it. Embed your social media posts into your blog posts. This will increase your sharability. These embeds will give your blog a visual feel and make it popular with your social followers.

Conclusion

You cannot sync social and email unless you realize that they serve different purposes. Your social followers merely want to keep themselves entertained. They are interested in bite-size content. Your email subscribers need more in-depth content.