How do you determine what type of drip campaign you should send to each of the contacts in your database? A correct drip campaign and CRM is the only way to mine your database for the hottest prospects. The strategies in this article will further help you to manage your database in a way that will keep you organized and structured. Did you know that a CRM could do so much for you?
Lead Generating and a Great Drip Campaign
I just hate to see agents or salespeople spending copious amounts of money on lead generating without having their follow-up systems in place. Every agent needs to plan to communicate with the new leads quickly, automatically and long-term with engaging, helpful and educational content. There is really only one way to achieve this and it is though a drip campaign.
Customer or contact relationship management software, aka CRM, is not just for emailing and texting your database. The idea here is to show you how to use your CRM and your Drip campaigns to help you to get more engagement, while at the same time to help you to identify the hottest prospects in your database. With the right software and follow-up content in place, you can take advantage of my secrets to identifying your next sale with a few special considerations you should set up within your settings and searches.
Before you can assign a drip campaign, you must know WHO is in your database. What I mean by this is “what kind of humans” make up your database. For the real estate industry, I will ask you… are they buyers or sellers…tenants or investors… agents or lenders? You get the idea, right? Once you know what kind of human, or contact type, you have… the next thing you must know is their status. When you know these two very important things (at minimum), you can then communicate with the contact in a way that keeps them engaged with you with content they care about at the right stage in their buying or selling process.
So, let’s discuss the difference between “contact type” and “contact status.” Depending on the CRM system you are using, you may currently be only tagging/flagging your contacts. In fact, I know this to be true for many agents and salespeople because most of us have no real good idea on the best way to track who is coming and going within our database. We end up migrating to the flags only because it’s easy and that is what the so-called trainers in the business tell us to do. Yuck! Not Helpful! Not Efficient!
Unfortunately, tracking our contacts within our database with only flags is simply not efficient and prevents you from running fine-tuned, highly filtered searches to identify the hottest prospects in your database. In most CRM’s you will have an option, or a field, to add in a Contact Type and a Contact Status.
Contact Types are the TYPE of person you have in your database.
Contact Statuses will tell you the stage the contact is within the buying and selling process.
Examples for the real estate industry:
Contact Types:
- Buyer
- Seller
- Seller & Buyer (yes, this is one type)
- Investor
- Sphere
- Agent
- Vendor
- Non-Client
Contact Status:
- New: Brand new lead into the system, has not spoken with either by phone, email or text
- Prospecting: Communicating, but not committed to working with YOU yet
- Active: Committed to showings or listing a home (now or soon)
- Closed: Completed sale transaction
- Inactive: Using another agent or on hold for a long, long time (over 2+ years)
- Dead: Unsubscribed or Opted out
When you can identify these two very simple things in your database, you can quickly and easily place people into drip campaign marketing buckets. Then, this bucket will get this campaign and that bucket will get that campaign.
To make this clearer, you should never put a Closed Buyer on a Prospecting Seller drip campaign. If you cannot go into your CRM and run a quick search for all your Closed Buyers, your database needs some attention! Every type and status bucket will get different types of corresponding campaigns.
Drip Campaign Bucket Suggestions:
- New & Prospecting Buyers: Long-term engagement campaign for a minimum of 1 year, and property listings with relevant properties sent often or real-time from the MLS or from your CRM with links to prebuilt search results on your website (great for SEO)!
- New & Prospecting Sellers: Long-term engagement or re-engagement campaign for a minimum 1-year, market area updates sent weekly close to their home or community.
- Active Buyer or Seller: No campaign other than listing or market updates through MLS
- Closed Buyer: Sphere, informative newsletters and monthly market updates (send this from your MLS or Drip Campaign with a link to your website page built just for their location), sphere and/or holiday campaigns
- Closed Seller: Sphere, keep asking for referrals, informative newsletters, and holiday campaigns.
- Inactive Buyers or Sellers: Sphere campaigns, Holiday Campaigns, Monthly Newsletters, occasional market updates (what’s it gonna hurt!)
- Dead: Send nothing, as they either opted out or their contact info is bad.
Sending drip campaign content based on contact Type and Status will get you more opens, more engagement and keep you top-of mind so when your prospect is ready to transact or refer you to someone they know, they will remember you more than the agent who doesn’t care and blankets their entire database with all the same crappy content.
Remember… when you send a drip campaign with highly relevant content you will get more opens, more clicks, more engagement, and of course, more sales and that is the name of the game. The opens and clicks are hot buying signs for you too, so use that to your advantage when you are prospecting your database. Spend the time calling those that are showing interest in what you are sending and if your CRM can’t track this… join us at EngageMore CRM. We got you covered and you can automate it all too with everything pre-built and ready to send!!
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