The previous blog in my COVID Recovery Series: Five Activities to Focus On looked at building a database using your sphere of influence. If you already have a database, while the market is going through this slow period caused by the fallout from coronavirus, use these tips and take the opportunity to give it a thorough overhaul so that it works for you now and in the future.
While the market is going through this slow period caused by the fallout from coronavirus take the opportunity to clean up your whole database. Without regular maintenance your database loses effectiveness – for example, you send mail or email to people and it gets returned or bounces back because they’re no longer at the address you have listed. It’s wasting your time, money, and costing you business.
So fire up the computer, log into the CRM and get cracking.
- Go through every single contact. If you haven’t spoken to them in a while, check their details online to make sure they haven’t sold and that they’re still at the same address. Update anything that has changed.
- Call every contact. Offer them your assistance regarding all real estate matters. Let them know that your willingness to help goes beyond real estate (that could even include picking up some shopping for them) and you’re happy to give your opinion regarding anything that they might need to discuss or to act as a sounding board if they need one. They may just want to talk about the state of Australia and the coronavirus – remember that you’re building relationships with your community so take the time to genuinely listen. Then, as part of the conversation, find out if you can be of service with buying or selling, whether you can assist them with an appraisal or an opinion on the market, and also whether they know of anyone who you can possibly be of some help to.
- Send a thank you card after speaking to them letting them know how much you value them as a client. Some of your better clients, such as past buyers, sellers and appraisals, you would send a little gift of some sort. It could be movie tickets for when cinemas open again, a $5 scratchy or a Lotto ticket or something to that effect, just to let them know that you care.
- Categorize your contacts into communities. These could include:
- Past sellers (People who have used you or you or your company to sell their property)
- Past purchasers (People who have bought a property from you or your company)
- Past appraisals (Anyone you have done an appraisal for)
- Buyers you’ve been in contact with, but haven’t sold anything to, and who have bought a property, so they become your future sellers and future appraisals as well
- General contacts or sphere of influence
- Make sure that you add a trail to every single client, to ensure you continue to nurture and stay in touch with them. There are many ways you can so this. For example, a multi-layered nurturing base can be a combination of:
- A phone call
- An email newsletter
- An email ‘sold’
- An email invitation
- A voucher of some sort
- A blog
- Some type of gift
There’s a range of different ways to nurture, and as you can see not all of them are asking for business, there’s a lot of give, give, give, ask, give, give, give strategies involved. But the point is to make sure that once your database is up to date, you stay in contact with and nurture every single person on it so that you can hopefully, one day, serve their real-estate needs.
The great thing about purifying your database, getting it all ship shape and attaching trails and an activity schedule of sorts to each contact, is that most of it can be done from your CRM via scheduling. So these can happen automatically without you even having to think about it. Yes, there is going to be a lot of work up front and setting this up, but once it’s done its plain sailing and it will pay off later.
If you want to know more about building a database and community and how to make it work through marketing and nurturing register for my upcoming FREE half-day Real Estate Brilliance webinar.
