Here at iRealty we understand that an agent’s database is one of their biggest assets. It’s essentially your entire history as an agent. All of your past vendors and buyers, those who had interest in listings and investors always looking for new opportunities should all appear on your list (ideally located in one place, your CRM). But for many real estate agents, their database is not an accurate representation of their career in real estate. 

We want to help ensure our clients grow and nurture their databases to generate more business opportunities. Here is the simple approach iRealty takes to: 

1. Foster database growth 
2. Maintain a healthy database 
3. Identify business opportunities 

Step 1: Optimise your marketing to encourage subscriptions 

While some of your database growth will come from open home attendees and website enquiries, you should not be passing up the opportunity to use your digital marketing to add extra growth to your list. 

It will come at no surprise that we suggest firstly, marketing across both email and social media and secondly that all of your marketing channels should promote one another. That means all of your social media followers should know you have an exclusive email list and vice versa. 

In fact we believe database growth is so important we encourage our clients to use the tactics below:

• Use ‘Subscribe to database’ calls to action 
  

  
  Each iRealty property landing page will include a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ form when the campaign is shared on social media or forwarded from an existing subscriber. From here each viewer will have the opportunity to join your contact list. As an iRealtyPro client, our team has designed attractive subscribe banners and a form which is posted as part of the monthly content calendar. This sort of cross-promotion incentivises those who are already interested in your business (Facebook followers) to join your email list for exclusive information. 

• Property or appraisal campaigns  

  While we have tactics directly aimed to increase email subscription, our team utilise other lead/ traffic building contact forms to generate leads for properties or services. Our vendor social media packages use contact forms to capture buyer enquiry. You can then choose to add a disclaimer stating enquiries will be added to your email list. Other paid campaigns encourage appraisal requests, market report downloads or rental valuations, all generating contact leads for your business 

• Other call to action campaigns

  Similar to the concept above, our clients have seen success from social media competitions. While a competition entrant would not be necessarily considered a market lead, they tend to be people in the local area. Recently, one clever client worked with our team to run a social media competition and utilise the opportunity to  find out what competition entrants were interested in the current market (Also using the disclaimer to be added to their marketing database). They successfully gained over 60 new contacts responding positively to market information.

Step 2. Nurture your database to increase conversions 

You have gone to the hard work to generate leads and grow your database. But it is important that you have a marketing strategy aimed at nurturing your contacts and not bombard them with irrelevant information. 

Our approach

• Best practice marketing that eliminates high subscribe rates  

iRealty clients have some of the lowest unsubscribe rates in the industry. And while each will have their own marketing goals in place, we can attribute the low unsubscribes to best practice sending habits. It sounds simple but we suggest sending more to those who are interested in the market and having a content lead approach to those who are not currently looking to make a move. Take our iRealtyPro model for example, sending good quality content based newsletters to your whole database (or a targeted database group like investors) then complementing this with iRealty’s smart automation nurturing your database with relevant emails. 

• Database cleansing and bounce management 

iRealty will conduct bounce management to ensure you know who has updated their email addresses. After a contact has bounced for 3 campaign sends, iRealty will automatically mark these subscribers as deleted. 

To summarise we love this quote found on REB’s recent newsletter. “If you love your database it will love you,” – Sonya Treloar Ray White Bridgeman Downs 

Your database is your biggest asset and in today’s market recording open home attendance is only one piece of the puzzle. Database growth should be a positive byproduct of your marketing efforts and generate leads for your business growth.