Your website’s looking great, so why isn’t it generating any leads? Perhaps it’s your “call to action” – the section of your website that prompts browsers to subscribe, follow, or contact you. Let’s take a look at some examples to find out what the options are.

Recently we checked out nestrealtygroup.com, the winner of Inman’s Innovator Award for 2009. They’ve taken a subtle approach to their calls to action, placing the suggestions to “get email alerts” and “contact us” in tiny print in the top right of the website. Scroll down to the bottom of the homepage and you’ll find a miniature RSS feed subscription button, along with small versions of the Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube icons under the words “find us on”.

Over in Australia, we can see two very different examples. cbrealestate.com.au hasn’t decided to engage with its customers via social media just yet, but they do know plenty of people want to contact them by phone. So their number is displayed in large print in that all-important top right corner.

Meanwhile, firstnational.com.au seem very comfortable with social media, presenting home hunters with large links to its Facebook and Twitter accounts halfway down its homepage.

In the UK, we have London agents Foxtons. Like cbrealestate.com.au, their homepage reserves the top right corner for large text with their phone number. Beyond that, Foxtons has not just one, but four calls to action for their home valuation service.

What these examples show is that there’s certainly more than one way to prompt website visitors to act. Now that you’re thinking about what constitutes an effective call to action, and what changes – if any – you need to make back at your website, consider these points:

Highlight it: Make sure users don’t have to go hunting if they want to sign up for alerts or find your contact details. As a general rule, the top right corner is where people go looking when they want to get in touch.

Simplify it: Keep the word count down and the message clear. Confusing a potential customer is an extremely effective way to make sure they don’t do business with you.

Monitor it: Any change you make should prompt you to track whether it’s turning visitors off or bringing in more leads. This doesn’t have to be a tiresome process – a simple count before the change, and a check a month or so later, should tell you whether you’re on the right track.

If you’re still stuck for ideas on how to make the most of your calls to action, spend a few minutes revisiting websites you subscribed to. What did they do right to capture your email address?

Twitter is arguably the most hyped – and therefore the most divisive – of all the online social networking tools. Plenty of agents have tried it out, and the results seem to be anything but uniform. Visit any real estate blog and you’ll find just as many people with tales of Twitter boosting their business as you will people who’ve seen no returns from Twitter whatsoever. So what’s the defining factor here?

Clearly, the agents using Twitter to boost their business are doing something different. As far as we can see, those Twitter users are employing at least one, if not more, of these tactics:

Offer something. Just like any other communication tool – email campaigns, letterbox flyers – you have to give people a reason to pay attention. So before you hit that “tweet” button, ask yourself how valuable this information is.

Don’t just talk, listen. There’s a reason the word “engagement” is thrown around so much when it comes to social media – it works best when there are similar amounts of give and take.

Understand the “tricks”. Get into the habit of using hash tags to link your tweets into ongoing conversations, and use the search function to find people you can engage with. Is someone looking for information on your area, or an insight into your market? Answer their questions and you might just be the agent they choose when the time is right.

Use separate accounts. Not everyone agrees on the idea of separating out personal and professional accounts, but how many times have you followed someone you thought could help you wit hour business, only to unfollow them as soon as they start tweeting about their breakfast?

Don’t buy into the “silver bullet” mentality. Because Twitter is the subject of so much hype, it’s easy to start thinking of it as a “magic” marketing tool. Of course, in the end it’s simply another way to communicate online, and as such demands time and perseverance for an eventual pay-off.

It goes without saying that before you can measure your success with Twitter, you’ll need to define what “success” will look like. For more on how to do that, and a closer look at social media ROI, check out our article here.

It has been said that criticism is the schoolbook from which we learn. Many businesses however avoid encouraging customer feedback on the off chance it may be negative.

But the fact is, it’s the negative feedback that will be of most benefit to you if you are committed to growing your business based on outstanding service.

A number of years ago, I consulted to an estate agency which had at the time one of the leading property management departments in its region and probably one of the best property managers in the business. Yet they were reticent to survey their landlords. I finally talked them in to doing it and the results were great – not because the feedback was predominantly positive, but more for the reason it wasn’t all “pats on the back”.

They learnt of issues that they would never have thought of otherwise, and were able to make improvements to their systems and processes that provided even greater service to their customers.

Customer feedback is an important part of your marketing

The process itself indicates you are genuinely focused on providing excellence in service and continually improving your customers’ experience. It also provides a road map for business improvement and growth through optimising customer centred service provision.

The message that you not only provide great service but are committed to continually improving it, tends to find its way to prospective customers.

Undertake customer feedback programs only on the following basis:

- You genuinely encourage both positive AND negative feedback,
- You’re prepared to act on the feedback not find excuses for it,
- You can provide outcomes and plans for change to all those who gave you feedback.

Ensuring great outcomes

1. First and foremost, quickly identify any vital issues that could cost you a particular customer or customers and do the following:
- Short term: Identify what you need to do now to fix the situation (and particularly make peace with any aggrieved customers).
- Long term: Fix it forever. What do you need to change or introduce in your processes to ensure this issue does not reoccur?
2. You should take up any particular issues with specific customers personally. Don’t hide behind other staff or emails.
3. Share feedback with your entire team – the good, the bad and the ugly.
4. Where segment-specific issues arise, prioritise and identify individuals or teams to suggest actions to rectify the concerns.
5. Identify any important improvements arising from the survey and communicate the outcomes to your entire customer base. Remember some of your customers may have had similar experiences and issues but did not bother to complete the survey. At least now they are aware that you have improved that area.

At the very least your customers will know that you are a company willing to act.

The above relates mainly to annual surveys of your entire customer base, however there are other intermittent surveys you should run:

- Vendor surveys two weeks into the listing to ask what they thought about your listing process, advertising, etc.
- Post sale vendor and purchaser surveys (if they are positive make sure you ask for a testimonial).
- Tenant surveys: you can obtain feedback on the service you provide, but also try to ascertain if they are considering buying in the future. In normal circumstances, tenants tend to make the managing agent the last person they go to to buy a property, but if you encourage them to come to you it enables you to not only get a possible sale but manage the changeover of tenants more easily.

How do I implement surveys?

Carefully. A team of people should develop the questions, ensuring they are open and encouraging of constructive criticism. The survey should be kept as tight as possible at around 10 to15 questions. They can be multiple choice, but make sure there is also the opportunity for free responses to explain thoughts and raise issues you may not have thought of.

The shorter the survey, the greater percentage of response you will receive. Having said that, make sure it’s comprehensive enough to cover the important issues and has the ability to return significant information. At the end there should be an opportunity for customers to raise any other concerns or make random comments. Some of these unsolicited remarks are the most telling!

Ensure your team understands that this is about improving your service.

Small sample surveys may be run on paper, but there are some excellent web-based products that can be used for large-scale surveys. One example is surveymonkey.com. There is a limited free version, but for a relatively small amount of money (around US$200 per year) you can get a full version that offers greater functionality response time, a greater number of responses and questions that can be included.

There are of course a number of other products available. The advantage of these online products is that they are quick, easy and professional to implement and response time can be almost immediate dependent upon completion rates.

Of course, if you are really serious and have a large customer base, you can engage external firms that will independently develop, implement the survey and analyse the results for you.

Quick Idea

Survey prospective vendors who did not give you their business. Ask: “What was it that made you select another agent over us?” You can obtain great information on how to improve your presentations and service offering.

Clearly articulate in the covering letter/email that you are committed to continually improving your service and wish them the best results from their sale. This is a great activity, particularly if they end up being dissatisfied with the agent they chose. The the door is open for you!

Final word

Engaging customers in surveys can be one of the most useful communications you have with them if you are committed to real customer service. You cannot provide that service until you really know what they think. Most people will not complain to you – they will just find someone else. Make sure you take control.

No matter what your online marketing strategy involves, there’s one goal you should always have in mind: audience engagement.

It might sound like a high-flown concept, but all engagement really refers to is people spending time with your brand. Obviously, the longer your potential clients are engaged, the better. After all, online advertising can keep people engaged far longer than the time they spend looking at a television commercial, and it offers many more ways to keep people interested than newspaper ad copy.

An engaged website user, for example, might land on an agent’s homepage after a Google search, only to be enticed by a widget that shows home value fluctuations in their area. Once they’ve done that, they might start looking for contact details, and then come across a blog post on a topic that interests them. By this stage, they will have been engaged with the agent’s brand for a good few minutes – a relatively big investment for someone online.

The goal of audience engagement is the reason good content matters so much. As we recently discussed, everything from your website’s tagline to your Twitter updates is an opportunity to draw a potential client in.

So how do you get an idea of how engaged your audience is? A good place to start is your website’s bounce rate, which we’ve looked at in detail here. If visitors to your website are not engaged, they will simply “bounce” away again after just a few seconds.

Your website’s click stream – the series of links a person clicks on while moving around your website – can also give you an idea of what’s engaging users. Is there something most users are drawn to? Is there a section they routinely ignore?

Bounce rate and click stream are just two aspects of web analytics that it pays to become familiar with. Understand what your audience is doing, and you’ll be able to tweak things to maximise their engagement.

Creating valuable engagement with your potential customers isn’t just a matter of being the loudest or most visible online – it’s a matter of quality over quantity. It’s getting your audience in the door, and getting them to stick around long enough to remember you.

Many estate agencies and individual brokers only dabble in publishing newsletters while others view it as a vital tool in the marketing and advertising mix.

Online newsletters can be an extremely cost effective and successful marketing tool which allow you to:

• Keep your brand in front of the market continuously
• Create and build relationships with prospective customers
• Maintain relationships with current and past customers
• Establish yourself as an authority in property matters
• Entrench yourself and/or your company as part of the local community

Keeping in contact with and engaging all your contacts – (including tenants who become purchasers, who become sellers, who become investors, who provide referrals and repeat business) - is obviously an important activity.

From a prospective customer point of view, newsletters are a great channel for positioning you and your company as a leader in the market. But that doesn’t mean the newsletter should be all about you. The “leadership” position comes from focusing on the needs of customers/prospects and providing information for them that focuses on your particular area of expertise.

Effective newsletters provide relevant information to the target market whether they are sellers, buyers or investors. It’s a good idea to have specific links to hosted articles on your site that allow readers to tune into more information that is most relevant to them.

So what should you include in your newsletters?

Market update
Movement on sale prices
Number of listings on the market
Governmental issues affecting property

Rental properties available

Featured properties of the month

Helpful hints
Things to do when moving house
Preparing your home for sale

Renovation tips

Quick online surveys about your area (with results to be published in next newsletter)
Survey of confidence in the market
Favourite restaurant in town

Community notice board
Highlight any sponsorships/community organisations you are associated with
Community activities

And yes you should beat your own drum a little
Testimonials
Staff profiles
Recent sales/successes
Awards

Building subscribers

You should look at every opportunity to sign people up for the newsletter. Everyone in your area is part of the community and most want to know what is going on – especially when it comes to property.

Take print-outs of your online newsletter to open homes and inspections and offer the opportunity to everyone you meet to sign up to receive it.

Advertise it in your windows, on mail drops and in community advertising/promotions.

Make your “free online newsletter” subscription stand-out on the home page of your website.

Put a link or URL to the subscription page on your online listings and in your general advertising.

Sign up request forms for attendees at any of your investor seminars, tenant or landlord information evenings, and any other functions you may be sponsoring.

If you have banner advertising on any portals, you should allocate one of them to highlighting your newsletter.

Lead generation

Ensure you include the ability to “send to a friend” on your newsletter. Referrals are key.

Look at discussing issues around selling your home and provide the opportunity for people to request further information. It may be a printed booklet such as a “Home Sellers Guide” or a Free Valuation.

Keep including the opportunity to link back to different areas on your website.

How to design and send an online newsletter

Many of the back office or CRM systems now have inbuilt tools to help you design and send html emails. If not, there are a myriad of email marketing programs that can assist at all different levels of sophistication. Your web designer should also be able to assist.

Helpful hints

Ensure there are articles or links to articles in each edition that relate to each of your subscriber segments so they will find at least one article of interest.

Avoid jargon or buzz words – make the content as approachable as possible.

Ensure there are some images or graphs to break up the text – the layout needs to be pleasing to the eye and easily scannable.

Keep each article relatively short and concise and perhaps have a summary in the newsletter with a link to the full article.

Quick idea to generate seller leads

Given that many people look to get rid of unwanted goods in the lead up to selling their property, it might be fruitful to advertise a free “Garage Sale Kit” in your newsletter. It could include signs (with your logo) that sellers can put their address on, a Garage Sale Hints brochure, and balloons. Perhaps you could even have a section on your website advertising garage sales coming up each week.

And finally…

Whatever the specific content, your newsletter should accurately reflect your business’ views and position in the community and be professionally presented and marketed. You should also have some way of measuring the results or effectiveness of your newsletter, otherwise, what’s the point? You should know how many times it is opened, passed on and which articles are read most of all. Over time, these statistics will give you a feel for what sort of content works best for your audience and you will be better able to target your future newsletters.

Using DotLoop, real estate companies and clients can engage in real time negotiations online. The platform offers secure electronic authorisation and “state-of-the-art tracking” to protect clients a they trade offers and counter offers, time stamping each version of a contract.

DotLoop is not only promoting its service as a time saver, but also says it can help to reduce a company’s carbon footprint by cutting down on paper waste and fuel costs.

DotLoop was founded by 24-year-old entrepreneur Austin Allison, who began selling real estate when he was just 18. In an interview with Business Courier, Allison explained how he and web designer Matt Vorst founded the company last year, and discussed its aim to eliminate paperwork.

“[DotLoop] eliminates up to 100 pages of paper per transaction, which can add up to a million pages a year for a large broker,” Allison told Business Courier. “The cost of this thing is trumped by the savings. You save money on paper, document storage. That can cost $200,000 a year for a big brokerage.”

A recent press release says DotLoop is aiming to become a US$100 million company operating across 50 states within five years. A free trial is currently available, and membership costs $20 per month for basic use or $50 per month for a premium service. Users can also choose a pay-per-use option.

MotionCloud’s co-founder and CEO Jaeyoung Chun explained the aim of the service to Microsoft’s Julien Codorniou:

“We wanted to provide a dead-easy content creation tool for non-tech savvy people – a tool that doesn’t require any knowledge about HTML, CSS, and FTP, a tool that doesn’t require additional software such as Photoshop, a tool that works in all Web browsers so that all you need is the Internet connection and a Web browser, and finally a tool that lets you create rich and interactive content which is searchable.”

Along with GoGoPin Ad, MotionCloud also offers GoGoPin Business – a free website creation tool it says will provide “unrivaled lead generation”. Its features include an interactive whiteboard that combines instant messaging, voice/video chat, and shared viewing. “If you are video chatting with a potential customer, you can display your available properties, invite others, and schedule an appointment on the first visit,” the website explains.

Lastly, MotionCloud is also working on GoGoPin Communicator, which is currently integrated with Windows Live Messenger to allow users to exchange pictures, watch videos, share maps and routes and draw pictures together. Integration with Outlook and Yahoo! Messenger are both “coming soon”.

propertyadguru.com welcomes a guest post from Houston Neal about mobile phone apps for property management.

Houston Neal writes for softwareadvice.com, where this article first appeared.

Property management is not often an industry on the cutting edge of technology. However, more and more property managers are making use of smartphones in their daily activities.

So, Software Advice has put together a list of smartphone apps we’d like to see developed for property management. Most of the technology already exists in property management software and other mobile apps, it just needs to be mashed up for our use. Some of these save time. Others save money. And some of them are just plain cool.

1) Augmented Realty Applications – By far we are most excited about “augmented reality” applications. Augmented reality is the blending of computer graphics and real-world data in real-time. The idea dates back to 1990, but interest in the field has reignited with the arrival of camera phones.

Augmented reality applications display digital information on top of real-time images using your camera phone. This image is from a video demonstration of Layar, an app for home buyers.

Here’s how it works: turn on your smartphone video camera, then point it at your property. The augmented reality app will overlay data about the property in your viewfinder. This could include things like vacant units, tenants with overdue rent or repairs that need to be finished.

To get specific details, simply touch one of the onscreen captions to go to a tenant account, work order or vacancy report. From there, click-to-dial a tenant for overdue rent, send out a work order to maintenance staff or email a prospect about viewing a space. This would all be tied to your punchlist and to-do’s would automatically be removed as you complete them.

To prove this isn’t entirely far-fetched, check out this video of an augmented reality app for home buyers.

2) Mobile Marketing – Marketing and tenant screening are critical to maintaining profitable occupancy rates. Smartphones can make those processes easier. To start, a marketing app could perform a credit and background check from your phone. Most tenant screening services already offer this over the web, so making “an app for that” would be easy.

After approval, tenants could review and sign the lease electronically using your phone. Not only would this save time, but also a lot of paper and any associated costs (purchasing, printing and archiving). Best of all it could all be performed on location after showing a space. Just remember to use the ol’ pinch and release to zoom in on that fine print.

3) Wireless Building Maintenance Management – Gone are the days of walkie talkies and making multiple trips back to the office for work orders. Smartphones keep engineers in the field and on task. Best of all, this already exists…

Deep Forest Systems, makers of OnCite Software, offers a wireless work order application. The app allows maintenance staff to access and edit work orders in the field. One notable time-saver is the “acceptance feature.” Work orders can be dispatched to multiple maintenance crew members. Whoever is closest to the property accepts the request. The “to do” is added to that engineer’s punch list and removed from others’ queues.

We’d like to see this developed one step further. Utilizing GPS in smartphones, the app could ping crew members’ phones, then automatically assign the task to whoever was geographically closest.

4) Voicemail Broadcasts – Need to make an announcement to all tenants? This app would allow you to create a voice recording and broadcast it to all tenants using a robo-dial feature. Start by building a call list of specific tenants — simply drag and drop from your database — then hit “go” to mass-dial each one.

This app would be handy for making general announcements, lease renewal notifications and emergency alerts. If it was a little more sophisticated, the app could automatically create and dial call lists for you. For example, the app could identify tenants who haven’t paid rent, build a call list, then send your standard “overdue rent” message.

For the record, a similar version of this is already available from SayNow. The app allows you to broadcast voice and text messages to a group of people. But there is a drawback; SayNow has the right to put ads in your text and voice messages.

5) Tenant Portal – A great app for apartment managers and residents alike. Apartment managers could use the app as an online bulletin board, while tenants could use it to pay rent or communicate directly with property managers. For example, after logging in, tenants would see a bulletin board of daily notices (e.g. pool closures, crime alerts, new office hours, parking announcements, etc). From there, they could perform a number of activities like pay rent, put in maintenance requests or even renew their lease.

This app would also be useful for community development. Managers could send out invitations to social events or make recommendations about local restaurants and retail shops. Tenants could use it to meet other residents, post event announcements or buy and sell furniture.

A sophisticated version of this would allow residents to opt in to a GPS sync. When they arrive at the property, their smartphone will recognize the location and load up any of the day’s alerts.

Of course all this could be applied to commercial property management. Businesses could leave comments for cleaning crew, place requests for repairs, etc.

Share Your Ideas
We could go on listing many other uses, but we’d like to hear your ideas instead. What app would you like to see developed? Leave a comment. Who knows, maybe we’ll see your idea posted in an app store.

By Houston Neal
softwareadvice.com

Northern Ireland’s propertynews.com portal has launched the first locally built and supported Rental Management software, called Rental EDGE.

The software was built in conjunction with GCD Technologies and is the first of its kind in Northern Ireland. It was designed and developed by propertynews.com especially for local NI Letting Agents who were consulted throughout the build.

propertynews.com has provided software applications and support services to the property industry for over 10 years. The new software complements the existing propertynews.com residential sales software ‘EDGE’.

In a blog post about the launch of the software propertynews.com writes:

“Rental EDGE is designed to efficiently automate the rental management process. Agents can instantly see summaries of leases, certificates due to expire, rent in arrears, inspections due – all at the click of a button. They can send automated text message reminders to tenants for rent owed or advise new applicants of the status of their application. The features of the product are numerous.”

Jonny Watson, Lettings Manager, McGeown Estate Agents, commented:

“Being involved from the outset on the steering committee for Rental EDGE was invaluable and provided me with the opportunity to shape the system to perfectly suit the local rental management industry – ensuring we all operate most effectively and efficiently on behalf of our clients.”

Speaking at the launch of Rental EDGE, Samuel Dickey MRICS, Partner in Gerry O’Connor Estate Agents said:

“We knew from our long history with Propertynews.com and their EDGE system that the new software would be top class and the support of a high standard. The new Rental EDGE system allows us to be more efficient in our delivery of service to both landlords and tenants”.

Emma McNally, Managing Director of propertynews.com, said:

“We are extremely proud to provide core business products to our customers and are delighted to see that the new rental software system is already delivering tangible benefits to local Estate Agents across the province. There is no doubt that Rental EDGE can radically transform the efficiency of the rental management process and thanks must go out to the agents who participated in the steering committee and also the expertise of GCD Technologies”.

Another iPhone application has surfaced to tempt agents using Apple’s iPhone: the “Agentworx” contact management and productivity tool just released by AppSpice.

Agentworx draws together information on listings, upcoming activities and tasks, earnings, buyers, and leads. A digital flyer about a particular listing can be sent to a client while you are speaking with them, and their email address is captured automatically. The application also displays year-to-date earnings, estimated earnings and financial goals. A free version is available but the full version of the application costs US$9.99.

The number of iPhone applications aimed at real estate agents is growing. One example is mobileapploader.com’s customisable “Real Estate – Real Easy” iPhone application, released earlier this year, which includes agent contact details, a search function, an “about” page with an “add to contacts” link, and a location based feedback page.

Another option is Smarter Agent’s mobile application, which covers not only the iPhone but other smart phones and mobile devices as well. “Homes for Sale”, which recently received an enthusiastic review on agentgenius.com, uses GPS to allow homebuyers to search for MLS listing information on the move, and can be branded by agents and connected to their own websites.

And property portals are getting in on the iPhone App too, aiming mobile versions of their website listings at the every increasing mobile market.

A post on US real estate marketplace zillow.com’s blog reveals their iPhone app has set yet more records. And it’s also having another unexpected effect – converting agents to using the iPhone.

The free app has been available for just on two months and version 2 is already available. The app allows users to access property values and other information on the move.

“Over the weekend we hit another exciting milestone with our Zillow iPhone app: over 1/2 million downloads — 513,213 as of this morning,” zillow.com write.

The company says that it’s not just good news for zillow.com in terms of increased web traffic. According to some of the testimonials they have received the Zillow iPhone app is giving real estate professionals a reason to switch to the iPhone.

For instance, a blog post from Richard Stephan of Engels and Volkers on activerain.com tells how he converted to the iPhone because of the zillow iPhone app.