A real estate chatbot will change your property marketing game — infographic
Today I removed around 50 email subscriptions and noticed a pattern — I hardly read them. With chatbot message open rates around 90% on Messenger it got me wondering — why haven’t more companies embraced a chatbot marketing campaign? We’ve got a handful of property clients so I began thinking — how could a property company benefit from a real estate chatbot and where do they fit in? What does one look like?
There are many arms of real estate that we could target. For the scope of this article, we’re going to look at property investment.
Why real estate chatbots though?
A huge part of real estate marketing is lead qualification. 1,000 new daily leads are useless if they do not have the funds to purchase a property, aren’t on the market or simply aren’t interested. A huge part of a property sales rep’s job is to filter through these unqualified, potentially wasteful leads. Pre-qualification wastes your time and wastes the lead time. So how can we automate it?
Secondly, real estate agents can occasionally get a bad rap for being too pushy and too sales-y — which is where the dehumanisation of a chatbot can come in handy (and be a secret weapon). By removing the human element from the prequalification process we make the process objective and therefore the users are more comfortable giving up information.
Finally — catching a lead outside their comfort zone can start the relationship off poorly. Wouldn’t it be great if we could scale a one to one conversation with thousands of people where they already spend most of their time? I’m talking about Facebook Messenger. In 2015, messaging apps surpassed the daily usage of social platforms.
What does one look like?
Can’t picture a real estate chatbot? That’s OK — we’ve done that for you. In the below infographic, you can see how a typical chatbot campaign might work. The most powerful part of this is that it can happen in Messenger — where we already spend a lot of our time online.
Let’s say we’re looking to get leads for young investors — in their 20s. Those who are interested in property and growing their wealth however are not comfortable entering it just yet. Our goal would be to give them value so they feel they understand why and how they should enter the market in order to warm them up to a consultation or actual investment. Let’s see how this would work:
Essentially;
- The user sees a facebook ad
- They are directed to a new chat where they already spend all their time
- The conversation is engaging and delivers real value
- They opt in to your broadcast list
- You can also collect contact information to follow up with.
What can a real estate chatbot collect?
Pre-qualification usually centres around a few criteria;
- What is their timeframe to invest?
- What are their investment goals?
- How much do they have to invest?
- How many properties do they own already?
This is just a small sample of the information that a chatbot can collect to qualify a lead. Contact information is of course collectable — things like email, phone number and address.
All of this can then be delivered to a sales rep to target the hottest leads ensuring that those who they do spend their time on is not a time-waster and has a high chance of becoming a client or customer.
What can you track?
Marketing is a very results-driven industry so it’s important that we’ve got metrics we can track by. Fortunately a guided conversation like this acts very similarly to a conversion funnel. I would argue that chatbot analytics can be more focused and high-resolution than web analytics as each step down the ‘tangent’ can be tracked as a drop-off point. If we see that people aren’t responding after three messages, maybe we’re sending the wrong information? Maybe we’re not offering enough value?
You can also track a slew of other analytics such as;
- Number of conversations
- Time spent chatting
- Number of conversions
- Conversion %
- Number of drop-offs
- Number of escalations to a human
- Number of times a fallback was activated (bot couldn’t understand)
- And many more
Is that all?
Certainly not. We are a firm believer that email marketing is dying and chatbots are here to replace them. Every person that opts into your list is now part of you ‘broadcast’ list.
A broadcast list is essentially a subscriber list that you can send short, focused and high-value content to whenever you want. This drops directly into their Messenger Inbox alongside their conversations with friends. These have seen insane open rates of 90%+ and re-engage leads who might have potentially forgotten about your company.
Additionally, you can also subscribe them to ‘sequences’. Sequences are analogous to drip campaigns — pre-set content that is slowly fed to someone to keep engagement going. These can be particularly handy to segment people by interest.
Of course, opting out is always an option for the user. But why would you opt out of the future?
We’re obsessed with chatbots and how they can help companies automate processes that drain resources so they can be better allocated. What sort of problems or processes are killing your time? Chat to Lexi and let us know!
Originally published at Mayte.
