The Real Estate Website Sales Conversion Funnel

Simply having a website does not mean that leads will follow. Your website is a tool for organizing information and, if you've got a well thought out conversion strategy, will give you the ability to convert traffic to your site into leads.

The real estate website sales and conversion process is significantly different from traditional sales funnels.

Understanding how leads are generated online is the first step to building effective systems that will produce qualified leads.

What prevents most real estate and mortgage professionals from having a successful online maketing strategy is a fundamental lack of understanding of how the online sales process works.

Let's take a closer look at marketing to, and converting leads from, your real estate website.

Creating Website Traffic

Generating traffic means motivating empowered, online consumers to visit your website for the purposes of delivering a product, service or information that the consumer was already looking for.

It is basically impossible to sell something to an online consumer that they are not interested in buying, especially when it comes to real estate. The very best you can hope for is that when a consumer IS interested in your products or services, they can find your website.

For specific methods and strategies for generating site traffic to your real estate website, read this article:

• Real Estate Website Sales Funnel Step 1: Building Traffic

Capture Reader Interest | Be Interesting

Getting a visitor to your site takes effort; delivering a message that captures your visitor's interest is an art. This is really the crux of real estate website lead conversion.

Interest is delivering a message that is interesting to the consumer. For organic search engine traffic, the "promise" of answers to consumer questions is suggested by the search engine. If you're answering the questions that consumers are asking, you are successfully mastering the art of being interesting to your prospect.

If you are driving traffic to your site, your success lies in your ability to land that consumer on a page that delivers what was promised as the reason why this consumer should visit your site in the first place.

For specific methods and strategies for capturing consumer interest, read this article:

• Real Estate Website Sales Funnel Step 2: Capturing Interest

Earning Trust | Being Trustworthy

If you are successful at capturing the interest of your website visitor, you now have the opportunity to earn their trust. Trust is earned relative to the quality and/or relevance of your content.

Remember, capturing the contact information of an online consumer only happens with complete permission of the consumer. We can surround our content with specific calls to action, and if the consumer doesn't trust that they will be helped by volunteering their contact information, no leads for you.

Recognize that the burden is on you to earn the trust of the consumer, and this piece of the lead generation puzzle should only work better as you learn to speak the language of your target prospect.

For specific methods and strategies for earning consumer trust, read this article:

• Real Estate Website Sales Funnel Step 3:  Earning Trust

Lead Conversion

Let's recap the real estate website sales funnel up to this point.

• Step 1: Generate traffic/visitors to your website
• Step 2: Capture the visitor's interest by delivering what they were expecting
• Step 3: Earn the trust of the reader by establishing yourself as an informed expert with extensive experience on the subject they are researching.

I wish I could say it was as easy as "Do these three things and you'll be swimming in leads," but it's not. You must successfully execute these first three steps in order to realize the ultimate goal of your website, which is to convert traffic into leads.

Having an opportunity to convert traffic into leads requires all of the above. The actual act of capturing leads depends on your calls to action, the simplicity of user engagement, and your ability to control your reader's experience.

For specific methods and strategies for converting traffic into leads, read this article:

• Real Estate Website Sales Funnel Step 4: Lead

Mastering this sales process is not difficult, but it will require time, money and practice. Once you push your way through the learning curve, it's a constant process of experimenting, measuring and adapting your efforts to maximise results.

To view the original article, visit the Tribus blog.