Messaging That Drives Lead Conversion

Gary Ashton of The Ashton Real Estate Group of RE/MAX Advantage knows a thing or two about online lead conversion. His team is killing it with a successful program that blends traditional, hard real estate work with online excellence. Last year, the company of 60 agents completed $236 million in sales and 798 transaction sides.

As a team, the Ashton Real Estate Group does a lot of things right, but the goal of our conversation was to learn a few of the top triggers that Mr. Ashton considers to be most effective.

Responsiveness

Everyone preaches about responsiveness. As a REALTOR®, you know that you need to contact the consumer within five minutes of an inquiry or you’re dead. Here is the tragic back story on that. The same consumer that expects a five minute response time is also likely to take 300 days to buy a home! Crazy, right?

For responsiveness, Ashton’s team uses live help by ReadyChat™. You have likely seen this on many agent, broker, or team websites. It is a little chat box that you can type stuff into. It connects the consumer to a call center that basically says ‘hello,’ grabs the consumer’s information, and shoots a message out to one of Gary’s teammates to follow up on. It’s a buttoned-up solution that gathers more consumer information than most agents gather and it satisfies the responsiveness.

Conversion

Because of years of investing in website marketing – business cards, signs, SEO, SEM, listing syndication, RE/MAX.com, etc. – Ashton’s team gets a lot of leads. Currently, they are managing 80,000 consumers in their funnel. They have had struggles with getting the right drip marketing. When they started out, they used the drip marketing that came with their website. That was not working, so the team knuckled down and tried to write their own. That did not work any better, so they turned to Happy Grasshopper.

“We worked with the Happy Grasshopper team to really develop campaigns with local content and sharp headlines that improved click through rates, readership, and conversions right away,” says Ashton.  “It is working great for us and I think that unless you are a particular agent who is a genius at email marketing, you should just rely on the experts.”

Try it

Understandably, a lot of this sounds like a broken record in real estate today. Every conference, every blogger, every guru tells you the same thing, but we have found that very few systems really deliver what they preach.

To test Ashton’s claims, we visited his website, NashvilleMLS.com. Sure enough, up popped the website attendant asking me if I needed any help. I was trying to get to the drip marketing, so I went right to save a search and registered. Before I could complete filling out the form, my cell phone rang with a very nice voice asking me if I would like a tour arranged in Nashville of homes that matched my search criteria. “WOW!” I thought. Responsiveness was delivered.

Next up came the drips – really good stuff that was engaging. The messages told me stories about home buying in Nashville that were real. The first one was in text – not some overly formatted marketing garb.

Hi Victor,

Thanks for visiting our site! Please let us know how we can help you with your home search. Would you like to view homes in person anytime soon?

Thanks.

So if you are generating a lot of leads and you are looking to drive more conversion into sales, check out www.happygrasshopper.com. When you take their online assessment, they’ll provide a free examination of your current processes and suggest ways to improve them.

Have a good tip for what is working well in your business? Tell us about it in the comments below.