When you practice effective contact management, your business becomes easier to run and you’ll see your referrals grow exponentially. In this article I’ll discuss my top four tips for effective contact management.
1. Use a Real Estate Contact Management System
A real estate contact management system is essential for keeping yourself organized, staying in touch with prospects and clients, and being proactive and in-control. If you don’t have one system where you store all of your contact information, manage your active business, and keep track of your schedule, you miss out on referrals and repeat business because it’s easy for key details, activities, and appointments to fall through the cracks.
Consider this: the only tangible asset a REALTOR® has is their database. A Realtor making a good income every year with a well managed database could sell this database upon retirement.
2. Group and Segment Your Database
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In order to master effective contact management, you need to communicate with different groups of people in different ways. And in order to do this, it’s crucial that you group and segment your database. You need to be marketing to your contacts and sending different people (for example: prospects versus clients) different messages so your communications are relevant. Maybe you have some people in your database who you’ve worked with in your previous career. You would want to put those people into a special group so you could easily shoot them off a special email, for instance, announcing that you’re now a Realtor and highlighting your shared experiences working for ABC Brands.
3. Effectively Keep in Touch With Past Clients
Many Realtors spend a great deal of time and money with lead generation activities. Once they get the client and the deal closes, they often make the mistake of not adequately keeping in touch with them. This is the case despite the fact that it’s been shown to cost five times less money and time to retain a client than acquire a new one. Once a client has used your services and has been satisfied, it’s not hard to get them to refer you and use your services again. The key is to keep in touch and continue to provide value.
Your real estate contact management system will play an important role in this because it’ll allow you to schedule and manage your “keep in touch activities” for the year, such as phone calls, Client Appreciation Events, and your email marketing. You can even automate a lot of your communications with a good real estate contact management system and automatically send a professionally designed and written monthly e-Newsletter.
4. Nurture Your Leads
The reality is that there will always be buyers and sellers who are simply not ready to buy or sell right away. If you continue to keep in contact with them over time, ensuring that they remember you, you could win the client over another Realtor. A good real estate contact management system will have drip marketing plans designed for you and created to convert these leads into clients. Make sure you assign every lead you get to a drip marketing plan.
At the end of the day, practicing effective contact management pays off big time. And with the right knowledge and tools, it’s extremely easy to do.
