How Much is Too Much? Keeping in Touch with Your Past Real Estate Clients
The past few days, I’ve been reading over the 2005 REALTOR® Technology Efficiency Survey, co-sponsored by the Center for REALTOR® Technology and the National Association of REALTORS®.
It’s not exactly the latest John Grisham novel, but there are some really glaring stats that explain a lot about why some Realtors® get stellar results and others don’t.
Before we jump in, here is a question:
Do you know the cheapest and most effective way to get new business?
The answer is your past clients.
Now here’s a question from page 28 of the survey:
How many times a year do you communicate with your past clients?
In a nutshell, here are the responses:
Over 64% of the respondents report they communicate with their past clients from 1 to 4 times per year. About 18% communicate with their past clients over 6 times per year.
Eek!
Contacting your past clients 4 or even 6 times a year is not enough. It is not enough to cut through the absolute chaos that is happening in most people’s lives.
Your goal is to connect the concept of real estate with your name in your client’s subconscious mind. That requires repetition – and a lot of it.
Never forget that marketing online and offline is not an event – it’s not an operation that you do once and then you are fixed.
Marketing is a process. It always is a process.
Here are some tips to build a deeper relationship with your past clients:
- Mix up the media. Use email, direct mail and even a phone call now and again. If your business depends on any one method too much, you are not building a firm foundation.
- Be absolutely consistent. There aren’t many things in this world that happen like clockwork, again and again. So it’s pretty easy to get noticed when you actually do what you say you will do. However you keep in touch with past clients, do it on a regular basis – like your life and well-being depended on it. Because it does.
- Put your needs in the back seat. Instead of “fishing” for new business with your communications, deliver real value to your past clients each time you contact them. As you go through your daily grind, always be on the lookout for how to help your past clients. When you find information that might help them with the things that every person deals with (work pressures, kids, saving money, etc.), then send them the information.
What should you do if you really want to make an impact?
Go the lo-tech route.
Consider starting a printed newsletter that goes out each and every month, without fail.
The trick is to make it about more than just you, your business and real estate.
A monthly printed newsletter filled with stuff that actually matters to your clients, even if they aren’t in the market to buy or sell in the next 6-12 months.
I remember asking one of the Realtors® I worked with if she ever received any newsletters from service professionals. She said, “I get a monthly newsletter from a mortgage guy.”
I asked her what she did with it and she said, “I throw it in the trash… there is nothing in it that interests me.”
Money down the drain.
Creating a marketing process takes time. It’s work. It’s an investment. And it is something that most of your competition won’t be willing to do.
And that’s the point.
