If you’ve been practicing real estate for a while, you know that your most valuable leads and customers come from referrals.
Milking referrals is one of the best marketing strategies that agents and brokers can take advantage of because these sources of new clients are essentially free and work well.
Building a good referral channel comes from having great customer feedback, but not a lot of agents know how to take advantage of customer feedback and turn it into a successful, sustainable referral marketing strategy.
Here are a few ways you can get customer feedback and turn it into organic referrals.
Survey your customers for feedback
If you’re like most real estate practitioners, surveying your customers isn’t at the top of your to-do list.
But the truth is that surveying your customers is an excellent way to start engaging with them and show them that you genuinely care.
With simple survey questions, you’re able to narrow down what your customers think about your service, what you can improve on and their experience using your real estate services.
With the responses and data, you can segment a list of customers who truly value your service and ask them for referrals because those are the ones who are more than likely to recommend you to their friends and family.
Most surveys usually receive a low response rate, but this isn’t the case with short, one-click surveys.
Surveys featuring single questions embedded within your email can receive a 75 percent or higher response rate.
Use Net Promoter Scores to gain insight
The Net Promoter Score has been around for a while. Enterprise companies — airlines, software makers and the like — use it on a regular basis to gain insights on customer satisfaction.
The NPS is a survey that asks one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend XYZ to a friend?”
The person answering this survey can choose a number between one and 10. The people who select 10 are your promoters or advocates.
The ones that select seven or eight are your passives, and one through six scores are the ones who are dissatisfied customers.
[Tweet “The people who select 10 on your NPS surveys are your promoters or advocates. Ask for referrals. “]
As an agent or broker, you want to take the ones who are selecting nine and 10 and ask those for referrals.
At the same time, you want to take the detractors (one through six) and personally reach out to them to see how you can improve your service.
If you’re already using a tool to create one-click surveys, you also have the option to create a Net Promoter Score survey within the platform.
Create testimonials
It’s no secret: people tend to follow others like them. Marketers call it social proof: when we see lots of others doing something, we assume that that’s the correct behavior.
One of the best ways to get more referrals is by having great testimonials. Imagine a typical conversation with a potential lead who asks you about who you’ve worked with in the past.
You can mention someone that you’ve worked with, enjoyed your service and quote their testimonial on what they thought about your service.
[Tweet “One of the best ways to get more referrals is by having great testimonials. “]
This is an excellent way to take advantage of the customer feedback that you received and put it to use. This doesn’t necessary need to be a testimonial over the phone. It can be from a survey or personal email.
To sum it up, customer feedback is an excellent way for you to drive more referrals and help you expand your real estate business.
Wilson Peng is the founder of YesInsights , an all-in-one customer feedback platform. You can follow him on Twitter.