Learn How to Retain Past Real Estate Clients
The real estate industry is one of the largest industries in the world, with a value of $50 trillion in the United States alone. As a real estate agent, there are plenty of opportunities to help your business grow, but you’ll need to know where you’ll get the most profit.
By increasing your business’ retention rate by only %5, you’ll be able to grow your revenue between 25% to 95%, and that’s a massive growth. However, increasing a business’ customer retention is one of the main challenges in the industry. Usually, when a client finds their home, they won’t reach out to their real estate agent again for years. That is if they ever reach out again at all.
With the increased competition, you want to do all it takes to acquire and retain a loyal customer who can also refer your business to others looking to buy or sell a home in the future. So how do you increase customer loyalty and revenue? Below we’ll share the top 5 customer retention strategies in real estate to improve client retention and skyrocket your growth.
1. Personalize your Interactions with Customers
Human beings react more positively to personalized interactions, whether online or offline. That’s why you’ll need to focus on creating lasting relationships to guarantee client retention.
Get to know your customers
To offer them a more personalized experience, you need to get to know every new customer before you try to sell them. Don’t explain the details of what you want or what your business can do for them yet. First, ask them about their expectations from buying or selling their home and their ideal case scenario. Especially if they’re home buyers, you’ll be able to offer better customer service if you get to know their lifestyle and their family. This will paint you a picture of what they want now and what they might want in the future.
Get involved in the community
Participating in community events is a great way to get to know potential clients and have them get to know you. Community events are all about creating ties and improving your customer interactions.
Reach out for special occasions
Send them a thank you letter after buying or selling their home with you. This is an excellent opportunity to leave a lasting reminder of your relationship. If they purchased a home from you, send them a housewarming gift a few weeks later. Another thing you can do is create a habit of sending holiday or birthday cards to past clients. This way, you’ll stay top of mind.
2. Meet your Customer Expectations
To meet your customers’ expectations, you first need to know them, and that’s why the previous strategy was so important. Unmet expectations often send home buyers and sellers away on to the next business.
Keep communication channels open.
Even if they expressed their expectations at the beginning of your interactions, expectations might change along the process. Clients don’t always know what they want, so you have to pay attention to verbal and non-verbal queues that might tell you that the client is getting a change of heart. After showing a home, reserve a few minutes to get customer feedback. Some clients will tell you right away, while others might take a few days to speak their mind. Always keep your communication channels open.
Tackle disappointments as they happen
Keeping your communication channels open will help you find out whether a client got disappointed in the course of doing business with you. You’ll need to be able to adapt to your client’s needs and create ways to bridge any gaps. Follow up to ensure customer satisfaction. If your client is happy, your customer retention rate will be too.
Timely communicate your business’ values.
It is also best to communicate your business values and processes before doing business. Clear messaging is an essential part of any customer retention strategy. It will help home buyers and sellers make informed decisions, thus, minimizing or preventing disappointments.
3. Stay on their radar
Retaining customers successfully involves a lot of following up. This is tricky, as you’ll need to follow up often enough to stay relevant, but not too much so you would get annoying. You would have to find the right frequency to offer the best customer experience. The good news is that follow-ups can be automated. Once you find your rhythm, you can create a follow-up schedule and generate feedback about your services.
Ask your customers for quality feedback, and do not be ashamed to receive negative criticism because it will help your business improve.
Social media platforms are great for staying top of mind. Once you know your customer, you’ll know what kind of content to include in your digital marketing campaign. Potential clients will want to get relevant information that will help them make the best decisions. Videos are the most popular and most effective at retaining their attention. So don’t be afraid to stand in front of the cameras.
4. Create a loyalty program
Having a have a solid referral program will help you grow your business. It will motivate current customers to come back again and again. New clients coming from referrals are also more prone to referring their own friends. This will help you grow your network and strengthen your ties in the community.
Treat customers as investors.
They are not only home buyers or home sellers. Every existing customer is also a potential investor. If they had a good experience with you, they will want to renew their house or interior in the future or put some of their savings into real estate.
As a real estate agent, you can educate your customers about real estate investment. You can become their go-to source of information about new opportunities in the area. This is also a great opportunity to leverage your social media presence to become a thought leader in your community.
Earn their trust
But for them to go to you as their primary source of information about real estate investment, you’ll have to earn their trust. You’ll need to engage with potential clients and explain all the possibilities they can explore with your business.
Don’t use complicated or confusing language. You want to explain clearly that you have their best interests at heart and outline how they can have a great experience with you. This is where you can use customer stories from past clients to earn their trust.
5. Invest in Latest Real Estate Technology
You might be thinking, who has the time to do all this? The answer to that question is technology. There are plenty of options to automate systems and ensure nothing slips off.
The real estate industry has various automated technologies that simplify operations and helps with client acquisition, customer support, and of course, client retention.
Simplify Customer Interactions
You can use Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) to keep tabs on all your customers and their journeys through your sales funnel. This will streamline all your customer interactions and make your sales efforts more effective.
You can also leverage your website and digital presence to offer your customers up-to-date information on everything related to real estate and to create compelling calls to action. You can even use your CRM to trigger discount offers to the contacts that are drifting away to draw them closer to your business.
It is all about providing customized services based on the needs of each of your customers.
Generate Quality Leads and Leverage Automation
But before you can retain a customer, you will need to attract one. You can reach out to the right people at the right time with an automation tool like Parserr. Once they are in your pipeline, you can nurture that relationship by putting them in the perfect email marketing campaign that will bring value to them. But as you already know, once they become your customers, the job doesn’t end. You can continue using Parserr to stay on your customers’ radars by sending them timely reminders of investment opportunities and personalized messages on special dates.
Creating meaningful customer interactions will make your customers feel valued, which ultimately increases referrals, and business opportunities and generates growth and revenue for your business.
If you are struggling to retain your real estate customers, we can help. Contact Parserr today for more customized approaches to get more bang for your buck.
