So we need to use this to our advantage. Buying or selling a home does not happen overnight. Many of our customers will spend several months researching and looking at homes before they’re willing to make a commitment, while other customers may not quite be ready to buy a home, but know within the next year they will be. Communicating with our customers on a regular basis lets them know we’re here when they’re ready to begin the process.

Not only that, but email marketing is a great way to keep your brand in front of our customers after we’ve completed a sale. As an industry, many of us do not stay in touch with our customers after they’ve bought or sold a home. If that’s the case, we’re doing a huge disservice to our company and our customers. With people being in the market to buy or sell a home every few years, if we’re able to sustain our relationship with them over those years, we’ll increase the changes that they’ll buy or sell from us again in the future.

That being said, below are a few ways we can use email marketing to reach our customers:

Establish trust: Email marketing enables us to send targeted and focused messages, so first and foremost, we need to establish trust with our customers. Be sure you know who your audience is before you send any email campaign. The worst thing you can do is blast an email to hundreds of people who will not find the information relevant. Be sure you research who your target market is so you don’t send an email about new homes on the market to someone who purchased a home from you last week. By doing this, we’re establishing ourselves as the authority on our market, while building a solid relationship.

Monthly Newsletters: Keep your customers up to date on enhancements to your website, events your company is hosting, housing trends and statistics, etc. Showcase newly listed properties or properties just sold in their neighborhood and success stories of customers who had a great experience buying or selling a home from you. We already have this information available, so organize it in a newsletter to highlight important information.

Home Buying or Home Maintenance Tips:  The home buying process doesn’t end after a sale. Often times, there is still a lot of work to do on a house in order to make it feel like home. Home renovation tips and advice, for example, will come in handy to customers looking to take on home improvement projects on their own.

Community News: As brokerages, we have a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips. If you’re working with clients that are new to the area, send them community information to help them feel at home in their new city. Not only that, this is a great tool for keeping up with past clients as well. Letting them know if events and happenings in the community that month makes you the local expert.

Open Houses and Other Events: Inform current and potential customers of upcoming open houses or events your company is hosting. Through email marketing, you can target customers looking for homes in a certain price range or looking for specific features that fit the criteria of the house. An easy way to invite customers to an event you’re hosting or to show your involvement in the community is to showcase events you’re participating in as well.

Online Surveys: The best way to find out what your customers want is to ask them! Online surveys are a great way to get to know your clients better and help you get feedback on open houses or past events in order to measure overall customer satisfaction.

Call to Action Items: Be sure that you include clear call to action items in all your email campaigns as well. Readers will want to know what they’re supposed to do with this content and where they can go next for more information. Direct them to specific pages on your website that relate to the topic of the email or give them a contact person to call or email if they’re interested in speaking with someone further.

All in all, email marketing is a simple cost-effective tool to staying in touch with potential, current and past customers. With the ability to control what content you’re distributing to your customers, you can make sure the message aligns with company goals and expectations – giving you a successful email campaign strategy.

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Active Community: Top 5 Takeaways from Real Estate Connect SF

By John Sable

At Real Estate Connect this year, speakers stressed the importance of meeting the demands of today’s consumer (which happened to be the theme of last year’s Enterprise Network Conference). Over the past few years, Active Website has encouraged Enterprise members to make the move to a customer-centric business model because in order to last in today’s competitive market, we need to keep in mind what the driving force behind our success is – our customers.

With a wealth of information available via the web, customers are now better informed – meaning we need to provide a higher level of service then we did in the past in order to win their business.  Our online users now expect instant results and if you don’t provide that, it is extremely easy for them to visit a competitor’s site instead that may have the information they’re looking for readily available.

So then, what does it take to be customer-centric?

Keep in mind the switch won’t happen overnight: It’s not just about changing your business rules; it’s about changing the culture of your company and requires a fundamental shift in attitude.  Customers are our surest and most reliable source of future revenue, so by taking the time to educate our agents and staff on the benefits of a customer-centric business model, we can ensure the growth of our company through the coming years.

Know who your customers are: If you don’t know who your customers are, you won’t be able to share your services with them or know how to reach them.  Think about who your target market is – are they first time home buyers, new to the area, or in the market to sell their existing home? Keeping the demographics and interests of your customers in mind will help you tailor your services to fit their exact needs – which bring us to our next point.

Know what your customers want: There is a huge dichotomy between what the broker wants and what customers want. Understanding your customer means understanding their reasons for needing your services, making you able to adapt to their demands. Meeting their needs and achieving a higher level of customer service ensure our customers leave satisfied – helping you build customer loyalty. In an age where customers are looking to their peers for trusted recommendations (like Yelp for example), this is another critical component in moving your business forward.

As a network moving towards a customer centric business strategy, we’ve seen growth even through difficult market conditions. All too often, companies are too focused on driving traffic to their sites. We’re not saying this is bad – in fact, it’s another crucial part of your business. However, driving customers to your site is only half the battle. You also need to focus your time and resources on developing a process for taking care of these customers once they’ve found you online.

In order to do this, Active Website has encouraged Network members to create customer-centric business rules through LifeCycle, our inquiry management system. By having proper response times (15 minutes or less is ideal) and knowing how a customer wants to be treated through the process of buying or selling a home, you’ll be able to increase lead conversions and leave your customers satisfied. And –through The Active Usability Lab, we can scientifically track how users are interacting with our sites. With this information, we can make educated decisions for how to position our brands online.

It’s our mission to continue providing The Network with the best technology available to better meet the demands of our customers. We truly believe that in today’s online world, if the end user is happy to use our sites, our brand will be associated with high quality and great customer service that will ultimately lead our companies forward.

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Top 5 Takeaways from Inman Real Estate Connect SF

Active Community: eBusiness – Where Do We Stand?

Active Community: Four Questions on eBusiness

By Amanda Stephan

Looking back on last week’s conference, it was a pleasure to see that our innovations and predictions over the past year have been sought out by others in the industry. Inman was an affirmation to what Active Website has been trying to instill in The Enterprise Network. With our conference last year focusing on creating a customer-centric business model, it was encouraging to see Inman starting to drive home the point that we need to find ways to better meet the demands of today’s consumer.

Which brings us to our top takeaways from Inman this year:

1. Moving towards a customer-centric business model: This was our theme for our Annual Enterprise Network Conference last October. Again it was great to see Inman reiterating the need to increase the focus on our customers. You’ve heard us say this before, but with a user’s experience on our websites playing such a vital role in the success of our companies, it’s important that the needs of our customers come first (a lot more on this next Friday).
2. Email marketing is back: As an industry, many of us have lost touch with email marketing and have disregarded it as an outdated form of communication. However, in today’s fast paced world where we’re constantly being bombarded with campaigns, a well tailored email marketing strategy is still a very effective method for reaching our customers.  It was great to see the people at Inman discussing ways to get back to our digital marketing roots.
3. The release of WordPress 3.0: Speakers at the conference discussed the release of WordPress 3.0 this past June and a variety of cool new enhancements including multi-user integration, plug-ins and how to use your WordPress site for additional SEO value. Always striving to stay ahead of the curve, The Active Enterprise Network, had already made the switch over to this unified enterprise blog system prior to Inman. We have learned a lot utilizing this new platform and would love to share our experience with all of you.
4. Home prices do not appreciate, they stay up with inflation: Another key point made at Inman this year was based on the housing market and our infatuation with price. While not a lot of time was devoted to this topic at the conference, this hit home with us and we feel it’s important to discuss further.
5. Three major areas are moving the industry: We’ve all been watching these trends, but the conference reiterated the importance of mobile, search and social integration (or as we call it, personalization) to build your online brand. No longer can we rely on just our websites to be a main point of contact with our customers. To be successful in our ever-evolving industry, we understand the need for a strong digital presence – including social and mobile sites – in order to increase search ranking. Staying up-to-date on new advancements in the technology world gives The Enterprise Network an edge over the competition and ensures our members’ place as market leaders.

While we gained a lot of valuable information from the conference, it is our goal to expand further on these topics to showcase how we can apply this knowledge to our network and beyond. So again, check back with us next week as we explore our first topic, the importance of a customer-centric business model.

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Active Community: Building Your Online Brand

By Amanda Stephan

By enforcing business rules and having a dedicated eBusiness department and eTeam that understands the needs of the modern consumer, you can make sure your online customers are taken care of properly. The future of real estate is eBusiness and we need to have the right processes in place for converting these leads into sales.  Watch our video and find out more.

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Four Questions on eBusiness

By John Sable

Jen came to Active Website three years ago and has really helped us grow Active’s eBusiness department. In our video below, Jen will go discuss her experience working with Enterprise clients and the struggles brokerages face as they begin the process of developing an effective eBusiness strategy. More importantly, Jen will explain the importance of eBusiness in today’s market and gives tips that every broker should consider when setting up a designated department. A successful strategy is not only about understanding why eBusiness is important, but knowing how to transform that strategy into results. Watch today’s video for more information.

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Danberry Launches LifeCycle for Inquiry Management

By John Sable

Because Active has access to Tobii Technology’s eye tracking system, we can now scientifically evaluate how users are navigating our sites making us better equipped to consult with Active Enterprise Network members on the best placement of components on their websites.  For our next usability study, we will be taking a closer look at the navigation pages and site map in order make our sites easier to navigate  for the user. Once the study is completed, we’ll be releasing more information to you on our blog.

As we wrap up this session on Active Community, we continue to make our way down the funnel. We started Active Community discussing search and the importance of getting customers to our sites through keywords, content ,etc. Then we moved to usability and the importance of keeping customers on our sites. Now, our next step is to discuss eBusiness and what we need to do to turn online leads into sales.

Active Website is excited to share with everyone our LifeCycle online inquiry management product and how we are helping our clients convert inquiries into sales. Watch our video for a wrap up on usability and for a preview of what to expect for the next few weeks of Active Community.

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Active Community: Introduction to the Active Usability Lab

Active Community: Usability Lab, Part 2

By John Sable

Because we released our results to Active Enterprise Network Members today, we want to give you a little insight into our findings through the online surveys we conducted as well as our eye tracking focus groups. 350 users participated in the surveys and over 60 people were tested using the eye tracking system. Because the information we collected is so valuable, we’re only releasing the full results to our clients.

However, we’d like to give you a sneak peek. This week’s video presentation focuses on four main of our study: the homepage, certain components on the homepage, content and branding. But what we really want to emphasis is the different perceptions of what the broker wants verses what the user wants.

At our October Enterprise Network Conference last year, we focused on the importance of moving to a more customer centric model. The results of our usability studies really drives this point home. With a user’s experience on our websites playing such a vital role in the success of our companies, it’s time we’re aware of their needs in order to meet their demands.

These results are crucial in helping the Enterprise Network move toward a more customer centric approach. With these findings, we’re now able to consult with our clients from a scientific standpoint when it comes to usability.

Below is the animation discussed in today’s Active Community session.

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Becoming an “Inside Out” Business

By John Sable

At the end of last year, Active Website teamed up with Tobii Technology, so we’ve spent the past few months developing our Active Usability Lab. By having access to Tobii’s eye tracking technology, we can now measure how customers are using Enterprise Network Members’ websites. Because we can take what we’ve learned from our usability lab findings and make improvements on our sites, Members are given a huge advantage over their competitors.

Tobii’s eye tracking is less intrusive than traditional usability testing and we’re able to get more accurate results through tracking and recording a user’s eye movement. With the ability to see the direction and duration of a user’s gaze, we can dramatically increase our efforts for efficiently marketing products and services via the internet.

The Active Usability Lab has 3 main areas of focus including data collection through online surveys, analytics and of course, eye tracking. This year, our goal is to produce quarterly findings for our clients based off the results of our studies. To find out more about what’s been happening at the Active Usability Lab, watch our video presentation below. Be sure to come back next Friday for an inside look at our results!

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Three Simple Rules to Remember

By John Sable

blog.activewebsite.com

Because inventory is high, prices are down and mortgage rates are near 50-year lows, this is an important event for brokerages across the nation. Benefits of participation include:

• Increased awareness about the homebuyer tax credit
• More buzz about homes for sale in your neighborhood
• Media attention at nationwide, statewide and local levels
• Additional publicity centered around your property listings
• Ability to reach out to your local community

At Active Website, we’re aware of the need for open houses to be an integral part of a company’s website. With around 62% of homebuyers using online sites to find open houses (according to NAR’s Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers), this is another great ROI tool available to the Active Enterprise Network. By incorporating open houses on their website, Members gain brand exposure while increasing customer contact.

Below are the links to the open house pages for Active Enterprise Network Members. Brokers, we highly encourage you to participate in this national event and customers- make sure you take advantage of this great opportunity to shop for your next home.

• The Group, Inc. – Fort Collins Real Estate
• Wright Kingdom Real Estate – Boulder Real Estate
• The Kentwood Companies – Denver Real Estate
• Charles Reinhart Company Realtors – Ann Arbor Real Estate
• Residential Properties, Ltd – Providence Homes for Sale
• Ebby Halliday Real Estate – Dallas Homes for Sale
• NT Callaway Real Estate Brokers – Princeton Real Estate
• Helen Adams Realty – Charlotte Homes
• LandVest – New England Real Estate
• Smith and Associates Real Estate – Tampa Homes for Sale
• The Danberry Company – Toledo Homes for Sale
• Milestone Realty Consultants – Kentucky Houses
• Turpin Real Estate – Chatham Homes for Sale
• Skogman Realty – Cedar Rapids Homes for Sale
• Windermere/Tri-Cities Real Estate – Kennewick Homes for Sale

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Innovative Open House – Online

By Amanda Stephan

Presentation highlights include:

Content is King

1. What message do you want to communicate?
2. Define your area of expertise
3. What geographical area do you want to influence?
4. Develop value through unique content
5. Make your content shareable

Understanding Duplicate Content

1. Becoming the authoritative source
2. Duplicate content in regards to property listings
3. Develop unique content that is different than shared content in IDX feed
4. Include content centered around IPWs with links to property details page
5. Understanding Page Rank

Understanding the Search Demand Curve

1. Identify where you rank on your Fat Head, Chunky Middle and Long tail terms and develop a strategy for each
2. Capture more traffic from the tail
3. Understand what terms are converting into sales
4. Use SEO performances in your marketing efforts
5. Use search results to develop more unique content

Building Your Local Brand

1. What is the message we are trying to communicate about our brand?
2. How to use all the tools and resources we have at our disposal to build our local brand
   • -Website, offline networks, social sites, blog, etc.
3. Need to establish a plan for bringing our offline networks online
4. Use syndication outlets not only for your property listings,  but for other content as well- i.e. news, press releases, blogs, etc.
5. It’s important that you’re reaching the right people with your message

How to Write an Effective Blog

1. Choose a topic
2. Create an effective title
3. Think about the layout
4. Include unique content, keywords and links
5. Decide if multiple posts are necessary

By John Sable

blog.activewebsite.com