Increasing Response Rate In Your Real Estate Marketing

There are many ways to increase your response rate when marketing for your real estate investing business, but today I am going to talk specifically about a general one that can be applied to ALL of your marketing. This one simple method can be used to give you a small boost in response regardless of what type of media or message you are using, or what market you are targeting (the 3 Ms of Marketing). What is it?

Follow up:

Give your market additional ways to respond.

It seems simple and it is, but it works. Here's the basic idea. Let's say you are running a small ad in a newspaper or on an on-line classified ad website. If you give only your telephone number as a way for people to request more information you'll get a certain response. However, if you include a telephone number and an e-mail address, you are very likely to get just about the same number of responses via telephone, but you're also likely to get some additional inquires via the e-mail address as well.

Why is that? Part of it has to do with preferences and ease of contact. Let's continue with the example above to illustrate this idea. If someone was reading the newspaper or an on-line classified ad website at, for instance, their public library, they might be much more inclined to drop you an e-mail instead of trying to call you from inside the library. It can work in the other direction just as easily though. What if they are in their car reading the newspaper and aren't near a computer to e-mail you. If you had only included your e-mail, you are out of luck. Since you included your phone too, you can get a call from their cell phone.

By offering several methods for someone to contact you in your marketing you often get a bump in response and the more you ad the better. It's not enough to say: phone and e-mail ought to do it. Maybe they want to see your website to get more info before contacting you. So, maybe you should include that. Maybe someone doesn't use e-mail, but would fax over an inquiry. Maybe someone wants to get more info from a recorded message. You might want to include that. The more methods someone has to respond to you usually means a slight improvement in the response rate overall.

So, when in doubt, and if it is possible to do so, let your target market decide how they want to inquire, but let them make that choice by giving them lots of ways to contact you.

Until my next post,

James