A real estate beginner or a property seller expert, a part of the housing market or not; whatever your position is, the principles for acquiring, converting and nurturing customers are more or less the same everywhere. Modern business is all about building fruitful and long-lasting customer relationships, which is why CRM systems are now already a crucial part of every organization.
What Is a CRM?
Being a savvy business professional yourself, it’s highly unlikely that a CRM methodology isn’t, in one way or another, already a part of your dealership experience. Just in case you are a newbie in the field, we’ll start by briefly explaining the principles before continuing on to the far-reaching benefits of this customer-oriented practice.
CRM stands for customer relationship management, and although mostly used for defining a software or a tool, it is actually a process, and should be comprehended in that fashion. As such, CRM is responsible for a big part of your customer acquisition lifecycle – managing leads, converting them into paying regulars and gathering valuable intelligence for further growth – which is why it is pretty close to being indispensable.
The Real Estate Customer Retention Dilemma
When it comes to attracting and retaining customers, there’s only one difference between a real estate market and the majority of other niches. Once closed, a real estate deal is very unlikely to bring more contracts with the same customer, simply because houses are not “usual” goods, so to speak.
Customer retention is therefore quite a unique aspect of the real estate business, and can even question the very need for building customer relationships in the first place. The truth is, even if chances are little that your past customers will return back to you any time soon, you can bet that they will recommend you to somebody else.
Due to the little thing called customer testimonial, CRM software for real estate agencies is not by any chance a useless business caprice, but an essential driver for progress.
Here’s how.
- The Ultimate Intelligence Manager
A successful business always have a lot on its plate. Licences, customer inquiries and financial administration, just to name a few, are the ongoing tasks every organization has to make time for and manage with utmost efficiency, and real estate is no exception. Additionally, in order to reach the top, a company has to make decisions that are strategically plausible and data-based. Both difficulties demand an intelligence platform to keep all of the business info tidy, usable and secure.
As a tool more than as a process, CRM is pretty convenient (not to say brilliant) at keeping all of your data in order. From lead generation, contacts and customer requirements, to properties, transactions and reporting – every piece of actionable and legally mandatory information is stored in one place, transparent and, if needed, ready for sharing.
- The Lead Generation Master
Although each of the aforementioned is necessary for keeping your books and operations shipshape, lead generation is especially important for further growth. At the same time, it is a process that requires skillfulness in managing different channels and streams – landing page surveys, social media campaigns, email blasts and online ads – all at once. And, as if that isn’t troublesome enough, it also demands every quality lead to be attended to, addressed and nurtured.
The most powerful CRM solutions allow you to multitask these marketing routes, collect every significant piece of information about your future clients and unify them in a single, reliable and comprehensive database. With every contact saved, organized by criterions of your choice and accessible from wherever you are and whenever the need occurs, your real estate conversions can only thrive.
- The Decision-Making Assistant
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Knowledgeable entrepreneurs understand that a modern company can only be as triumphant as it is data-centred. We’ve mentioned the decision-making process only briefly before, but it is certainly a topic that can and should be discussed in depth. Since the word count disallows us to do so, we can only stress that no decision in business can be made without being based on research, analysis and intelligence.
As previously explained, CRM software systems are designed to serve as business knowledge bases. While some of them can only provide unprocessed info, the best versions can actually make important calculations on your behalf. Either way, these helping tools remain in the very core of carefully estimated and premeditated business decisions.
- The Workflow Automate
If passionate about what you do and where you’re headed towards, your team is probably stacked with hard-working and ambitious busy bees. However devoted, diligent and dependable, the members of your staff are often challenged with a situation when they simply cannot do it all by themselves.
Even if your company’s workflow is pitch-perfect and is in no need for additional improvement, your team should be allowed to deploy some of their time-consuming tasks to computers.
Take email newsletters, for instance. They are insanely important for keeping your current and future customers informed and excited about your offers, but they are also repetitive and demand a great portion of your team’s hours. By automating email blasts, CRM systems make sure that every mail is being sent without wasting even a minute of your company’s time. It’s efficiency at its best!
- The Real-Time Communicator
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about modern customer behaviour. As much as your niche deals with a target audience that usually makes its purchasing decisions with the utmost mindfulness and little caprice, real estate customers, like all others, want to feel respected, valued and heard. When it comes to closing the deal, the way you communicate with them makes all the difference.
Even though they cannot make your agents any better at approaching their leads, CRM systems can help you attend to their requests, answer their questions and solve their problems at greater speed. When in doubt, a customer should not be allowed to ponder on, but convinced that their decision to employ your services is a good one. Responding to their demands in real time is therefore of greatest importance, and is something CRM automation can help you bring to perfection.
- The Custom-Tailoring Machine
When it comes to customer conversion, personalization is an agenda that must not be neglected. When acquired through an audience targeting process, leads are still only virtual profiles with collective characteristics and no identity, but once the conversion starts, they want to be treated like individuals with quite specific needs and pain points.
This is actually paramount for real estate, since this niche deals with a lot of additional information. While your lead’s profession might help you determine how luxurious a home they would want, it cannot tell you about their preferences on window sizes or kitchen design.
By being information-rich, CRM, on the other hand, can. The data it collects will help you custom-tailor your emails and direct offers in such an extent that no potential customer would be able to refuse them.
- The Feedback Joggler
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Customer feedbacks are not only nerve-wracking comments that everyone who visits your website can see; rather, they are intermediate chances for improvement. A professional should always encourage his clients to leave feedback once the contract is closed, and only an ignorant one will not see that as an incentive for doing better work.
When integrated with your website, CRM software can precisely measure how happy your past client is with your delivery. Furthermore, gauging email open and click-through rates is one of this system’s basic features, which can help you determine how successful your lead generation campaigns actually are.
- The Report Generator
Along with feedback, timely reporting is yet another factor that enables you to measure your agency’s efficiency. Besides being a necessary yardstick of accomplishments which businesses can choose to use for future improvement or not, reporting is usually mandatory as well. If your agency is only a part of a larger real estate company, you know what we’re talking about.
Apart from generating reports on your properties, clients and contracts, CRM systems also keep your sales reporting in place, thus allowing you to come clean with your agency’s heads. Particularly for real estate companies that manage a lot of offices at once, administrative benefits of CRMs are very welcome.
- The Customer Relationship Mediator
Regardless of the niche or the size of the business, what it all comes down to is customer satisfaction. Without a happy audience, there would not be high-earning companies at all, and the same applies to real estate.
With everything in a business being interconnected, CRM systems surely optimize at least a part of your agency’s undertakings. Even if its usage doesn’t go further than email marketing campaigns, the sole automation of this process grants you the time you can devote to your current customers and brainstorm new ways of keeping them happy.
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It goes without saying that these 9 benefits of CRM systems that real estate agencies can and should leverage are not the only ones, but when it comes to successfully managing your customer relationships, they are more than enough.