Win More Listings by Lead Nurturing Home Seller Leads

Lead nurturing, in it’s purest form, is about building trust with potential customers that are not ready to buy the moment they make contact with your business. This is definitely true for the Real Estate industry with buyers and sellers.  Hubspot found that 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research). Knowing this, every lead you capture should be nurtured for the long term with the goal of building trust over time.

A home owners largest asset is their home and they are going to hire a professional that they trust with their largest asset. Whether it’s a form they filled out on your website, a property search capture or a home valuation landing page they entered their information to find out about the value of their home, the concept of lead nurturing starts here and applies to online seller leads.

Most home owners that you have captured and classified as Home Seller Leads are going to want to know the following things before they hire you to represent them as a listing agent…

• If you know what you are doing and if you are the right agent for them by engaging with your content.
• If other home owners/sellers have had success with you and your brokerage by reading customer stories and reviews.
• If you have the marketing resources and knowledge to provide the results the sellers and want and meet their goals.
• If what your services offer are a good fit for their plans and what they want out of selling their home, before they hire and list with you.

To put it in just a few words, a relationship needs to be built with Real Estate Seller Leads by nurturing them. In this post you will learn the 3 phases of the seller lead nurturing funnel. The power of quality content and pro funnel tricks like “accelerators” the power behind them and “decelerators” and other pro tips from my years of creating online Real Estate lead generation funnels for Seller Leads for Realtors.

SAY ALOHA TO THE SELLER LEAD FUNNEL…

With any lead funnel the main driver or body of the funnel is content. There are three different phases in the seller leads cycle, each one with it’s own message and conversation that helps to speak directly the the potential clients mind set and what they may be thinking during this process of getting ready to sell and getting ready to hire a listing agent.

These two thoughts intersect often and the best way to make sure that your name is still in the hat for the short list of agents to hire in the end of the home owners decision cycle is to help to provide information that is;

• Relevant to them
• Helps them to connect the loose ends of “What about this…?” “How do we…?”
• Provide them with valuable tools to use to help with their questions

Here are the three phases and stages of the seller lead’s mind set;

• Early Stage: “I’m just curious and doing research, I am not close to making a decision about hiring an agent or listing my home yet..”
• Mid-Stage: “I’m interested in selling, but I want more information to see if  XYZ Realty is the best choice for me.”
• Late Stage: “I think I’m ready to sign a listing agreement and get started selling my home with you.”

You can probably see that in each stage the seller lead goes through how they would benefit for the right message and content that speaks to them for each stage and mind set they are going through.  With the right content your touch points to the lead should be relevant to the mind set and provide value during the lead nurturing cycle.

Now here is where the seller lead nurturing content funnel comes in.

Best practices are to create content that will match the life stage or the stage that they are in during the buyers cycle. For this example I will call them buyers since they are buying your service in one fashion or another as they will become clients of yours eventually from Home Seller Leads for Realtors to listing clients that will become your sellers.

Let’s go over each stage of the buyer cycle for seller leads and the content funnel.

EARLY STAGE: “I’M JUST CURIOUS AND DOING RESEARCH, I AM NOT CLOSE TO MAKING A DECISION ABOUT HIRING AN AGENT OR LISTING MY HOME YET..”

Potential sellers at this stage are not ready for the hard sell, they are slower to engage and they are low commitment at this point. At this point they haven’t spoken with you or your sales team, they haven’t investigated who you are and what you offer as a brokerage service, they are just starting the journey and it’s best to greet them like you would in person with a nice casual tone that is non-salesy and start by educating them with helpful interesting content that would benefit them.

Essentially that means:

• Share The Best You Have-  Share your best knowledge that you have about the home selling process, you have experienced selling homes first hand and have most likely seen what not to do and what earns home owners the top dollar. Give away your tips and best practices with some short stories and help to inform the potential sellers how they can be successfully by doing what works in today’s market.  You may not think what you know is not very interesting, but to the home owners out there what you know might be very helpful and great insight for them.

• Step By Step- Take the home owner into the journey of selling their home step by step, share with them the first things first items that need to take place when getting ready to sell, show them how it’s done and explain what those steps are and how they can benefit with each step taken, break it down into easy to digest pieces that help them to understand the work involved on both sides as the agent and the seller. This will help them to understand what’s involved when selling and they will have a better picture of the entire process.

• Market Trends And Sales- Show your expertise about the market, by sharing the latest market stats and compare the past years market with today’s to help home owners understand if it’s a good time to sell. Go over the reports and explain what they mean in basic terms, give them a summary of the market with your stamp of approval and knowledge insight about what they should do and what the market is doing. This will help you stand out as the expert and help to back up your position as a listing agent that knows the market and what should be done for your clients.

Best practices for the top of funnel for Listing Leads for Realtors, is to go for 95% teaching and educating and about 5% selling yourself.  This keeps you top of mind, with out pushing seller leads away, this way when they are ready, they will think of you.

When? The best timing is always hard to nail down, however with Real Estate Listing Lead Generation the best practice is to adjust your emails and content to the sales cycle for the type of lead. For seller leads we suggest that you send out a series of 4 to 6 emails spaced out 5 days apart, using your best content. Start there and then play around with the best frequency of emails to send later on, once you get a larger amount of Motivated Seller Leads in your funnel.  The key logic that goes into this is that you want to be sending emails and connecting with your leads that you’ve captured at least every 2-4 weeks to help convert those leads into your sellers without pushing them away or annoying them by being too salesly or sending too many emails and risk losing them as a client down the line.

Now once your leads have received your content and have started to click open your emails and early stage content you then move them into your next stage of the seller lead funnel.

What does “move” mean? Moving the lead into the next stage of the funnel is means that after they have engaged with your first early stage content, then they fall into the next stage or you “move” them into that next stage of the funnel by sending them a emails in a shorter frequency. This means that your emails going out to them in the next stage will be shorter and quicker than before.

MID STAGE- “I’M INTERESTED IN SELLING, BUT I WANT MORE INFORMATION TO SEE IF  XYZ REALTY IS THE BEST CHOICE FOR ME.”

Potential sellers at this point are now more informed about you and your service, they are also more likely to be open about hiring you to sell their home.  They’ve received your emails, seen your face and brand message and have read your content and at this stage it’s best practice to introduce some social proof. What I mean by social proof is that you need to feed the natural craving any consumer has with any company, which is that they want to know who has had success with you and what results did they get.

The best content to send to them in this stage is:

• Customer stories from your past sellers and showcase the success they had with you and what their experience was.

• More in-depth content about the selling process, how you handle the sale of homes specially and what your marketing for homes looks like. This could be anything from a 5 minute video to a web page or 10 page Ebook going over your marketing and process.

• Reviews from Zillow or Trulia backing up the social proof that you are the right choice.

When To Send Them:  These mid-stage emails are going to be sent on a more frequent basis. Typically 3 to 4 days days apart is best to be fresh on the home owners mind. By now they have read your content and they are familiar with you, but now we need to step further into their bubble and make sure they trust and recognize you as the preferred expert. With these emails you are painting the picture of a marketing mastermind, you want them to start to picture themselves as a customer and let them feel the level of service they will get from hearing the stories of others you’ve helped and what that would look like for themselves.

LATE STAGE: “I THINK I’M READY TO SIGN A LISTING AGREEMENT AND GET STARTED SELLING MY HOME WITH YOU.”

Potential sellers are now at the point to be considered as warm leads and they are ready to be reached out to by you or your sales team.  By now there has been enough trust and recognition built up for you to approach the lead and ask for the business and most will be ready to meet and talk about their goals for their home.  The best practice is to prime the lead with invitation emails like these below;

• A promotional offer to receive a free staging consultation from a staging company you work with, or a free house cleaning when they hire you in the next month.

• A new market update or new CMA on there home with a message about wanting to talk more about the home values in the area.

• An invitation to an open house in the area or a new listing preview so they can meet with you and see how you market homes.

• A short text based email asking if ” they are still interested in selling their home?” The nine word email is a great way to spark a conversation. 

When to send them: These emails should be spaced about 2-3 days apart from the mid-stage emails so that the call-to-actions and ability to connect is higher while leads are still hot.

The seller lead funnel can be tweaked and customized in many different ways, but you want to make sure that you follow this guide as a way to start your process of nurturing leads.  Learning How to Get Real Estate Leads and then learning how to nurture them can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be.  If you are interested in learning how to capture Motivated Real Estate Seller Leads then start here-How To Get Listing Leads Using Facebook.