Effective Real Estate Website Calls-to-Action for Lead Generation

For real estate lead generation, you run ads in the newspaper, in the homes magazine, and highlight your website in all of your other marketing. You've done a good job with this marketing in calling people to take action and come to your website. Now what are you doing for calls-to-action on your website to get your visitors to tell you who they are?

If you're asking for them to "sign up for my newsletter," or "register for my guestbook," you're probably not very happy with leads from those calls. It's not that a newsletter isn't valuable, and we'll talk about that, but just asking them to sign up for it isn't going to grab their interest. So what can you do for calls-to-action around your site for real estate lead generation? And where should you place them?

You Need Offers

You're asking for your site visitors to give you something valuable—their contact information. Sorry, but very few of them will be generous enough to do that unless there is something in it for them. You need to come up with a few specific offers you can make to them that will be interesting or valuable enough to get them to take action.

Action: Gather Your Offers

If you step into your visitors' shoes, what would you value for an offer on a local real estate website? List them for your actions:

• An eBook of the negotiation process in your market.
• A copy of a (personal info redacted) settlement statement with explanations of the line items.
• Offer an automated alert email of new listings and price changes for their search criteria if your system allows it.
• Work a deal with some of your local vendor friends to offer printable coupons for their home-related businesses.
• BIG: offer sold property reports by neighborhood or MLS area going back as far as you can gather records.

You may be able to come up with more, and the more the better.

Place Offers Around the Site

You should have one or more calls-to-action on almost every page of your site. Use each one you come up with several times.

Action: Key Calls to Content

Place your calls on pages that have relevant content. Don't put a call-to-action that is targeting sellers on a buyer's interest page. If you came up with one or more call ideas that do not have specifically relevant pages, then create the pages to go with them. You'll get far better results if you offer something that is a bonus related to what they're reading on the page.

Your Newsletter

REALLY IMPORTANT: Don't just buy some canned newsletter content, even if it has space for you to add an article of your own. If you're going to have a newsletter, it should be all of your own content or locally contributed content relevant to homes.

Action: Develop a Process

Newsletters are tough, simply because they force you to perform on a scheduled basis and to do so with new content. If you're blogging regularly, you've got what you need. Simply use your blog posts, or excerpts from them, linked to the originals on your site.

If you're not blogging, maybe you can have a theme for each newsletter. You then create some short articles about the topic, and you can also use website excerpts with links. Ideas include:

• Buyer Topics
• Seller Topics
• Neighborhood Profiles
• Transaction Process – Buyer Side
• Transaction Process – Seller Side
• Local Government
• Local Shopping
• Local Entertainment
• Local Vendor Coupons and Offers (home related)

There are others you'll think of, but the idea is to send out interesting newsletters. To get them to subscribe, describe what you're doing, maybe even with a sample article quote or two.

Use these tips to develop a real estate lead generation strategy that will make you really happy with the results.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.