Competing for business has always been tough for estate agents. But in the profound uncertainty of our current moment, it can feel impossible to find the extra resources required to really drive home those victories.
The truth is, most estate agents’ lead generation and marketing strategies fail not because they don’t know what they’re doing – they fail because they don’t the time to do it.
Now more than ever, the key to competitive advantage is not bigger offices, longer hours or larger workforces – it’s strategic insight and technological innovation. And perhaps the most powerful innovation for estate agents is constantly improving, dynamic automation.
How automation works
While it can sound intimidating, automation really just means programming a machine to do a task for you. This could be anything - from telling your email to send automatic replies to every email you receive to orchestrating an entire factory to run on its own.
In theory, anything which is repetitive can be automated. Not only does this save a huge amount of time which can be more productively used on complex and creative tasks only humans can accomplish - it removes the potential for human error.
Combining an understanding of customer psychology with an automated communication system, you can ensure the right message is sent at the right time to the right person – and all without lifting a finger.
Over three quarters of businesses see a positive Return On Investment within the first year of adopting automation; in theory, this is a no brainer. But in practise, there are some real concern to address.
The challenges of automation
As you can imagine, there are clear risks involved if your automation is done poorly; without human direction, it can result in increasingly irrelevant messages being sent to the same individual ad infinitum – as anyone who’s been followed around the internet by ads for a pair of trousers they bought two weeks ago can attest.
Not only is this annoying – it undermines the efforts you’ve made to personalise your messages.
But what’s perhaps more surprising is that even seemingly well-executed automation can prove problematic. Nearly half of all businesses using marketing automation find that they are unable to effectively personalise their automated messaging, and over half struggle to keep up with rapid technological advances.
These challenges are compounded by the fact that most businesses’ automation is not maintained or integrated within a larger strategic system.
Having automated responses to some kinds of queries and not others creates inconsistencies, which are terrible for customer experience; and managing discrete automated systems from various different apps can be extremely taxing – especially when you’re trying to run an agency at the same time.
How to do automation right
The answer then, is to find an automation systems which is fully integrated, easy to operate and allows you to truly save time.
For estate agents, this can help in virtually every aspect of marketing and client communications:
Automated lead generation
Automated proposals sent immediately upon request
Automated responses to queries
Automated emails or texts sent before and after appointments
Automated customer care messages on birthdays and holidays
Automated recontact messages to clients you missed the first time round
Ultimately, it can create a truly cohesive and highly effective customer journey that works exactly as you want it to, every time.
If you’d like to discover how Active Agent provides such automation, book your free demo today.
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