So you think it is time to invest in a real estate CRM for your business, but you aren’t sure what exactly to look for. It can be an intimidating process, but if you ask these 10 simple questions of each product you look at, you’ll get the answers you need to make your choice. Remember that a real estate CRM should be able to help you in every facet of your business, and these questions address them all.
1. Is the program easy to learn and use?
If the software is difficult to learn, you simply won’t use it. What good is it to you then? Look for something that is easy to use and provides unlimited support, like we do at IXACT Contact.
2. Is it possible to use the CRM on mobile so you can do business anywhere?
As a busy real estate agent, not much of your time is spent at a desk. So if your real estate CRM is only functional on a computer, you won’t get the most you can out of it. A real estate CRM like IXACT Contact provides a Mobile App that lets you do all of your important business anywhere you need to.
3. Does it have automated Keep in Touch, Birthday, and Move-In Anniversary reminders?
If you have to manually enter all of these things, it is unlikely they will get done. Who has the time? Your real estate CRM should provide simple mass assignment of automated reminders, like IXACT Contact does.
4. Does it provide rich Contact Profiles and Statuses?
The more information you have on a Contact, the better your communication with them is going to be. A real estate CRM like IXACT Contact provides you the ability to make notes, track email correspondence, use social media integration, and assign each Contact a specific status so you know where they are at in your Business Pipeline.
5. Is there a monthly e-Newsletter available through the CRM?
You will always need some form of email marketing, but you won’t always have the time to create it from a scratch. A good real estate CRM provides a monthly e-Newsletter for you to use, and at IXACT Contact ours is automated and contains three fresh articles each month that you can choose to customize or not.
6. Does the CRM provide customizable email drip campaigns?
One of the best ways to convert leads is to nurture them – and your real estate CRM should help you to do that. At IXACT Contact, we provide many pre-written nurture campaigns than you can customize as much or as little as you want, making that lead nurture process simple.
7. Is email campaign reporting available in the CRM?
What good is all that email marketing if you can’t see if it’s working? A real estate CRM should provide campaign reporting statistics such as Open Rate, Click Through Rate, and Bounce Rate, and who is opening and clicking, just like IXACT Contact does. This will help you find hidden leads!
8. Are there integrations to capture leads from your website and third party lead sources automatically?
If you have put the work in to generate tons of leads, you don’t want to then have to spend hours every week entering each one manually. Your real estate CRM should integrate with your lead-generating sources to capture leads automatically and assign them tasks as appropriate, just as IXACT Contact does.
9. Are you able to manage all of your Active Business in the CRM?
You need to see all of your Active Business at a glance, and your real estate CRM should provide that ability. This will keep you on track and let you know where your focus needs to be at any given time. IXACT Contact allows you to set this up as a widget on your dashboard for especially easy viewing.
10. Does the program provide Teams functionality?
If you work on a team, you need a real estate CRM that will allow you to coordinate and share information as necessary. You need to stay organized and present a united front, but not have it add a lot to your workload. A real estate CRM like IXACT Contact offers these capabilities without making you relearn the entire system.
There are many more questions you could ask, but these are a great starting point to see if a certain real estate CRM will meet all of your needs. These cover the basics that a good CRM should be able to help you with. Test drive one that has ALL of these features today. Start your FREE 5 week trial of IXACT Contact now.
