The other day, I received the following email in my inbox that satisfied none of those filters with the title Opt-In for emails from CENTURY 21 Premier Group:

Your Email address, [removed] has been added into the email address book of:

Kari Olson
CENTURY 21 Premier Group
1660 S. Highway 100, Suite #578
St. Louis Park MN 55416-1566
651-235-1181

Periodically you’ll receive important or informational email messages from us – in response to your requests of us and our relationship. These email messages are written expressly for you. We do not rent, sell, or buy our client’s email addresses, and your email address will not be used to sell you unrelated products or services.

In order to ensure receipt of the email messages we send you, please browse to the address below to approve your email address inclusion in our client address book:

http://www.salesaspects.com/public/mailings.aspx?optin=1&id=[idnumberremoved]

If you do not wish to receive email from us, please browse to the address below:

http://www.salesaspects.com/public/mailings.aspx?optout=1&id=[idnumberremoved]

Thank you for taking the time to verify your wish to be contacted. If you have any questions about this email, its origin or the nature of the email you’ll receive, feel free to reply to this email or call at the number above.

E-mail ID: 483d37e5-dad7-456b-a66a-62c8604e6b05

Where do I even start on this? This is about as impersonal as you get with email — not even a “Dear [Insert Name]” welcome for me. NOW, I’m not feeling the love

The following thoughts raced across my mind as I scrambled to figure out the root cause for receiving the email:

• Who is Kari Olson?
• I do NOT live in Minnesota
• I do not remember registering, or even searching, on a Minnesota real estate website
• I don’t remember being on Century 21 corporate site recently either
• Which website did I register on recently that might have sold my contact info?
• What is Salesaspects.com?
• How the hell did Kari get my email address?

Now, I’m sure Kari is a great lady and maybe even an awesome real estate agent, but, I’m sorry, this is not how to go about email marketing. Not even in the slightest. It’s either a case where she purchased an email list from a 3rd party (and somehow I got on that list) and started an automated campaign. Or it’s a case where Century 21 (either her broker or corporate) purchased a list FOR their agents in an effort to drive more leads and put that list on some sort of automated campaign on behalf of their agents. Or I guess she could have randomly found my email address on the web (it’s on the sidebar of my personal blog) and added it to her address book, but that’s highly unlikely.

Not sure which of those three things happened — but, regardless, it’s still a lesson on how not to build a list. I suspect only if someone knows Kari really really well AND is in the market to buy or sell a home in the next 12 months would they  opt-in after receiving the email above. All of a sudden, the pool of potential signups just shrunk to near zero. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if this email didn’t produce any opt-ins whatsoever.

The sad thing?

She likely has no idea this conversation is taking place. I Googled her name and can’t find much of anything other than a directory listing on a Century21 site . No Zillow profile. No Twitter. No agent website.

Lesson: Don’t put a blogger on an automated email campaign without knowing them.

Is this just another way for agents to avoid actually making contact with the person to see if they can help them? Wouldn’t it be better to actually contact them to see what you can do to help?  Maybe then you can ask them if they are interested in getting your weekly or monthly emails. That might be a better approach before you start spamming them with email letters of how great you are and what an expert you are.

I also wonder how many of the users receiving these annoying drip emails are actually hitting the spam button?  If enough Yahoo, MSN or AOL users hit their spam button instead of just deleting them, all the mail from that server will start going into that email providers spam. Is it really worth jeopardizing the daily email alerts of new properties going out? I would say it is not.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

I want to take this article in a slightly different direction.  That direction is using Facebook, Linkedin, and maybe even Twitter to boost your lead conversions today.   At my brokerage, Investor Nation Realty, lead generation is the lifeblood of our company.  We distribute leads to our Realtors who then call and follow up using a CRM tool to nurture the leads.  As a company we have your standard Facebook Fan Page and I have all my Realtors on Linkedin.  Getting them to use Twitter has been a struggle or even actively use Linkedin and Facebook.   As with any group of people, some of them get it, some of them don’t.

The problem with lead generation is you seem to get leads in various forms; some with phone numbers, some without.   The problem is also the solution. This is what you want.  In converting leads frequency of call attempts, emails, or otherwise comes to mind as does the most important element; recency.  He who calls the lead first seems to win the business in the real estate industry.  I want to add a third element:

Recency – How quickly you try to reach a lead after you receive it.  Often the quickest person or company to respond gets the business

Frequency – How often you try to reach a lead after you receive it.

Format – What methods are you using to try to reach a lead?  Most of us are using phone and email.

In the summer of 2009, we started using social media to convert leads by changing up the formats in which we tried to reach them.   First let me preface by saying that any attempts to reach a prospect or lead are done in a non-salesy manner with serving the client at the forefront of this type of campaign.

Using Social Media to Vary the Format

Assuming as an agent or as a brokerage you have Facebook Pages and Linkedin profiles already set up which are clean, professional, succinct with your website or blog, and somewhat memorable  (Please no Mafia Wars or growing tomatoes on your Farmville).

The strategy is this;  when a new lead comes in which has an uncommon name (example:  Ryan Hinricher, since there’s only one), quickly search on Linkedin, and then send a request to connect with that person.  Here’s a sample request I recently sent out to a prospect who signed up on our site to view properties for sale:

If the potential client or lead does accept your request, you now have access to a trove of information which you didn’t before including; employment, education, and a general idea of who they are as a person.    Also In doing so you’ve reached out to them in a way in which your competition, at least for now is not.  Those are obvious pros, but what are the cons?   First off you’ll be spending additional time searching and you’ll come up empty handed.  Try doing a search for your new prospect, John Smith.  Good luck with that one.  I’d say roughly 20-25% of the time we’re able to locate them on Linkedin and maybe 25% of those folks will accept our connection request.

The pros outweigh the cons and I feel that while it may be a bit more aggressive, most prospects who are serious appreciate the aggressiveness. They’ll realize we apply the same aggressiveness for finding and negotiating the perfect foreclosure for them.   Plus isn’t in our best interest to do everything contact and service someone who is showing genuine interest?

The second method, which I’ve found a bit less effective, is using the Facebook page.  Many people see Facebook as a very personal, non-business, experience, so our response rate is pretty low.  It doesn’t, however, take up much time and we’ve had maybe a 10-15% success rate in securing the connection this way.   The agent will go to the bottom left hand corner of the Facebook Page and hit the “Share” button.  This will prompt them to either share it with a friend if you start typing or just an email address.  We use this as a requirement on all of our leads we’re generating.  Everyone gets an invite to join our Fan Page.  Remember to make it about adding value to the user, not about YOU and YOUR Page.

Although I wish everyone would accept our invitation on Facebook, the majority won’t.  I rarely accept all the invitation causes I receive from my friends on Facebook, so why would I from a total stranger?  If that stranger is truly interested in finding more information about your market, or getting the content you’re offering, then why not?  If they do, you now have access to a lot of personal information including their Birthday.  This makes dropping the Birthday card out in the mail much easier than the awkward questions that result from phone interviews and profiling.

In a new real estate economy where each and every lead and prospect is a precious commodity, real estate professionals can maximize the volume they already have versus always chasing after more leads.  Plus these tools are free to use.  Unfortunately it is extra effort.   Most of us are no stranger to that, especially in this economy.

These strategies work no matter if your lead generation is in-house or via Zillow, Trulia, or somewhere else.  You must tailor your reply and specifically mention where the lead originated from.

These methods can be used with most any other social media site, though outside of Linkedin and Facebook we’ve had abysmal results.  Usually too much time spent searching for them.   So go where your prospects already are and make this strategy part of your ongoing process.  I’ve incorporated a checklist on our CRM, SalesForce.  Prior to deletion of a prospect, the Realtor must complete the checklist which includes multiple calls, emails, a Linkedin request, and Fan Page suggestion on Facebook.

In doing so, you’ll likely have a leg up on your competitors who see this as too much effort.  The effort yields results.

After dozens of changes and experiments with my own campaigns, I offer the 7 most important things I’ve learned about drip campaigns for real estate:

1. People hate HTML rich emails.  If your drip emails have lots of colorful HTML and banners, they might suck.  If you want people to read your emails, then keep them simple with no banners and pictures of your happy home selling face.  Nothing says “SPAM” like a colorful email that looks like it came from Best Buy.  People are more likely to respond to auto-responders if they don’t know it’s an auto-responder.
2. Long emails suck.  You don’t read long emails from anyone, not even people you like.  So why would anyone want to take 5 minutes to read a email from a real estate agent?  I’ve found that the most effective emails are about 3-4 sentences.  If a prospect can read it in 15 seconds, he might actually take 5 more seconds to reply.  (I sometimes use emails with no caps in the sentences. That looks authentic, though a little amateur.)
3. Give people a reason to respond, or your email sucks.  If your email doesn’t ask a question or give the reader a good reason to reply, will they?  End your email with something like, “When are you thinking of moving?”  Or, “Let me know what you think of this house.”
4. Emailing too frequently might suck.  If you email me every week, I’m eventually going to mark you as ‘junk’ in my Google account.   Don’t email people every week if they aren’t moving for a year.  If a buyer has no time frame for moving, then once a month is plenty, maybe even too often.  Early on in my career I had everyone getting a weekly email with properties.  The vast majority of those people opted out of my emails within a few months.
5. Irrelevant emails suck.  You can’t just have one email campaign, because you don’t just have one type of client. Buyers should get buyer emails, sellers should get seller emails.  Prospects with no set time frame should get long term, spread out emails that just remind them you are there.  You want a custom email campaign for each types of lead, prospect, and client you are working with.  And by the way, those are 3 very different types of people I just mentioned.  A lead is not a prospect, which is not a client, yet.
6. If you don’t send properties, your emails might suck.  I say “might” because not every drip email needs to show properties. But if you have a buyer, chances are they would rather see properties of interest than your pretty face.  Sellers want to see homes sold or listed in their neighborhood.  If you know anything about the recipient, sending properties of interest is your best bet.
7. And lastly, for the love of all things email, don’t forward jokes or trite little stories about your cat.  I am actually on one Texas agent’s list and she forwards jokes to her entire sphere of influence (including me) about once a week.  Let me assure you, her emails suck.

Well Pots(y) (play on words, ATT uses the acronym P.O.T.S. to denote Plain Old Telephone Service, not real inventive that company), today is your day!…Now there is DialMyCalls.com…Hurray!!!!

Just a quick disclaimer, I’m not sure this is what DialMyCalls had in mind for this service, but I can’t help but relate new technologies to Real Estate. It’s what I do! and the 1st thing that came to my mind when I read about this service was “Pimp my Drip” baby!

OK, so what is DialMyCalls.com? here’s and excerpt from their website….

A Few Nice Features Of The DialMyCalls Service:
	Free To Use Try out our free service and send up to 1 group call per day to 25 people or less. Or, upgrade to our premium service to send unlimited calls to as many people as you wish!
	Record Your Own Voice Messages Easily With our 3 easy to use tools, you can create your own custom message in a couple of minutes. Offering your callers such a personalized touch is something they are sure to appreciate.
	You Control The Caller ID Settings You are able to have your own home, cell phone, or business phone number show up on your call recipients’ Caller ID system. This is available on both the free and premium services, so everyone can take advantage of this great feature.
	Voice Mail Detection We are able to detect 99% of all answering machines & voice mail services. If your call ends up reaching an automated answering system, our system will know to wait and leave your message in its entirety.
	Email Your Voice Message To Your Callers Also If you enter email addresses along with your contacts’ phone numbers you can also have your voice message emailed to them. This is a popular feature and great for those people who do not answer their phone or check their voice mail often.
	Detailed Call Reports With every call you send, you will have access to a detailed call report with the results of every individual call. From there you are able to tell whether the call was answered live, went to voicemail, had an error, and many other specific call details.

OK, so now I want you to go to thi swebsite and imagine how you can use this service to create a “Drip Marketing” campaign that utilizes potential clients cell phones, and oh by the way, their emails TOO! Can you see it? I can!

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
Albert Einstein

That’s it for today Kiddies, go do something that makes a differne in your life, see ya next time…

Best of Luck

The Coach

About a month ago, I got tipped by a developer buddy of mine, Stephen Parker about a powerful new platform called GoodBarry. Originally out of Australia, this platform markets itself as providing a complete online business solution to turn your website into an efficient money making machine.

So, I tried it. For about a couple of days. I took that long for me to switch my company website to them.

Features

When they say complete solution they mean just that. In one dashboard, you can control the look and feel as well as the functionality of our site. You can import your entire existing website in 5 minutes and start adding functionality to it from the get go. Functionality like: Blogs, Newsletter Sign-Up, Forums, Announcements, Online Store, Photo Galleries, Site Search, Contact Forms and more.

You can read a complete overview of features here.

Dashboard

Geek Factor

One of my favorite attributes of Goodbarry is that you can keep it simple or take it as advanced as you wish. For instance, it allows you to create a brand new real estate web app without any knowledge of code. They have a neat tutorial on how to build a real estate web application from scratch here.

This platform has way too many features for me to fit into one post. And I’m not sure whether this is for everyone either. But if your real estate business is at that stage where you need more functionality, more control and more efficiency, Goodbarry has to be on your shortlist of contenders.

Ok, now for the serious side. As most of you already know, I have the worlds greatest job! I get to spend countless hours on line researching the latest web 2.0 “Cool Tools” (that’s what I call them), determine what may be effective for my Agents, learn how to use them and then present them effectively to the “300″. It’s no mystery that the best response I receive is to the “Cool Tools” that are either FREE or very reasonably priced.

So, with that in mind, I was in our Napa, Ca. office last week when a salesperson came to give a presentation on a web 2.0 product. So naturally I was intrigued and sat in on the presentation. It was a product/service where the Agent was offered an “exclusive” opportunity to participate in an on line Marketing campaign on the city website. (Ok, so they were limiting participation to 20 Agents, where is the exclusive? and who goes to a City website to search for Real Estate?) Anyway, the Agent was to receive an opportunity to have their Listings and contact info placed on the city website, a profesional video produced, and a video email platform where they could send out video emails to their “Sphere”. All this amazing web 2.0 exposure for just ….$9,500!!! AAAHHHHH

If there were ever a time where I needed to provide a service to my Agents, this was it! So off I went, into the Internet, for information. I did like the video email concept, so I started there. What I found was, as in most cases, the Internet offered choices that were reasonably priced and in this case FREE!!! Isendout.com is an on line producer of video emails. You can either upload an existing video file or create your own from a video cam directly. They will in turn give you a platform to email your video out to your sphere. Did I mention it was FREE!!!

I was also intrigued by the professionally produced video. I think it is a great way to set yourself apart from your competition. I found several companies that could do this at cost ranging from $1,200 – $1,600. That may be a subject for another Blog.

Bottom line, Isendout.com is a great FREE tool for Agents, a “Cool Tool” if you will. Give it a shot and and let me know your thoughts?

BTW, I was just kidding about the $950! I do this because I love it!

Agents “Stop” “Listen” “Learn” “Grow”

The Coach

Until now it has frustrated the heck out of me…AAAARRRGHH (mean sound). then (while I was sitting on the “Porcelain God” of course) DOOOINNGG! it came to me…Web 2.0 saves the day again! Da Da Da (not to be confused with De De De) JOTT, yes Jott.com…faster than a speeding terabyte, more powerful than 320Gig Hard Drive, able to leap small minds in a single bound…It’s JOTT!

JOTT is an online FREE service that translates your speech into an email and sends it for you. It is unbelievably accurate and simple to set up on line. You just enter your contact (you can even upload a bunch through csv), you don’t even have to enter a voice tag, it just knows??? (Spooky). Seriously though, if you have a teenager, how many times have you sat up at night worried that they are texting while driving??? JOTT can help there too! Told ya he was a Super Hero!

Anyway, never worry about loosing a great thought again, just pick up your phone (speed) dial JOTT, tell it to call “yourself” and start talking….when you get done (hee hee), you grab the email and VIOLA! you are a genius.

Now if I could just write a Blog Post about explaining it to the guy in the next stall???

Agents “Stop” “Learn” “Grow” “Prosper”

The Coach

Now, along comes EurekaWare. This new software integrates itself into your copy of Microsoft Outlook 2003 to give it the kind of power that an agent needs. Most systems out there (including Top Producer) require you to relearn how to do everything. There is a different interface for every tool you have. EurekWare recognizes this so they decided to integrate their tool into Outlook, something that most business professionals are already very familiar with. Taken directly from the site, “You’ll be up and running in minutes allowing you to focus your time with your clients, not learning new technology.”

The Pros:

• Familiar Software – By adding functionality to a tool that most people are already familiar with, users will feel at home very quickly after installation.
• Local Install – Your database is now installed onto your personal machine, giving you access to your data when you are online and offline.
• Faster than Java applications – This tool is a plugin based system that adds functionality to your Outlook software. Top Producer runs everything through the a Java machine which is basically a middle man translating Java commands to commands your computer can undertake. This is a slow process, especially on Vista which is already system resource hungry.
• Cheaper – Lower cost with a software fee, not a monthly fee.

The Cons:

• Local Installation – Backups are now back in your hands. Make sure you know that.
• Dependant on Outlook 2003 – As far as I know, doesn’t work with the latest version of Office (2007). Not a big deal for some, but a deal breaker for others.
• No integration into websites – Top Producer integrates with Top Producer Websites to connect your listings and leads into one package. Nothing like that for Eureka.

Many agents who are fed up with Top Producer love EurekaWare. If that is you, give it a try and let me know what you think.

1. Campaign
2. Templates
3. Email Content.

Campaigns:
The Campaign itself is basically defined as your list of emails that are organized in chronological order. Typically, each client is assigned to only one campaign as to not confuse the client. Campaigns are targeted to a specific type of client. You might have one that is setup for your past clients, buyer leads, seller leads, buyers looking for homes in a specific city, etc. You can get as specific or as general as you want. It all depends on how much work you’re willing to put into setting up your campaigns. It all starts with campaigns, then you can start to add emails and templates.

Templates:
A Template is the actual layout of the email. Usually, I will start out with a “Text Only” template that only uses the basic content of the email without any layout. It makes the email feel more personal and not so promotional. Those emails are usually the most effective, but you should set them up with some HTML template emails as well. “HTML templates” are used to make your drip campaigns look professional with graphics and colors. These are the e-mails you see with head shots, colored fonts, and theme graphics integrate into the content of the email.

Emails:
Now emails are very basic. They are the actual content/words of the emails you send. Even though it’s a simple concept, it’s the most important part of a drip campaign. Your message is what drives the success of your entire campaign. Truthfully, your email message is everything; it’s the part that will drive your response rate through the roof.

Most drip campaign systems will have one script that ties it all together and sends your emails out on schedule. Some software will allow you to schedule your emails to go out on the exact hour you choose. Most servers do this by using something that’s called a “Chron Job”. A “Chron Job” tells the server to run your script at a certain time frequency. You can set it up to run the script every minute, every hour, every day, once a week or once a month. It’s completely up to you. Most “Chron Jobs” are set up to send your emails out every hour or every 15 minutes.

Drip Campaigns are becoming less and less useful as more and more agents begin to use them. Email has become a difficult way to communicate because of the amount of email we all receive. A new concept to the drip campaign is adding “Actions” to your campaign. An “Action” is something like…”Make followup call on the 12th day from signup” or “send a personalized email” or “Set client up on drip listings campaign.” These are simply personalized action reminders that get set up in your calendar instead of letting your email system do the work for you. When it comes to converting your clients and leads into dollars, phone calls and personalized service will always trump a simple email drip campaign.

The overall goal of a Drip Campaign is to get your clients and leads to take action today or to remember you when they are ready to take action in the future. It’s a simple tool to allow you to stay in front of your clients and convert them into dollars without putting in to much effort. Think of drip campaigns as an automation tool that allows you to stay in front of your clients while you’re on vacation. The goal is to set it up correctly so you can forget it later.

If you’re looking for a new drip campaign there are many providers out there. Someday, we’ll explore who the best drip campaigns providers are for real estate…but we’ll leave that topic for another day.