As we all venture into 2018, we thought we’d start off the year with some best practices around online lead conversion. In a nutshell, this revenue source continues to play an important role, but so too do our offline lead conversion techniques.
A recent survey conducted by Inman* demonstrated the impact that online leads continue to have on real estate professionals (with over 80% of the survey respondent reviews suggesting that online leads play a role in their closed business dealings).
But, as one would expect, the balance between online lead gathering and offline lead follow-up continues to be an important ROI factor. In the survey’s follow-up special report (published by Inman in December of 2017), the Inman research team found that while the overall cost of online leads has gone up, the perceived value has gone down...
“Our research showed that it’s more important now than ever to take a targeted and measured approach to digital lead capture and follow-up, as the cost of online leads over the last decade has increased while their return on investment has declined…”
Increasing layers of data “scrubbing” (lead verification) technologies over the years certainly comes into play here, however the Inman research team also concluded that the type of online lead generated is also important, finding that…
“Online seller leads appear to be more rare than online buyer leads. We found for around three-quarters of real estate pros, the majority of online leads they’re receiving are buyers, whereas about 5 percent say the majority they receive are sellers. Ten percent said it was around 50/50.”
Further, the Inman team suggests that you augment your online lead strategy with other lead follow-up tools and strategies, all aimed at a bigger, more-patient lead conversion approach. Essentially, that getting the most from your online leads requires that agents...
“Develop a plan for staying in touch with leads who won’t be ready to buy for another 90 days to 12 months. It’s all about the long game.”
So what this shows is that not all online leads are alike and that depending upon the type of lead you’re scampering after and the conversion effort you’re willing to dedicate to this lead source, you might not yet be ready to compete for online leads (at least until you’re set up to handle them operationally).
Is offrs.com a good source for online leads? ...absolutely, but you’ll want to leverage the other lead nurturing tools provided as well. Be sure to visit www.offrs.com to review how offrs generates seller leads and what automated lead follow-up tools can mean to your business-to-life ratio.
*Special Report includes Survey conducted by Inman (in association with offrs.com) between 11/10/17 and 11/1/17. Of the 409 survey respondents, 255 (62.35 percent) identified themselves as agents, 100 (24.45 percent) identified themselves as brokers, 11 (2.69 percent) identified themselves as coaches, and 43 (11 percent) identified themselves as “Other.” offrs collects and provides topical insights, statistics, reviews, humor and best practices gathered from real estate professionals and consumer homeowner industry peers. If you're a broker or agent interested in learning more about seller lead generation or automated marketing services and solutions, visit www.offrs.com or continue to browse our growing collection of industry articles at www.offrs.net.
