How To Convert Online Real Estate Leads (3 Reasons Why Real Estate Lead Conversion Is So Hard)
Is the secret to real estate lead conversion really just about frequency and speed?
Is the only thing that works is contact them within five minutes and if that doesn't work, follow up with them 3x every day for the next 12 days?
Is that really what real estate lead conversion is?
If speed and frequency were the secrets - why are real estate lead conversion rates so low? Accordingly to NAR, typical real estate lead conversion rate is 0.4% - 1.2%.
If you're struggling with your real estate lead conversion:
You've probably tried this speed to lead.
You've probably downloaded new ideas for scripts or copy templates that you can send as email or text.
You've looked at how you can build better rapport through something like sending a video via email or text.
Maybe you try to bump up your contact frequency doing something like ‘12 days of Torture’ on them.
I think the real question that we have to ask ourselves is if the above actually worked, why is there such a focus right now on hiring inside sales agents? ISAs.
It's the conversion of those leads that's hard now and you're probably tired of being an unpaid telemarketer doing it yourself, that's why teams are trying to hire inside sales agents.
That is their only job, that is their focus.
But for me, that's like hiring someone to grab a bucket and start bailing out water because there are holes in the boat instead of focusing on how we plug the holes in the boat.
Here are 3 reasons why your real-estate lead conversion is so hard.
They’re not your leads.
If you're getting your leads from Zillow or from some sort of aggregator platform, if you're getting your leads from a team leader or you're hiding behind some sort of weird brand, recognize that these are not your leads.
There's a major disconnect from the leads, the prospect and the consumer on the other side that doesn't recognize who you are. They don't recognize your name but they recognize Zillow, they recognize the team leaders’ name or their brand or they recognize the weird brand that you're hiding behind but they don't recognize you.
One of the main things that you need in order to convert a lead is trust and rapport.
Let's be real here, you don't have that, you have zero trust and rapport with this person, prospect, with this lead, with this person on the other side of the phone or screen. They don't recognize your name in the email, they don't recognize your phone number and they don't recognize your name in the voicemail. They might recognize Zillow or your team name or the weird brand name, but you have zero trust and rapport with them so you're fighting an uphill battle from the very beginning. It's like they're not even a lead.
There's just a major disconnect. It's basically like trying to convert a cold lead, you might as well be calling random strangers or going and knocking on random doors. There's really no difference! They don't recognize who you are.
And here's the reality…
It is difficult to get that alignment, connection and awareness that someone knows who you are. A lot of marketing people call it “Mind Share” and you don't have mind share with these people.
Someone else has mind share, Zillow, your team leader, you're weird brand name that you're using. You don't have it, they do! So you're struggling and you're starting from behind. It's not that it's just hard for you or for real estate agents, it's hard for even companies like Apple.
In a research study by UCLA professors Alan Castel and his colleagues Adam Blake and Meenely Nazarian asked more than a hundred students to draw the Apple logo from memory and here's the result…
While most of the students were confident they could do it, the majority of them were iPhone and Apple computer users, but only one person actually drew it correctly. Only seven people drew the Apple logo with three or fewer errors and when the respondents were asked to select the correct logo from a lineup of seven altered logos, only 47% picked the correct one.
There's so many things fighting for people's attention out there.
It's hard to get it and keep that mindshare, so no wonder it's hard to convert leads. It's not your fault that it's so hard to convert leads. You don't have a budget or the awareness of Apple. If they struggle to get that kind of awareness and if they struggle to be remembered to have awareness, then how are you supposed to get it?
I'll tell you the number one thing that you have to have is the leads need to be your leads. You need to be generating leads and not off of Zillow, not off of your team and not off of some weird brand name. The leads need to be connected to you, to your face, to your brand, to your name, to who you are and not someone or something else.
I have enough conversations with real estate agents to know, but they always say to me…
“I don't know how to generate leads”
“I don't know how to do this, that’s why I’m paying Zillow”
“I don't know how to generate my own leads”
So first thing is to take a look at the video on how we market listings.
And the next thing I'll share with you is when we decided to put our real estate group together. Cantrell Persinger, we knew that this was a big challenge, that this was a big problem for real estate agents especially agents on teams. We spent a lot of time, money and effort to develop our method of how we generate leads and how we help our agents generate their own leads and our conversion process.
You just don't have enough leads.
If you don't have enough people coming in and if you don't have enough people to contact on a regular basis, you can't expect great results.
In my business planning training, we talked about how you should have a minimum of 300 more likely 500 leads coming in a year. This just comes to too many real estate agents having a lackluster committed marketing strategy. They're relying too much on referrals or repeat business, they're relying too much on their sphere, they're relying too much on hope marketing, hoping that the one lead that they have or the one person that they met at an open house is going to buy. And that hope marketing... that doesn't work that well.
I speak to this from experience not just from coaching and training real estate agents but inside of our own business. When we reached our first 300 leads, we didn't see a lot of success and we didn't see the needle moving a lot. But now we have well over 3,000 leads in our database, you didn't stop at 300 and go, “Oh well. That’s enough.”
So even though we didn't see success at the first 300 we kept at it and now we're seeing momentum pick up, we're seeing appointments happen easier, we're seeing people reach out to us a lot easier and a lot more often.
You might be thinking to yourself “I don't have a budget like that”, “I don't have a budget to generate 3,000 leads” and I totally get that, but you have to start where you can start. Maybe you generate your first 300 leads and you get one closing off of that. And the secret though is to just do what you can, start where you can start, and do what you can and then reinvest that money back into your business, back into more leads, back into the conversion and back into the nurturing.
Out of Alignment
Let me show you what I mean by having alignment.
There's a bunch of things that could be in alignment or out of alignment, but just to keep this simple…
Let's say we have your mindset, your strategy, your tactics in your goals. For great conversion, all of this stuff would be in alignment, but if you have a certain belief and then the strategy you do is one way and then the tactics you do is another way and your goals are something else, you're out of alignment and this is not going to work for lead conversion.
You should be really specific. Let's say your mindset is you believe that you want to provide value versus volume, you don't need to do 300 transactions a year to consider yourself successful. Instead, you can do 30 and provide tons of value to those 30 clients and your strategy is one of providing value. That's maybe in alignment with mindset, so you provide lots of content and value into the marketplace for free.
But then your tactic is after you generate a lead, you're doing speed to lead or twelve days of torture on them, your tactic is out of alignment.
You've generated leads in a certain way but then they're feeling you approach them very differently. So your strategy, mindset, beliefs, goals, tactics and everything that you do need to be aligned otherwise none of this is gonna work.
Maybe you're a solo agent who’s struggling to generate enough leads to reach your goals or you're an agent that's on a team but you're tired of being an unpaid telemarketer trying to convert leads, check out my FREE Guide to No-Chase Lead Conversion, called AppointmentFlow Control.
Let's do a quick recap of the three reasons why it's so hard to convert real estate leads.
There's just a big disconnect from where the lead is coming in and who you are. You're getting them from Zillow or some other platform like that. It's not them against Zillow, it's just that it's hard to convert those leads because the person that's signing up is on Zillow, searching then signing up on Zillow and they have no idea who you are. The same thing can be said about getting leads from the team that you belong to or the team that you're on, this person signing up on that website is used to seeing that team leaders face in that name and then here you are, you're hiding behind a brand like your City Real Estate Group or your County Real Estate Group or whatever it is.
The way to convert leads easier is they have to know who you are from the get-go before they ever sign up, before they ever opt-in for anything. Do they know who you are? If they don't, it's going to be a real struggle.
You just don't have enough leads. If you think that having 50 leads here or 50 leads there and you're not consistent with your lead generation or your marketing strategy, it's just gonna be too hard to convert leads. You don't need tens of thousands of leads but you need more than 10, 20, a hundred or a couple hundred. You need more leads.
You're out of alignment. You're doing things that aren't in alignment with your mindset, with your belief system, with your strengths and how you really want to do business. These things need to be in alignment because it won't just feel weird for you or for the lead that you're trying to convert if the way that you're trying to convert them isn't the same way that you try to generate them, it's never going to work.
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