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Previously tilted heavily in favor of email marketing, OutboundEngine’s new app shifts its approach since Inman’s initial review.
The company has smartly evolved into mobile marketing, launching a quasi-omnichannel solution for iOS and Android that will help agents manage their web-wide persona, better vet leads and, as the company stated in a phone call, forget about their desktops.
The software offers managed, paid Facebook advertising, removing the confusion from how to balance budgets with audience targeting and the social network’s ever-changing ad-buying administration.
OutboundEngine offers three levels of ad budget, each offering a bit more than the one below it but all providing an effective campaign model. Agents can pay $99, $249 or $499 a month to have the company create and manage news feed display ads.
New leads generate quick alerts and a number of ready-made responses to ensure quick follow-up. There are new blocks of content that are specialized to the user’s market and delivered via a mobile, consumer-facing landing page.
Unlike a number of content marketing efforts, OutboundEngine isn’t streaming a tired, replicated library of listicles. Instead, it recruited a former content editor from a Keller Williams brokerage to lead a staff of content specialists to generate a range of business-focused and topical stories.
Luxury agents will find their customers are served well by the content team, too.
Also a part of the new OutboundEngine is online profile management, which some refer to as reputation management.
The terms are somewhat interchangeable, and they deal with how online reviews, search engines and online directories combine to ensure a company’s information is up to date and consistent across the internet.
The ultimate goal is to provide a solid foundation on which search engines can base credibility and feel confident when granting a higher ranking in search results.
What most of OutboundEngine does in this capacity is automated for the user. The agent’s role is to ensure the information is correct.
Contact import was also made more efficient in part through integrations with Contactually and Google, and more customer relationship management (CRM) partners are on the way.
Something not yet available but in the works is a feature that every CRM in the industry should begin to consider building: contact sunsetting.
The feature will alert agents to inactive or otherwise poor contact records and recommend that they be scrubbed from the database.
List value is rooted in quality, not quantity.
Agents should focus as often as possible on the most probable leads instead of worrying about when that person met at a middle school open house four years ago might finally need advice on which iBuyer to work with.
Current OutboundEngine users who haven’t transitioned to the app should feel confident that its UX (user experience) is intuitive enough to make switching easy, and new users on each platform will recognize a number of native OS assets and functionality.
This is an upgrade that’s conscious of its user-base’s technology needs and aware of how buyers and sellers want to interact with real estate agents.
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