September 16, 2020
Hassan Riggs
Take Our Quiz To Find Out Why Your Real Estate Leads Aren’t Responding To You
You’ve got the soft skills, people who meet you love you and your clients almost always leave you a rave review.
Of course, your online leads will love you too… if you can ever get in touch with them.
Working with online leads, or people in general for that matter is 3 parts science and 2 parts art.
Sure you’re going to need strong soft skills and the ability to make people feel comfortable quickly. But research and experience will still prove incredibly useful.
So let’s assume you’re a likable person and instead focus on the science of connecting with leads.
We know that 75% of buyers and sellers work with the first agent they talk to, according to NAR’s research.
So the very first (and arguably most important) objective you have when working with online leads is to get in touch with them. Even if they tell you they’re not interested, just getting a response is worth its weight in gold these days.
What we’re going to unpack today are the 4 primary reasons that online leads aren’t responding to you. Based on our own extensive experience as an ISA Provider used by hundreds of agents and qualifying thousands of leads.
Studies have shown that lead response rates drop by a factor of 10 in just 5 minutes after the lead registers online.
Simply put, that means your leads go cold within 5 minutes and you’re 10x less likely to make contact with them if you wait longer than 5 minutes to reach out.
This is a core principle of online lead conversion and it’s called “Speed To Lead”, the faster you get to a lead the more likely they are to respond.
It’s excruciatingly difficult to respond to every single lead that comes within 5 minutes though. So you don’t, instead, you get to them as soon as you can.
Unfortunately, in today’s landscape, ‘as soon as you can’ just isn’t fast enough. So by the time you’re reaching out the lead has left your website and has moved on to the next agent.
This slow response time is just one of the reasons you aren’t getting in touch with your leads.
Now we have to layer on availability.
Your leads don’t all respond to your ads between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM, right? Of course not, they become leads 24/7.
That means... you guessed it, you need to be able to respond to online leads at a moment’s notice 24 hours a day if you want to maximize your chance of connecting with and converting these leads.
Online leads who are searching for homes don’t care if you’re busy with other clients or finalizing an offer for an important deal.
They have needs. And they want you to meet those needs on-demand, and on their timeline.
In sports, there’s a saying that “availability is your single greatest ability”, the same is true for converting online real estate leads.
Your expert local real estate knowledge won’t matter if you are never available to share it with a buyer when she’s willing and ready to talk.
That logic also lends itself to the antithesis “unavailability is your single greatest liability”, food for thought.
Do you have any “dead leads” in your CRM or buried somewhere in your email’s inbox?
Of course, you do, who doesn’t?
And if we’re being honest with ourselves a large percentage of those “dead leads” we marked dead after making just one attempt to get in touch (to say nothing of the agents who make ZERO attempts and still have the audacity to blame the leads).
Don’t be embarrassed, we’ve all done it.
After all, Speed To Lead is the most important factor in determining whether or not you connect, right?
That’s true but if the MOST effective contact attempt you’ll make is the one you make in the first 5 minutes then what’s the second most effective attempt you’ll make?
According to a May 2020 Study, the number of attempts you make to connect with a lead has a direct impact on your likelihood of getting a response.
The study shows that of all the leads who will ever respond (accounting for fake numbers) only about 40% will respond on the first attempt.
As you continue to reach out and court the lead your chances of getting a response gradually climb, reaching a crescendo at 90% likelihood by the 6th attempt.
Meaning the second most effective attempt you’ll make is the 6th attempt! Print this section off and tape it on your wall the next time you consider discarding a lead after trying just one time.
Simply by being a little more persistent you can more than double (90% vs 40%) your chances of getting a response.
Take our quiz to Find Out Why Your Real Estate Leads Aren’t Responding To You. Then finish reading this article below to dive deeper into the core issues.
We are in the 3rd decade of the new Millenium; technology has reshaped the world we live in ways we never could’ve imagined back in the 90s.
We’ve seen the rise of massive tech companies in entirely new industries that would sound made up to our past selves.
As a result, the average American has become incredibly keen on the tech tricks businesses use to save time and money.
Now more than ever before people can tell the difference between text messages sent from a real person and an autoresponder.
And People prefer People!
We conducted an internal study in order to optimize our conversion rates and here’s what we found.
Leads (people in general) have become so isolated in the digital world that their ears perk up when they get the chance to speak to a real person.
The way we tested this was fairly simple; we added a simple phrase that only a real person would use to the intro line of our text messages.
The results speak for themselves!
We saw an astonishing 15% increase in response rate just by proving that there was a real person messaging them. And as we saw in our article on increasing appointment show up rates a small increase in conversion rates can have a massive impact on your bottom line.
What’s the magic phrase we used to prove we were real people?
It’s a bit complicated so you may want to write this down.
At the beginning of our texts when we say “Hi, this is Alex” we inserted the magic phrase in parenthesis so the new message reads “Hi, this is Alex (yes, a real person)".
Groundbreaking, I know!
The first milestone you want to reach when converting online leads is to get a response. The best way to do this is to ask frictionless questions.
Frictionless questions are questions that your lead can answer without even thinking.
By asking a question that your lead has to put even a tiny amount of thought into, you are creating friction for them. In order to get a response more often you want there to be as little friction as possible.
Think questions like:
These questions are great at producing a response because not only do they not require any thought, they also require very few keystrokes.
For instance, if you ask a lead how many bedrooms they need they have to tap their phone twice to respond. Once to click the number of bedrooms they need and again to click send.
This reduced friction will make it so much easier for your leads to answer, and the easier it is for your lead to answer the easier it is for you to move them further down the funnel.
You probably read this whole article thinking to yourself “That great and all but I just don’t know which (if any) of these reasons are really MY problem?” then you’ve got to take the quiz today.
Take our quiz below to find out why your real estate leads aren’t responding to you.
Just complete a few details about your current follow-up and it will let you know (with a high degree of accuracy) the number 1 reason that you personally aren’t getting in touch with your leads.
What you do with the results is up to you but we recommend you assess whether or not you are the best person to remedy that reason.
If you’re not, we’d love for you to check out Smart Alto.
We leverage real human ISAs around the clock to follow up with your leads within 2 minutes and convert them into15-minute phone appointments that we put directly on your calendar.
We put you on the phone with leads so your expertise can shine.
Take our quiz to Find Out Why Your Real Estate Leads Aren’t Responding To You.
The Smart Alto Appointment Setting System guarantees your team never misses another sales opportunity.