Leading real estate CRM’s are the ultimate centralization solution for busy agents. Whether you want to watch your referral business grow, track important property and listing details or capture and nurture leads – it’s like having the best admin money can buy helping you with running your business.
Let’s do a “State of the CRM” address and check out 10 new things that make up the heart and soul of a real estate CRM.
- Your CRM Has Gone Mobile
In 2017, the average U.S adult spends 2 hours and 25 minutes per day using mobile apps, a jump of 10.3% over last year – and this number will only continue to skyrocket. Users now expect a seamless transition from the work they do on their smartphone to translate over to their desktop, tablet or laptop. Modern CRM’s can’t limit themselves just to the larger screen, especially when all the data suggests that people need the flexibility now more than ever.
- Integrating Social Media
Having a social media integration is no longer just a luxury, it’s a must-have for real estate CRM’s. Having a Social Intelligence feature allows you to get instant access to all your contacts’ social media info and channels with a single click providing a holistic view. Having all of this data consolidated to provide actionable insights is now the gold standard.
- Mass Marketing Made Easy
The magic of marketing is that high-end software allows you to be ubiquitous, even though your calendar wouldn’t necessarily agree with that. Automated keep in touch reminders ensure that you don’t lose touch with past clients, prospects, or important referral sources – ever again. And that you never miss another opportunity to wish someone a happy birthday or reach out to them on their move-in anniversary. The big evolution in this was that in the past, the setup was contact by contact which was tedious and took forever – and therefore it rarely got done.
The magic today lies in the automation. Leading edge CRMs such as IXACT Contact allow you to create KIT call reminders, birthday reminders, and move-in anniversary reminders for your entire database in literally a matter of minutes.
- Fully Automated and Fully Customizable e-Newsletters
We understand the inherent power that newsletters command, but the greatest copy and design in the world means nothing if it isn’t 100% responsive.
As recently as 5 years ago, most real estate CRMs gave you a blank template and you had to write and create your own newsletter. This process was a big first step, but also showed a glaring hole in the fact that many real estate agents didn’t have the time to carve out to put together this piece of content from start to finish.
IXACT Contact became the first real estate CRM to provide agents with a professionally designed and written e-Newsletter that’s also fully automated – the industry’s first true “set it and forget it” monthly e-Newsletter. A value proposition that still holds true to this day, except now it’s fully customizable at both the agent and brokerage level, plus it’s the only CRM e-Newsletter that’s 100% responsive. It’s the ultimate turnkey solution for active agents that have a creative foundation to work off of to add their expertise to.
- Video is Exploding in Email
Video email marketing is a powerful tool that helps messaging stand out that can lead to a 200%-300% increase in your click-through rate. It’s an interactive and intimate way of cutting through to your audience and commanding their attention. The reason why video has been difficult to tackle is because of the perceived costs and level of expertise needed.
Now you can create and send video emails directly from IXACT Contact, courtesy of our integration with video email leader BombBomb.
- High-Quality Marketing Content
“CRMs don’t provide content; they’re just software!” How many times have you heard that statement – or even muttered it to yourself when looking to squeeze your return on investment from your CRM.
While this sentiment has been very true for a very long time, the new gold standard is the quality of content that is now provided. Most (but not all) CRM’s today include content in the form of pre-written drip emails for nurturing leads, but it’s a onetime upload and the content is typically fixed.
However, leading real estate CRMs are providing their subscribers with a stream of fresh, high quality, marketing content that greatly enhances agents’ marketing efforts, and positions them as the real estate authority in the minds of their clients and prospects.
Our monthly e-Newsletter includes three fresh articles written by real estate marketing experts every month, while our agent websites include not only built-in blog functionality, but also fresh blog articles twice a month.
And lastly, our just launched Social Stream service allows agents to post to their social media channels articles in real-time from tier one publications across North America. We’re talking articles from reputable sources such as The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post.
- The ‘No Limits’ Email Marketing Game
The training wheels are off when it comes to revolutionizing the email marketing game. Traditionally, and with many real estate CRMs still today, there are limits on your email marketing. Sometimes a single mass email can only have so many people on the distribution list, or you can only send so many emails per day or per month. More advanced marketing oriented CRM’s now allow you to send marketing emails to as many people as you want, as often as you want to.
- World Class Reporting
Create, distribute, measure and optimize. Those are the four key elements in any marketing campaign, but if you’re having trouble with the third one in the list, the cycle will have a tough time of getting better.
Measuring your marketing campaigns is vital to know what worked and what didn’t and what to change. Having the ability to see who’s opening your emails and who’s clicking through on links in those emails gives a ton of raw data into what types of content your audience likes to consume.
Email Campaign Reporting is at the core of your CRM providing you with the tools to uncover hot and high quality leads hiding in your database.
- What About Websites?
“CRMs don’t include websites.” Again, how many times have you or someone you know of blurted that out during a demo trial? The truth is that new cutting-edge CRM’s actually now include beautiful, highly customizable, mobile friendly, IDX-enabled websites.
- End to End Setup Help
In the early days of CRM, you signed up and were on your own to figure out how to upload your contacts data, and get everything up and running. If you were lucky, you were pointed to a Help Guide or tutorial videos for self-help instructions.
We took it to a new level with our Concierge Setup Service, which basically means that we work with new customers to get every aspect of the system that they want to take advantage of set up and working for them. This includes setting up all of their data including their monthly e-Newsletter, website, keep in touch reminders, automated lead capture and Google Sync – completely free of charge.
Join the next evolution of real estate CRM’s and shatter your previous misconceptions of them. Watch how these next 5 weeks can transform your business – and your bottom line.
Start your FREE 5 week free trial of IXACT Contact now.
