Happy Grasshopper has earned a sterling reputation in the real estate industry. They've spent years perfecting their email marketing services, and growing even more quickly than they expected – but now that they've mastered their initial product offering, they're ready to branch out. Responding to client requests for expanded services, they've just launched two new products: Position-Me and HG-Recruits.

If you're a broker, HG-Recruits is for you. You can read our full introduction to HG-Recruits here. If you're an agent, Position-Me is for you. Read on for a closer look.

Warming Up Cold Web Leads

Dan Stewart, president of Happy Grasshopper explains, "We kept hearing the same question time and again, 'If Happy Grasshopper is built for maintaining relationships with people I know, what can you do about people I don't know yet?'" Real estate agents were particularly interested in building relationships with Web leads. Thus, Position-Me was born.

"Position-Me takes a cold Web lead and turns it into a friend as quickly as possible," Mr. Stewart explains. "As with Happy Grasshopper's original messaging, Position-Me isn't dry, boring, or 'salesy.' It's emotionally engaging and starts conversations."

How does Position-Me work? The process is simple:

1. Complete an assessment that will build a profile of you, your business, and your geographical area. It's important to respond thoughtfully to these questions, because your feedback will be the basis of the messages created for you.
2. Based on your assessment feedback, the Happy Grasshopper team will create a positioning statement for you. They'll also create the campaign to use with your leads.
3. Did they nail it? You have the opportunity to review the positioning statement and campaign – and to request any changes until you're 100% satisfied.
4. The Happy Grasshopper team will get your campaign loaded-up and ready to send. Once you have the green light from them, you can add your contacts and start converting new leads into customers.

Let's take a close look at that last point, because it is a critical component of Position-Me. Loading a new lead into Happy Grasshopper can be as simple as visiting the site and adding the lead's contact information. But this would only be scratching the surface of what Position-Me can do.

This patent-pending solution allows you to create "tags" for different lead sources and thus customize what kind of follow-up that lead receives. Each time a tag is added, a unique email address is automatically created for that tag. You can then use this unique email address for the specific lead source.

Let's use your website as an example. You can create a tag in Position-Me and call it "Leads from My Website." When you create the tag, Position-Me will give you a unique email address for that tag. In your website's administrative tools, you should be able to specify the email address where you'd like to receive notifications of new leads. In that space, you now use the unique email address from Position-Me. You can then follow the same procedure for all your different lead sources (i.e. Zillow, realtor.com®, etc.). In short, if it's a lead source that sends an email notification for new leads, it will work with this system.

Product Highlights

There were a few things that stood out to me as particularly nifty:

• We all receive incomplete leads occasionally. Position-Me recognizes when a field is empty and responds accordingly, so your leads won't get an awkward response that begins, "Dear FirstName."
• With the simple WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editor, it's easy to make minor or major changes to messages.
  
• The level of control for when the messages are delivered is extraordinary. You can decide that you only want messages sent on a specific day or time; or, you can decide that you want it delivered as soon as possible except for specific days/times you want to avoid (i.e. never on a weekend or never at night, etc.).
• Happy Grasshopper has an open API (a fancy way of saying that their technology is allowed to interact with software built by other people). They currently have integrations with many CRM companies, including Wise Agent and Tribus. This means that you can easily import information from your current CRM – and Position-Me actually pushes reporting data out of their system (so you can track your campaign's performance from within your CRM).

Next Steps

We're really just scratching the surface of this new tool. We recommend contacting Happy Grasshopper for your own product tour. You can also:

• Visit Happy Grasshopper's spiffy new website
• Read articles about drip marketing
• Explore more drip marketing solutions