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Takeways:
- Email marketing remains powerful if leveraged correctly.
- Many industry-favorite CRMs can generate leads, but not evolve them.
- The industry needs to continue focusing on data as a sales driver.
The pitch
Zurple is a lead generation and cultivation solution.
Platform: Web, browser-agnostic.
Ideal for: Agents and teams comfortable with the concepts of digital marketing.
Top selling points
- We got this: Zurple allows agents to choice between personal or personally automated follow-up.
- It’s watching: The software consistently monitors how prospects interact with your listing data.
- Land ho: Landing pages can be created for multiple submarkets and pay-per-click ads.
Things to consider
Zurple’s highest and best use is its Conversations Plus edition, which relies heavily on connection with Google advertising and responsive IDX websites.
The close
Zurple is all about data.
Thankfully, you don’t have to know anything about that.
Because underneath all that big data, Zurple is merely orchestrating for its users a time-honored, proven marketing strategy.
It starts with pay-per-click advertising. Account representatives help you devise a plan, offer the best keywords, test and launch.
Ads send shoppers to any number of landing pages you have built. These are sharp, effective capture pages that lead directly to clean, image-heavy listing pages, translated from data on your IDX account.
Once a lead’s information is captured, the big machine gets churning.
Then there’s no slowing it down.
Zurple isn’t about remembering birthdays or your prospect’s golf handicap; it’s not trying to be a CRM (customer relationship manager).
Yet once a lead is captured, Zurple is pure sales. It reacts quickly, knowing what to say and when to say it.
Using data on how a prospect interacts with your listings, Zurple conducts its own email marketing campaign. But don’t call it drip marketing.
(Can we do away with this term?)
Based on lead activity, such as a sudden flurry of image views or increased attention on a particular ZIP code, Zurple zaps an alert account holders, suggesting that it’s time to act.
Agents can choose to respond personally or allow Zurple to run with it.
Its email messages are written by an in-house marketing team and enhanced with current market data or a specific reference to the property.
Zurple backs all of its messages with extensive A/B testing, the act of testing different message content for effectiveness.
This ensures that each message being sent was honed over time to be as attention-grabbing as possible, further capitalizing on the immediacy of the lead’s interest.
As the database is populated, Zurple users find themselves entrenched in a living, breathing sales entity.
In essence, you know how Batman turned every mobile phone in Gotham into a sonar device to track down the Joker in “The Dark Knight”?
That’s what’s happening here.
Unlike a CRM, where an 11-month-old lead typically dies on the vine, forgotten about in the pursuit of freshly blossomed leads, contacts in Zurple are perpetually attended to.
The software reacts at the slightest sign of a pulse, letting users know a checkup is in order.
Interacting with Zurple is done via an uncluttered back end.
Leads are categorized by behavior, filtered by lead source and can be tracked by their latest website visit, property clicks and communication.
Every email you’ve exchanged is recorded and compiled and used as a resource in creating the next one they receive. It’s all bound together.
Pay-per-click advertising is a sore spot for many agents.
They either don’t buy it or claim people don’t click on them.
To an extent, that’s true. No one clicks on the ones not targeted at them. A well-written paid search result is worth every penny. So is the landing page it requires to be successful.
My view on Zurple is that users need to fully commit. Run the campaigns, build the landing pages.
What I find so compelling about this software is that behind all the complicated algorithms and big data, it’s nothing more than old-school, research-based advertising: Find your best possible audience, craft a message, test it extensively, then run the campaign.
Then do it again.
Is Zurple something you’d consider implementing? How do you feel about PPC advertising? Let us know in the comments.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
