Video Emails and More: 4 Ways to Use Technology to Convert Real Estate Leads

What digital technologies have the best potential to generate real estate leads and convert them to clients? The most successful tools are ultimately ones that help you communicate information — a listing, an offer, a market report or a deadline — quickly, comprehensively and consistently. Digital technologies help you stay in touch with clients and stay competitive with other agents.

Here are four ways to use technology to convert real estate leads.

1. It’s practically a given that you use email to communicate with prospects and clients, but your messages can be working better for you. Emails that include video — property tours, agent information such as a profile or your personal approach to customer service, tips on the buying and selling process, an overview of contracts — win every time. According to Invodo, video in email can boost open rates by 20 percent and increase click-through rates 2–3 times, and adding the word “video” to your email subject line also increases open rates and reduces unsubscribes.
2. Maintaining your online presence by sharing information on a regular basis can help prospects and clients to recognize you as a well-informed, contemporary industry expert. Rather than blast your information out to a general audience that will largely ignore you, use online marketing tactics to attract buyers, sellers and prospects who are already interested in what you have to say. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram drastically opens up your sphere of influence and referral base. Use these platforms to tell stories that educate and engage visitors. Intersperse pictures and videos of client reviews, testimonials and listings with lifestyle posts such as neighborhood events, favorite links, and even book or restaurant reviews. Your website should look professional and tidy, and include photos, videos and a clear call to action on every page. Optimize your website for smartphones and tablets: According to Google, 61 percent of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing from their phone and 40 percent head over to a competitor’s site instead. Writing a blog is another way to build a rapport with leads and clients, tell your story, showcase your expertise and differentiate yourself from the competition.
3. There are 143 million smartphone owners and 71 million tablet owners out there, according to comScore, who also says that mobile Internet use has finally exceeded desktop Internet use. When your prospects and clients are using mobile devices for more and more tasks, so should you, if you want to stay current. Smartphones and tablets, and mobile apps like Zillow’s enable you to stay in constant touch with buyers and sellers, and to create, gather, view, organize and share information more quickly and easily than ever before — at any time, from anywhere.
4. A CRM (customer relationship management) solution can help you generate, manage, and reach out to leads over time — all in a single powerhouse tool. Use it to assign leads to drip email campaigns to easily stay in touch and on their radar; store the information you've gathered on leads so that you can later customize your communications with them; automate tasks and workflows such as wishing a past client a happy birthday; automate the delivery of your e-newsletter; integrate with paperless transaction platforms to store, organize and share documentation. There’s so much more a CRM can do for you — but you have to use it on a regular basis.

Technology is designed to save time, labor and cost, but what you get out of any tool is what you put into it and how you wield it. Real estate technology can manipulate data to the nth degree, but it’s still on you to determine what information to keep and how you want to use it. Technology only helps run your business; it’s not the business itself — you are.