Keeping Up with Your Clients: The Magic of Consistent Text Campaigns
In real estate, communication matters. After all, it's the building block of any strong agent–client relationship. Of course, things aren't always so simple. There's a sweet spot between not sending enough messages to your clients and sending too many—and within that, each message should be valuable and keep from wasting the client's time. This is where best practices come into play. What does it look like? How and why should you keep in touch with your clients during the buying and selling process—and afterward? Let's dive deeper into why regular communications with your client sphere matters. Reason #1: It keeps you top of mind When you message your clients regularly, whether it's through text, email, phone call, or even snail mail, you're seizing the opportunity to remind them of your business. Keeping your name around means staying at the top of your past clients' minds, so they'll know who to look for when they're ready to buy or sell. The same goes for potential leads and current clients. With clients at any point in your funnel, it's important to make use of automated tools and platforms that let you stay in touch while also saving time—and support you with delivering high-quality messages that are engaging, memorable, and valuable. Stick around, and they'll find their way back to you when the time is right. Reason #2: It keeps you open and available For any of your leads and clients, staying open and available to any inquiries they may have will help immensely with furthering your credibility and reputation as an agent, as well as pave the way for a potential new deal to happen. When you use a platform that not only sends messages to your clients, but also gives them the option to message you back, you open a direct line that: Makes you feel accessible Makes it easy to contact you. Jumping into—or back into—the real estate game can be difficult and confusing, so clients will often opt for the easiest option. If contacting you isn't as easy as a text or email, they can be quick to move on to an agent or brokerage who is. All in all? Make sure it's easy for your clients to reach you for a conversation. Reason #3: It helps your clients stay updated With today's competitive market, listings are like gold. As a client, entering it can be overwhelming. As an agent, make sure that you're doing what you can to keep your clients updated and informed about their buying or selling journey in real time. And with today's technology, you can do things a lot faster than ever before. This can look like updates about: Listings that have just dropped Listings your clients might be interested in Listings they've already shown interest in And more. Take advantage of platforms that offer text updates for listings as soon as they hit the MLS. You can also customize how often these updates are sent, all based on your clients' preferences. When you make sure to prioritize keeping your clients updated and informed, they'll show their appreciation tenfold in return. To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.

Texting Real Estate Leads and Clients: When is it Appropriate?
Text messaging continues to become more commonly used as a way to communicate with real estate leads and clients — but is it always appropriate? While sending text messages to real estate leads and clients can be convenient, if it's done in the wrong manner it can be detrimental to a working relationship or even appear to be lazy and unprofessional. Real estate agents need to be careful when deciding when to send a text message instead of emailing or calling leads and clients, so we've compiled some pros and cons to help you decide. The Pros Quick Response Time: If your day gets busier than you'd expected and need to follow up with someone quickly, text messaging can be a great way to let someone know you'll get back to them as soon as you can. This way you can also set up a good call time that works for both you and your lead or client. Nurture New Relationships: Using different channels to get and stay in touch with leads can help you nurture your relationships. Text messaging can make it easier for potential leads to communicate with you if they aren't yet comfortable with a phone call. Texting can also be very helpful in setting up a call time, checking in or even keeping in touch after a closing. Keeping up with Millennials: The millennial generation is a very tech savvy group of future buyers who rely heavily on their cell phones and mobile devices for communication. So if you're not comfortable with texting just yet — we suggest learning how to as soon as you can! Utilizing this form of communication will help your business in the long run. The Cons Miscommunication: One of the major downfalls of text messages is that often times messages can be misconstrued or come off in the wrong tone of voice. Be careful in how you write your text messages to leads and clients in order to come off professional and positive. If you feel like something may be misunderstood over text, it's probably best to set up a call. Informal Communication: Text messaging is a very informal way of communicating with someone. When working with leads and clients, be leery of the times you are sending text messages as well as their content, so as not to come off unprofessional. This is most likely the biggest financial transaction in one's life and should be treated as such by a real estate professional. Finding a good balance between texting, emailing and speaking with leads and clients on the phone will help you nurture your professional relationships and grow your real estate business. To view the original article, visit the Zurple blog.

Text Etiquette: What's a Faux Pas in Real Estate Text Marketing?
Real estate agents use different means for communicating with their clients and potential leads. One such means is SMS text marketing. But not all of us are familiar with the regulations and the best ethical practices being set and established in SMS marketing. In this article, we will go through some of these practices. Is Cold Texting/Bulk Texting Illegal? Cold texting is indeed illegal if your clients don't give an explicit consent to be part of your SMS marketing campaigns. There are a couple of organizations you should be aware of that encourage healthy texting practises as well as legally enforce it. Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) — It controls wireless communication. Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) — Encourages all businesses owners to follow ethical SMS marketing strategies. Federal Trade Commision (FTC) — This U.S. government agency has a legal role in consumer protection. It handles all complaints that deal with media communication. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — It's a government agency that regulates different types of media communications. What Are the Important Legal Considerations? The FCC has issued rules under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that legally bind you to not send messages unless you have a consent from your clients. Please note that the FCC's definition of consent includes only written consent. Verbal consent is not enough when it comes to business practices. In order to create a solid, but at the same time, legal SMS database, you need to follow these rules. So how can you do that? Well, the easiest one is to have a website pop-up. Your customers scroll through your website and enjoy your content, and then they see a pop-up window that explains what will happen if they consent to become part of your subscriber list. Another one that is close to the concept we discussed above is the online form. As always, your clients should be fully aware of what it entails to be part of your subscriber list. A written and signed paper, even though it is not a typical way of doing things in a modern world, it still is valid in the eyes of FCC. Legal disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal advice. What Should You Text Your Real Estate Leads? As always, the golden rule of every marketing strategy is to first provide valuable content. To do that, you need to know what problems your real estate clients are facing. That's why we're encouraging you to take notes during your real estate sales conversations. This will allow you to personalize your texts. If you want to retain business relationships with your real estate clients, it's important to send personalized messages. One such message can congratulate your clients for their success and accomplishments. There is a chance you're following them on social media. It's also a good source for personalized text messages. If you want to send bulk messages without personalization, the same rules of sending valuable content first apply here as well. How Do You Follow Up on Text? First, you need to identify who you should follow up with. It can be prospects that never answered you, your clients who you didn't communicate with for quite some time, clients who might be interested in the property that recently became available on the market. The possibilities are endless. Depending on these types of clients, your follow-up will differ. We prepared some example scripts that might help you with following up: Hello, Your Client's Name, are you available for a quick call this Wednesday? Hey, Your Client's Name, we haven't chatted in a while. Are you still interested in selling your property? Hello, Your Client's Name, I remember you were interested in the property address. There are similar homes available on the market right now. Would you be interested in seeing them? As you see, the three examples we presented here have something similar: They are brief. They have limited amounts of information, which means clients will need to follow up with you to learn more about the prospects. They are establishing a clear call-to-action with a goal in mind. What Is Appropriate Texting Time? Depending on the nature of the message, the appropriate sending time will differ. For example, if you want to set an appointment with your real estate client, it should be at least a week in advance so your clients will have time to decide on an appropriate date. As for the reminder, it will be better to send the text at least one day before the appointment. Generally, it's recommended to send text messages during the work week, preferably the middle of the week, mid-morning or early afternoon. These are general guidelines that marketers should know, but to truly understand what time works better for your leads, we suggest doing A/B testing. By sending text messages a couple of different times, you will be able to determine what time frame works best for your business model. To view the original article, visit the Realtyna blog.

Texting: One of an Agent's Greatest Tools
It wasn't that long ago when most phone service providers enforced strict limits on text messages. Most users could send 500 or even just 100 a month. Now, such rules are unthinkable -- the average American sends and receives around 85 texts a day. With 96% of all U.S. adults owning a cell phone, virtually everyone sends and receives texts. What's more, the average text message is read within three minutes. Those facts are of great interest to relationship-driven industries like real estate. Seventy-five percent of consumers surveyed say they are okay with receiving texts from brands. With its astonishing 90% open rate, texting shows signs of giving email a run for its money as the marketing technique with the lowest costs and highest campaign ROI. If you're not using text marketing yet, it's not too late — but now's definitely the time to start! The Benefits of Texting for Real Estate Professionals Real estate is all about relationships. Once you incorporate it into your workflow, text marketing is a natural extension of that mindset. From leads to clients to former customers, all can benefit from and respond to texting. Let's consider some of the top advantages: 1. Texting is Personal The great majority of texts are legitimate, one-to-one communications from the people your leads genuinely want to hear from. When contacts opt in, they invite you into a much more casual and personal space than their email box. You, in turn, can speak to them with clarity and authenticity, making a real connection. 2. Texting is Responsive Real estate pros have long understood the faster you can respond to a lead's first attempt to reach out, the more likely you are to get an appointment scheduled. Texting allows you to answer others even faster than a phone call. Plus, you can do it without completely interrupting the flow of your busy workday. 3. Texting is Universal Consider the stats above — 96% of American adults have a cell phone. They don't need the latest fancy Apple smartphone to send and receive texts. Even the simplest phones with the most budget-friendly plans can generally receive unlimited texts. You never have to make any assumptions about your contact's technology. 4. Texting Uses Automation Effectively Some marketing techniques, like email, are a natural fit for automation. Others, like a phone call, had better be done manually. Text messaging falls somewhere between the extremes. While a personal text is often the best bet, you can automate certain "event-based" texts, and they will still feel perfectly natural. Text Message Marketing: From Beginner to Advanced If you use texts in your day-to-day life, you have skills that will serve you well in text marketing. For example: It is okay to use contractions, emojis, and even let a typo slip through if it fits your personal style Don't bombard your contacts with a lot of text messages without letting them get in a response Avoid texts late at night or before morning coffee unless it's an emergency for a current client Don't forget to check your own texts a few times a day — they are now part of your work life The key to text messaging is context. If you send messages only when it makes sense, you'll avoid having contacts opt out. Texting is a two-way street: your goal is to combine great timing with interesting content that will get recipients to respond more often. To do that, you need to know your clients well. Let's look at ideas for taking texting to the next level: Automate Your Initial Opt-In TextsTo stay on the right side of the law, it's crucial to ensure contacts affirmatively opt in for ongoing texts. You can automate this process using CRM data, ensuring that open house attendees and those who register for updates on your local listings receive an opt-in invitation right away — when they're most likely to consent. Make It Easy to Set Appointments by TextMany people prefer the convenience of text to the rigmarole of a phone call. Some people dodge phone calls to avoid high-pressure sales situations. By texting leads a link to a scheduling app, they can put themselves on your calendar in a low-friction environment. Ask Questions in Your TextsEvery time you get a response to a text, you open the door to extending that relationship. The best way to incorporate questions is to make them meaningful, like "What do you like most about the house you just toured?" Most recipients prefer to dash off an answer rather than risk seeming rude. DeltaNET customers have the opportunity to deploy text messaging campaigns with confidence from right within our high-performance, AI-driven real estate CRM. RE Technology readers can try it FREE for 30 days. To view the original article, visit the Delta Media Group blog.

Discover the Dos and Don'ts of Text Marketing for Real Estate
Over the last few years, Millennials have turned up in the housing market by the thousands leaving, many wondering what they want when it comes to real estate. The future is now, and Millennials are here: Pew Research found they've been the largest generation in the U.S. labor force since 2018. That same year, NAR said they were the largest cohort of homebuyers, which has continued to hold true so far. What does this have to do with SMS marketing?

5 Steps to Build Out Your Real Estate Mobile and Text Message Marketing Strategy
Marketing is getting tougher and tougher--there's no doubting that. One strategy you can consider is SMS marketing, the process of sending short text messages to your ideal customers in an attempt to engage them with your campaign and get them to convert. Even though average open rates for SMS messages beat email by a whopping 28%, your real estate company sells homes for a large price—unlike small-ticket items that can be purchased on a lunch break. So, how can you make text message marketing your biggest driver of website traffic, leads and sales? Here are the five steps you'll need to build out your mobile real estate marketing strategy, as well as two brands who are already killing it with their text messages.

Everything You Know About Open Houses Is About to Change
From its invention more than 100 years ago and until recent events, the open house has remained much the same. While agents rushed to provide virtual showings to fill the immediate void, "open houses" are starting to return, but they are not the same. In fact, everything you know about open houses is about to change again with an innovative new service: Open House Every Day. Randall Standard, CEO of VoicePad, who parlayed nearly 20 years of experience in the wireless industry into the creation of the VoicePad platform, has applied his penchant for innovation to creating a new kind of open house. Open House Every Day is safer for sellers and one that buyers can schedule from the curb. And it asks this basic question: Why wait until Sunday? And while Standard admits he didn't invent the concept of holding an open house every day of the week, the new out-of-the-box service he is offering real estate agents is innovation and iteration at its finest. The result is a solution tailored to our times that can help agents and teams win more listings. How it works Open House Every Day is driven by the same well-proven call-to-action process that VoicePad has perfected for its core platform. Standard notes that for all real estate tech, great ideas are defined by the processes behind them. "Good processes always make their way to the bottom line," he says. "Open House Every Day has taken a good call-to-action message and improved it with an exceptional process." Like all traditional open houses, it begins with the yard sign, which is amplified in online listings and social media posts. VoicePad provides an agent with a custom, text-enabled phone number for the agent's Open House Every Day yard sign or yard sign hanger. When a potential home buyer calls the phone number on the sign, up to 10 agents' mobile phones will "ring" simultaneously. This assures that someone is available to take a call. The first available agent to answer the phone gets introduced to the potential buyer. Agents called are limited only to those the listing agents know and trust to show the listing. When an agent's phone rings, they immediately know it's an open house lead calling about scheduling a showing — so the call gets answered. The system delivers the potential buyer's contact details to the agent who was first to accept the call. The system also automatically assigns the caller to the agent in the system's CRM. The Open House Every Day mobile platform allows the agent to schedule the appointment instantly with the buyer, offering available times that are pre-determined by the agent and the seller. The dealmaker feature The Open House Every Day yard sign has a dealmaker feature: an auto-scheduler via text. With millennials comprising a growing share of home buyers, this text feature stands apart in the Open House Every Day offerings. The mobile web schedule interface is attractive, intuitive, and very easy to use. A potential buyer texts the keyword "Open" to the agent's Open House Every Day number. The buyer gets a return text with available showing times. The location of the request is geo-located, so an agent can see where the showing request was initiated. Listing agents control appointment availability as well as the last appointment time of the day, all from their mobile phone. Potential buyers are prompted for additional information (best phone number, name, and email address) to complete the scheduled request. This information is collected and added to the appointment request notification. It just might be the safest open house ever An additional — and essential — benefit to agents using Open House Every Day is the enhanced level of security and safe viewing that it provides. Because of how the process is designed, an agent or team can limit the number of people visiting the home to one client at a time. Safety is increased as agents can vet potential buyer candidates before they enter their client's home. The automatically captured contact information can run through agent safety systems, ensuring the protection of everyone involved. Open House Every Day can also optionally be set up to record agent-client phone conversations automatically. The voice prompt alone is likely to deter someone with evil intentions: It notes, "This call is being recorded for safety and training purposes." Consumer-focused Open House Every Day addresses the elephant in the room when it comes to the "why" when buying any real estate technology: It makes home buying and selling easier for consumers. "Agents and teams suffer from tech fatigue," Standard says. "But agents and teams still desperately want technology that significantly improves the consumer experience while keeping more income 'in-house.' It's also an excellent way to generate additional referral income from agents who show your listing." Agents can win more listings Open House Every Day is available at a flat rate of $39 a month. That makes its benefits-to-investment ratio remarkably attractive. Agents can offer a better open house for sellers as it maximizes the exposure of their home. It's better for agents because it eliminates wasted time that comes with house-sitting. Agents can win more listings by offering sellers what nobody else will: "an open house every day." Agents receive the best leads as the system is designed to capture ready-to act-home buyers. The auto text feature gives consumers — and especially millennials — what they want, when they want it. Plus, that text feature captures contact details automatically and delivers it to the agent's CRM. And Open House Every Day follows the rules of real estate. It can filter out buyers who are represented by another agent — because friends don't hand out buyer leads when they already are working with another agent. Open House Every Day asks the caller if they are an agent or represented by an agent. With Open House Every Day from VoicePad, leads can be answered in real-time, helping customers avoid what they dread most: voicemail. With Open House Every Day's "simul-ring" technology, buyers' calls are answered by an agent, which is what buyers want. Standard says early adopters have found another way to leverage Open House Every Day by using it on existing listings that are not selling. "It's a great way to avoid a conversation about a price reduction, refreshing an otherwise stale listing." This can be the go-to option when an agent's digital strategy fails. Open House Every Day is today's way to hold an open house: it's better and safer than ever. The days of sitting an open house while juggling groups of prospects touring all at once apparently are gone, but most agents will tell you that's a good thing.

How to Turn 'No' into a 5-Figure Commission
Anyone who works online leads knows it takes skill to turn a property inquiry into a potential client, let alone a commission-earning deal. Texting only makes things more difficult, with no assurance of a timely response and no way to rely on body language to see if a connection is really being made. Difficult, but, as San Diego-based real estate agent Steven Wener recently proved, not impossible.

How to Use Texting as Part of Your Lead Follow-up and Nurturing Strategy
It used to be that the only way to instantly follow up with leads was to pick up the phone and call them. Then, email was introduced to the scene. Many homeowners preferred getting emails from real estate agents over phone calls because they could decide when to read the email and how they wanted to respond. As time went on, email inboxes became inundated with tons of unwanted email messages from all kinds of companies, lowering open rates and making email much more difficult to succeed with. Enter text message marketing. Not only do text messages have a 97 percent open rate, but if you are effectively sending them to your best prospects, you will close more business. So who are these best prospects? What is it you want to send them to get them to become clients? Today, I'm going to cover this and give you some best practices to ensure you crush it and convert more leads.

Use These 3 Text Message Pick-up Lines to Land Your Next Real Estate Appointment
Real estate prospecting online can generate plenty of leads and potential clients, but only the most successful real estate agents take this lead generation tool to the next level by using text messaging to land appointments. In today's world, texting has become a regular form of communication, so it's important to utilize this in order to connect and communicate with clients in the most convenient way. Use these three text message pick-up lines to land your next real estate appointment.