Guide to Preparing for Marketing Automation

September 16, 2016

The increased uptake of marketing automation software has made a drastic impact in the real estate space, creating incredible opportunities for property developers to move leads through the purchase process and convert them into sales. Using marketing automation software across the Marketing and Sales teams will help them work together to convert leads, ultimately resulting in a higher propensity for an increase in sales. Click here to read a quick overview of marketing automation.

Keen to find out how your organisation can utilise marketing automation? Keep reading the Property Developer’s Guide to Preparing for Marketing Automation to find out the 5 key things to do before you invest in the software.

Identify the Problems you Need to Solve

Marketing automation has a variety of functions and can be implemented across several areas of your organisation and marketing efforts, but it’s impossible to tackle all of these functions at the same time. So to start off, identify up to two key problems you want to tackle first across the stages of the purchase cycle.

Pre-purchase Stage

Are you struggling to convert leads to appointments? Or are those appointments not showing up? Drive higher conversion and attendance rates by creating automated email reminders and SMSs that are send a week, 3 days and the day before the appointment.

A great way to ensure that these emails and SMSs have a strong cut-through to leads, make sure they’re sent from the salesperson that the lead has already been acquainted with and the reply goes directly to the prospect’s key contact. This supports the development of the potential buyer relationship is crucial from the get-go, creating essential rapport and enforcing

Deposit Stage

So your lead has been to the display suite/sales centre for a consultation, and they’ve shown strong interest in making a purchase, but still don’t seem to be ready to make a deposit. What can you do to move them along?

Create a nurture stream that targets the key barriers to entry as leads face the deposit stage. The key is to tackle the issues that they have at the top of their minds while considering the purchase. For example, if one of your property’s pain points is the price, provide messaging around additional financing options.

Post-purchase Stage

Post-purchase is not the end of our marketing opportunities. Here are a few ways you can keep in contact with purchasers to assist with reducing cancellations:

• Send personalised email nurture streams
• Send personalised SMS follow-ups from salespeople

There are also opportunities to support education and to drive referrals:

• Send updates for key delivery dates and milestones.
• If you are developing an apartment building/precinct or master planned community, send development updates.
• Send success stories and testimonials of other customers.
• Send further opportunities to engage via social media.

Set Up Benchmarks and KPIs to Measure Performance

Benchmarking and setting up key performance indicators allows you to continually improve the results of your campaigns by attaining tangible results.

Observing the performance from campaign to campaign and from email to email gives you insights on how you can best optimise them for the best results. Make sure when you are testing the changes from your benchmarks, that you are only change one to two elements per campaign/email so you know what is affecting the increase or decrease in performance.

From there, you can forecast improvements for future campaigns, creating KPIs that are both achievable and show strong progression.

There are a mammoth amount of metrics to measure when it comes to email marketing, but we’ve identified a key few that will give you the most insight into your campaign performance.

If you already using a small scale email marketing tool, you can benchmark and set KPIs using the following metrics:

• Average unique open rates
• Average click-through rates
• Average hard bounceback rates
• Average unsubscribe rates

Otherwise, here are some industry averages to start off with:

• Unique open rate: 26.0%
• Click-through rate: 3.4%
• Hard bounceback rate: 0.723%
• Unsubscribe rate: 0.331%

Educate your Sales Team

Alignment between the Marketing and Sales teams is the ultimate driver to:

• Gauge which leads are most likely to convert, which enables accurate hot lead identification.
• Marketing is only sending only the most qualified leads through for Sales to contact.
• Sales can then easily avoid tyre kickers and window shoppers, and focus on reaching higher sales targets.

Here are the four key things to cover with your Sales and Marketing teams:

1. What is a lead? What touch points have they have prior to being sent to the Sales team? What makes them qualified?
2. Further to the previous point, what is lead scoring? What do the scores mean and how do they indicate high intent to purchase? Do their characteristics align with the profile of your ideal buyer?
3. What information does the lead already have prior to being sent to Sales? How will this be passed onto Sales so that they are equipped to tailor the lead’s consultation?
4. Who is responsible for unqualified leads and for what reason can Marketing Qualified Leads be sent back from Sales? Look to introduce reason codes and the necessary information to tackle these objections.

Key Takeaways

• Plan To Succeed – have a plan for what you plan to achieve with marketing automation. Target key areas where your conversions are dropping off and create automation streams that support Marketing and Sales teams to nurture leads.
• Set Benchmarks – take note of existing or industry standard email marketing statistics to create KPIs for your automation streams. These goals and benchmarks will inform your optimisations and overall performance.
• Empower The Sales Team – give your Sales team transparency over the types of leads they are receiving: what qualifies the lead, what information the lead has received up until this point etc.