3 Ways to Use Data You Have Today to Better Understand Your Customers

If you have an effective real estate website, it will engage visitors, guide them through their buying or selling process, and ultimately convert those visitors to prospects for your agents. But what if your website could do even more? What if your site and the tools you use to drive people to your site could inform you about the thoughts, desires, and values of your future customers?

Websites don't have to be one-sided. If you really start to understand how people interact with your company online, you can access a wealth of information that will help your agents prioritize leads and close more deals.

1) Analytics

Use web analytics to gain insight on how people find and interact with your website. Analytics can be overwhelming – there's too much information here. But if you look at just a couple of key indicators, they can help you prioritize messaging, segment your visitors by interests for more effective outreach, and ultimately increase conversions.

• Hot Days: Identify which days of the week are most active. These are the days your customers are telling you they are interested in thinking about their future home.
• New versus Returning: You can easily break down this information based on new or returning visitors. Returning visitors may be deeper in the sales cycle and might have different tendencies.
• Demographics: Who's viewing your website? Using analytics, you can determine the location, age, and gender of your viewer. Understanding your demographic is essential to curating and targeting your message.
• Interaction: Using analytics, you can see what pages people stop on, and for how long, their navigation history, and with what kind of device (e.g. mobile/desktop, Windows/Mac, Chrome/Firefox). This kind of data is invaluable in customizing and optimizing the value of your website.

2) Social

Many agents and brokers like to use Facebook to advertise or promote their services or homes for sale. Facebook is a great resource to not only advertise, but find out more about your visitors and future customers.

• Partner Categories: Use Facebook Partner Categories when doing Facebook ads. The Partner Categories include mounds of data related to buying histories and lifestyles, so you can create ads that are much more relevant. You can target based on likely movers, movers with kids, movers that travel for work, and much much more.
• Re-Target with FBX: Use data to re-target likely buyers through FBX. If someone comes to your site from Facebook, looks at a specific page or blog post and then returns to Facebook, you can serve an ad related to the home, area, or district they showed interest in on your site. By collecting this information, you can deliver valuable content to consumers.
• Social Media Drivers: Know what social media outlets drive visitors through analytics. Under referrals, you'll see which social media site is most effective for driving traffic. But even more than that, you can segment those leads by social preference so you can use their preferred means of communication when reaching out.

3) CRM

• Personalized Content: There are solutions now that will e-mail personalized content based on the pages online visitors frequent. These systems are automatic, easy to implement, and effective. If you know a visitor is interested in the value of a home, for example, send them e-mails when that value changes. This is another way you can use the information you collect from your site to improve communications.
• Lead Scoring: Many CRM tools now do predictive lead scoring so you can identify likely buyers and sellers. Understand how these systems work and make sure they are driven by your past customer data, integrate your demographic and behavior information, and use appropriate weights calculated by the model. The finer tuned those systems are, the more effective they will be.

These are just some small examples of how you can use the data at your fingertips to better understand your online visitors, prospects and customers. Join me at Inman next month to learn more about how to use data to get data on your customers and the impact this new way of thinking will have on your business. I'll be in Conference Room A at 4:00 PM on Tuesday, August 2. I look forward to seeing you there.

To view the original article, visit the Onboard Informatics blog.