The biggest challenge in industries such as real estate is figuring out how to keep a productive dialogue with past clients during the down time. After all, there may be long gaps between real estate sales or rental changes. However, knowing that a significant portion of your business will likely come from repeats and referrals, it is paramount to find ways to stay in touch with your clients and, even more importantly, to find the right things to say to stay relevant and helpful.
What Matters To Your Clients?
The first piece of advice is always to stay in touch with your clients. Easier said than done of course–because while you can certainly send them all kinds of messages and information, that doesn’t mean they will be the happy recipients of your frequent communication. If what you say doesn’t matter to them, you will run the risk of annoying them at the very least and driving them away at the worst.
While it would be impossible to know exactly what matters to each individual client (and even more impossible to uniquely tailor each piece of communication to their interests), you can combine some general demographics of your clients to create subgroups whose interests may be common enough to create a distribution list. Create common profiles by age, family size, home type and neighborhood. For example, a young family of four that owns a home in Bergen County are more likely to share interests with others that check the same demographic boxes than the single urban professional renting a studio in Chelsea.
Frequency and Content
Once you have narrowed your clients into a few select groups, you will want to find things to communicate with them. Stick to a frequency you can manage (perhaps once a month?) and find content that will be both unique as well as easy to produce. Keep in mind that any content you create should be aligned with things that are related to moving and real estate. These are broad topics though and you can get pretty creative with them without driving yourself crazy.
For example, an April communication piece may center around the best spring activities for young families in North Jersey. Round up a list of 5 or 7 different events in the next month or two and share with your clients. How is this related to moving and real estate you might wonder? Well, pretty much anything tied to enjoying your local area or getting to know your neighborhood’s plentiful attractions can easily be considered “real estate relevant”. After all, your home and its community’s events are intrinsically linked.
Aligning Your Messages with Your Sales
Of course the ultimate goal here is to keep your name front and center should any of your clients (or their friends!) need to move again. Make sure to keep your contact information on any piece of content you create and share as well as include a simple call-to-action should anyone reading your information need to reach you for assistance. Keep your format clear and consistent every time so that readers become familiar with your brand. This will create subconscious connections in your readers and make them even more likely to remember you when they need a real estate agent again.
Interested in learning about Unpakt’s Agent Services program for real estate agent referrals?