This is pure spam, as far as I know, completely unsolicited. I read it and loved and now I’m sharing it with you:
Here’s a web-based version, if you’re having trouble reading it.
I read this as Harrah’s-style database marketing at its best: I’m offering you an incentive to sign up to be touched at your natural buying points. That’s a mutually-reinforcing loyalty, with the merchant, of course, taking care of the up-keep for the relationship.
The issue: How to translate it to real estate. It’s not enough to have an offer. Free moving boxes are a one-off freemium, and what you want are regular reasons to touch your people.
Richard Riccelli has a great idea for synergistic offers, but you’ll have to use your imagination to retool it for real estate. He suggests giving a free magazine subscription as a freemium. For us, it might be Dwell or Cottages. In your market, it might be your local city mag. The challenge is turning the offer into natural, organic touch points. One solution might be to feature something from the magazine in your monthly newsletter. Another might be simply to call your subscriber clients to talk about issues raised in the latest issue.
A comps search is a way to stay in touch with past buyers. These were a lot more fun when prices were going up, but it’s still a nice way to stay in contact. I’m assuming everyone knows what this is: An MLS-based search of stone comps to the buyer’s home, with email alerts going to them and to you every time something changes. They get to see what’s going on in their hyper-hyper-hyper-local market, and you get a golden opportunity to talk them every time a comp is listed or sold.
What else? I wish we could have a couponable event every four to six weeks, like SuperCuts, but what other things can we do to create pull-based relationships that give us natural, organic opportunities to stay in front of our clients?
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Joshua Keen says:
Though not couponable…defintely a regular way to stay in touch:
homeminders.com
November 17, 2008 — 10:24 am
Greg Swann says:
> Though not couponable…defintely a regular way to stay in touch: homeminders.com
Very cool. I’ve been playing with WP-Mu. We’ve talked about using it to do hyper-local weblogs on a very granular level — by neighborhoods, for example, or by condo communities. This link leads me to think in terms of weblogs for individual home buyers… 1322WestVermontAve.BloodhoundRealty.net.
Very interesting.
November 17, 2008 — 10:47 am
J Boyer Morristown NJ says:
Hi Greg,
A comps search for past home buyer clients is a great idea that I have looked at for better than a year now. The question for me switches to is there a better alternative to Topproducer’s Market Snapshot at $79 a month.
November 17, 2008 — 11:45 am
Todd says:
“What else?”
Bind an event, at a physical location ( which I guess for real estate would be an open house? ) with people’s GPS enabled phones.
Redeeming the coupon is just a matter of sending a text message from an iPhone or G1 while inside the open house – that way the agent knows for sure they were there, looking at the house.
November 17, 2008 — 11:55 am
leanne finlay says:
Other than the overused word ‘organic’ well said :-)!
I’m going to replace George Carlin’s 7 dirty words with a list of 7 words I never want to hear again, starting with paradigm and organic!
November 17, 2008 — 1:52 pm
Mark Madsen says:
So many real estate and mortgage professionals view marketing as a one-time attempt for the first client vs a relationship building exercise.
As a lender, we can work with our current database and find opportunities to help past clients by restructuring their mortgage, letting them know of current neighborhood home values, and reminding them to update their credit fraud watch through the bureaus.
This tool works well for us: http://www.topofmind.com/marketing/suREFIre.cfm”
November 17, 2008 — 2:45 pm
Craig Ernst says:
Hi Greg,
In addition to the ideas mentioned above, starting either a paper newsletter or an email newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with clients. The problem is that creating them is time-consuming and most of the pre-done ones available commercially are rubbish.
Doing a complimentary magazine subscription is a great idea, and bydesignpublishing.com actually offers some brandable options.
The biggest thing to remember is that most people, unless they’re currently in the market to buy or sell a home, are not terribly interested in reading about real estate (information related to their own home’s value being the exception).
So, one of the keys, I think, is to provide them interesting home-related information that’s not specifically about buying or selling real estate.
November 17, 2008 — 3:25 pm
Barry Cunningham says:
in a few weeks you’ll see a promotion of mammoth proportions that you can feel free in duplicating.
One of the benefits of having a marketing background and being in real estate is the knowledge that maybe 90% of your competition or MORE has no earthly idea as to how to market, the rest either have no money to do so, or choose to do what everybody else does and then they say marketing doesn’t work. Gotta love the real estate business!
November 17, 2008 — 3:29 pm
Paul Dunn says:
I love the idea of a haircut reminder email. For me, I know it’s time for a haircut when my wife tells me I look more like I’m living in the ’60s as opposed to being born then…
In the mortgage and real estate businesses, our purchase frequencies can be sporadic at best. We can have a good idea of how often people tend to purchase new property.
Unlike a haircut, which is pretty much on a regular basis, our business needs to keep a position in the minds of our database for when the “event” that triggers the transaction happens.
November 17, 2008 — 3:48 pm
Chris Brown says:
mark beat me to the punch, i recently reviewed the surefire program by top of min networks, and it is slick. sends automated emails out every 90 days with all the recent sales around their home to allow them to estimate value. Need a CMA to get a nailed down number, but if they call me, as a lender, i can get them in front of one of MY agents to do just that… other cool mortgage stuff, but i don’t want to roll over the conversation here.
Chris the implementer
November 17, 2008 — 3:50 pm
Todd E. Scott says:
Great discussion happening here. As the director of marketing for Supercuts, I can assure you that this was not spam, as Supercuts does not purchase email lists. The people that received the email shown here had, at one time or another, previously signed up for the haircut reminder program at Supercuts.com. This email was composed and sent because we made a few fundamental changes to the way we approached the program (now approaching a decade in operation):
1) We wanted customers to have control over how often we reminded them and sent them a coupon
2) We wanted them to be able to choose the location to which they wanted to be reminded to visit. The coupon they receive is then customized to be usable at that location only — and only for two weeks from the time the coupon is first accessed.
3) We wanted customers to confirm for us how they wanted to be contacted so that we would have a definitive list of who wanted to be contacted for haircut reminders ONLY and who would allow us to contact them outside the confines of the haircut reminder program. So far, approximately 90% allow us to contact them both ways.
November 18, 2008 — 2:34 pm
Greg Swann says:
Hi, Todd. Thanks for coming here. As I said, I think it’s a very cool promotion.
Here are a couple of things I thought about, and others here might have other ideas.
First, I would love to see a bar code on the coupons. That way, you can scan and see who is actually following through. Moreover, you can then schedule the next coupon to the actual date of the haircut. I think guilt over accumulated untapped opportunities is a disincentive to act — as silly as that sounds — so if people aren’t using the coupons, you need to do something different to get them back in the game. And, as with Harrah’s, when someone repeatedly does what you want them to do, you should give them a special reward to reinforce your shared idea of loyalty.
As an A/B test, you might try less scary-looking models in the photos on the coupons. I’m coming to SuperCuts for a $15 haircut. If you promise me that I’ll come out looking like a Metrosexual Vampire MBA, I’m going to GreatClips.
Utterly cool past-client touch strategy, all that notwithstanding.
November 18, 2008 — 7:50 pm