Getting More Valuations – Traffic is worthless without CONVERSION!
Winning more instructions is the biggest challenge for 99% of estate agents. .
As a result, many agents spend a fortune on digital marketing agencies and who-knows-what else – often with virtually no return on their investment. I recently had a conversation with an agent who had spent £2000 per month on AdWords and Facebook for 5 months, without a single valuation to show for it!
The problem is that having someone land on your website is a waste of time (and money!) unless you can get their phone number.
Many (dare I say most?) estate agent websites have the opportunity to do that a lot better.
A few have started already – and they’re stealing market share.
Which category are you in?
Take a moment to look at your website – does it have a property search function on the home page?
Does that highlight to homeowners how good you are at selling?
Does it give them a reason to pick up the phone and call you?
And don’t even think about excusing yourself by saying your site lets people Request a Valuation. Everyone has a “Request a Valuation” button on their site somewhere. No one ever receives instructions through them. When did you last fill in a form to ask a salesman to call you back and sell you something?
Anyone interested enough to fill in that form is going to pick up the phone to speak to you right now. They won’t fill in a form and wait until you’ve got a moment.
Luckily, getting more visitors to your site to submit their phone number through your site doesn’t need to be difficult or expensive. Here are a few tips:
- Get an Instant Valuation Tool. The best one on the market is provided by GetAgent. It’s brand new and they’re offering a 50% LIFETIME discount for early adopters. The valuations are ballpark, not perfect (a good excuse for you to offer a professional valuation), and clued up estate agencies using this tool have reported getting an extra 5-10 instructions per branch in the first couple of months using it. Leading blogger Sam Ashdown has even said that some of her clients get more business through valuation tools than any other channel.
- Kill the property search. It’s boring. Think about what will grab a vendor’s attention – how fast do you sell? What money do you get? How big is your investor database? Do you have a great deal on fees? Tie that up with a CTA (“Call to Action”) – “We have 500 investors waiting and get 5% above the asking price on average – call us on 0800 321456 to find out what we can do for you!”. That’s what you need front and centre.
- Offer some value. Put together a FREE eBook on something you are an expert on, but vendors aren’t (or pay someone on fiver a fiver to do it for you). Offer that on your homepage – “Click here for a free eBook on how to sell your home yourself!” – and require an email address and phone number before it can be downloaded. Perry Power has this (among other marketing strategies) down to a fine art – and it shows in the volume of instructions he and his team are winning!
- Target good traffic with social media and paid adverts. If possible, direct them straight to a converting page (like GetAgent’s instant valuation tool). Track which lead source converts best with Google Analytics and spend more money on that and less on the other stuff – it’s easy, free and works an absolute treat.
Follow up your leads properly. Calls are best, but if you’re too busy use Drip. It’s an awesome tool that lets you send a chain of emails at preset intervals to your leads. That means if you’re in touch with someone who’s not selling right now, you can add them to your Drip account and relax whilst Drip sends them a preset email every few weeks – maybe giving them ideas on how to prepare to sell their house, property market news and so on. That way, you can make sure vendors who aren’t quite ready to sell yet haven’t forgotten you when they’re ready to instruct!
A sponsored blog post for GetAgent.
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