You’ll close only 1 percent of your Internet leads. One of the biggest reasons for this is that real estate agents don’t have the resources to properly qualify leads, and then market to those qualified leads.
No matter how you generated your leads, your leads’ value is closely tied to how much information you have about them. Integrating people data — the data we all share online — into your marketing and sales activities can be the difference between making the most of your leads and wasting 99 percent of them.
Below are four ways to use “people data,” all found online, to improve your marketing and sales.
1. Lead qualification.
You have one or two hours to contact a lead before he or she becomes cold. With such a tight deadline, prioritizing which leads to contact has a big impact on your sales.
To prioritize, you’ll need to understand who your leads are as soon as they fill out your lead generation form or arrive from a third party. The people data you can use to determine a new lead’s potential are job title, employer, age, location and education.
A few tips about qualifying your leads:
- Be careful with long lead generation forms that can hurt your conversion rate. Try testing different form lengths and questions to see how much information you can ask for without driving away leads.
- Use a lead enhancement service or a marketing platform with lead enhancement built-in to learn more about your leads’ profiles. These services (such as the company I work for, Pipl, or Clearbit) use a person’s name, phone number or email address to find and give you more information about the person (job title, social profiles, demographics, etc.).
2. Personalization
The most obvious use of people data is to personalize your interactions with leads. Personalized emails can see conversion rates as high as six times more than nonpersonalized.
So if you want to send optimized email campaigns, make sure to:
- Use the person’s name in the subject — it can increase open rates by more than 25 percent.
- Segment your mailing list based on the properties/topics they’re most likely interested in — this increases click-thrus by as much as 41 percent.
- Use a person’s location and job type to figure out the best times to send emails. The best hours and days to send a campaign depends on your audience.
- Segment your mailing list so you can send the most relevant content to each segment to increase click-thru rates and improve your relationship with your subscribers.
3. Ad targeting
Once you have a lead’s email address, you can do a lot more than just send an email.
Facebook lets you target ads and promote posts to particular people. You can target your posts or ads to your email list through Facebook’s Custom Audiences feature. This feature gives you another channel to stay visible and connect to your mailing list. Facebook ads are also relatively cheap, which makes this an inexpensive option.
Some tips for using Facebook ads:
- Custom audiences won’t match every email on your list to a Facebook user if the user registered with a different email on Facebook. You can use data services to find Facebook user IDs or try uploading phone numbers to get more of your list in your ad segment.
- News feed ads have much higher click-thru rates than sidebar ads.
4. Market research
It pays to stop and analyze your leads, customers and market every once in a while.
Your goal should be to understand better who responds to you, who is interested in certain types of content and what channels are best for different segments.
Some types of analysis:
- Look up your competition’s Twitter followers to see who they are, what they do, etc. If your competition has a Facebook page, simply search “People who like [page name]” in Facebook’s search box to see a list of people who like your competitor’s page.
- Build personas. Research your ideal leads so you can better target lead generation campaigns. Targeting empty nesters for ads to buy their home is a perfect example of building personas with people data.
In a high-touch business such as real estate, people data plays a big role in your marketing and sales. By using the tools at your disposal, you can engage with potential buyers and sellers much more efficiently.
Billy Attar is the head of marketing at Pipl. He’s addicted to marketing, everything tech and coffee. You can catch up with him on Twitter at @billyattar or LinkedIn.
