Best Practices for Nurturing Inactive Customers

Our best practices for re-engaging inactive customers and converting them follow the acronym: PRE. Once these customers show interest, shift the conversation with your ALM framework and get up to speed on their search.

When reconnecting with these customers, make sure your attempts are Personalized, Relevant and Easy.

P: Personalized

Customize your touchpoints by leveraging what you know about the customer from past interactions:  

• The neighborhood, property type or price point of the original home inquiry
• Specific attributes of the property that you suspect might have piqued their interest
• Any and all communications received from the customer
• What mode of communication the customer uses (phone, text, email) and what times of day they tend to respond

R: Relevant

Communication should offer unique and relevant value to the customer. If the message you’re trying to deliver doesn’t meet this bar, revise before sending.

Valuable information you can share with customers:

• Suggestions about other neighborhoods or properties that might be of interest given the customer’s original inquiry, saved searches or saved homes
• Updates on market conditions: For example, a table that shows homes sold in the past three months with list and sale prices and your personal assessment
• Information about local developments, such as changes to public transportation routes, school zones or zoning

E: Easy

Make sure your follow-up cadence offers value, sounds human and is customized to your customers. If you feel that you need to send blast after blast, consider diversifying your outreach by type (call, text or email) and time of day (morning, evening or night). Experiment with leveraging technology to streamline your follow-ups and make it even easier on customers.

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Quality vs. quantity

We recommend the following maximum follow-up interactions for inactive customers — but if you’re doing each interaction effectively, you may need far less:

Once inactive customers are re-engaged, you can shift into your ALM framework: Appointment, Location, Motivation.

Watch: More tactics for nurturing leads over the long term