Understanding the Basics of Lead Conversion for Real Estate Agents

There is no magic bullet to lead conversion for real estate agents. There is also a lot that you might not know either. What is a conversion anyways? What is the difference between leads and contacts? How do I make sure I am getting a return on my marketing investments? I’m glad you asked and it’s actually a lot simpler than you probably think.

What Conversions Exist for Real Estate Agents?

First, let’s clarify what conversions exist for real estate agents or any other small business marketing strategy. I like to group conversions into three types:

1. Unknown to Contact
2. Contact to Warm Lead
3. Lead to Client/Buyer

What is an Unknown to Contact Conversion?

Unknown to contact conversions usually happens when someone is coming through the top of the funnel in lead generation campaigns like newsletter signup. This allows you to market directly to people who are interested in hearing from you and could be potential buyers in the future. Pretty simple and helps build your contact list for automated email campaigns and nurture campaigns. Especially in the real estate world, the bulk of your contacts come to you as referrals, so it’s especially important to increase word of mouth referrals to help fill the top of your funnel.

What is a Contact to Warm Lead Conversion?

Turning your contacts into warm leads is the first step to making a sale. This means that you are targeting a specific person or demographic to get them interested in your services. The process usually involves a call to action to get the contact to fill out a form or to contact you directly through email or phone. I’ve seen contacts get nurtured for several years with automated emails and drip campaigns before converting into a warm lead. You can also use social media to nurture these contacts too. It can be a long cycle when dealing with real estate or any other business and you have to be patient. Obviously, if you see that a specific lead list or lead generation technique is giving you a lot of bad leads you need to rethink that marketing campaign, but you usually have to give it several months of testing before determining this. This post has a lot of great ideas on how to make sure the emails you send are actually working to convert these contacts into warm leads.

What is a Lead to Client/Buyer Conversion?

Warm leads are where your sales process begins. The lead becomes warm by contacting you through one of your marketing campaigns and shows interest in your services. This can be as simple as a form being filled out or a phone call generated. As with any lead generation strategy, it is up to you to convert them, and it is up to you as a real estate agent to decide if the lead quality was good or bad through your marketing campaigns. That being said, the key is making sure you are targeting the right people and then maximizing the potential of every lead by nurturing them through automated emails, retargeting, social media or other marketing campaigns.

What’s a Conversion Funnel?

A conversion funnel is how a lead flows from unknown to a home buyer or client. It’s a simple visualization of the lead process explained above.

How Do I Track My Conversions?

There are several tools out there to help you track conversions. Google Analytics is probably the most widely used for top of funnel reporting but to track your warm lead to home buyer conversions you generally need a CRM or some good spreadsheet skills. Google Analytics is free and a good place for anyone to start tracking their conversions. Google has done a good job with their online documentation to help you get started and setup.

So what’s the Real Deal with Conversions?

Now that you know the different conversion levels involved in your marketing funnel you know the real deal behind marketing and the numbers that should drive your real estate agency. Tracking and knowing the different levels are important in getting a return on your investment (ROI) in marketing. Actually, I just have my next blog post idea for you, so keep coming back to see how to track ROI and maybe I can even provide a template to help you track your conversions better.