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• The BEST way to touch your sphere of influence list and generate seller leads

Sphere of influence in real estate – are all realtor touches the same, do they generate the same number of realtor leads

Let me share a little about touches with your sphere of influence because their effectiveness really depends on what type of touches you do.

I was doing a call with Caroline recently. She was interviewing me about marketing to your sphere of influence list. We were talking about this whole topic of touches and about how most real estate agents think that all touches are the same, including email drip campaigns, real estate postcards, and real estate letters. I have to tell you this story because it epitomizes the problem and challenges that most real estate agents have. They think that all touches are the same. They believe that if they want to touch their sphere of influence a lot, they’ll stick their sphere of influence on an email drip campaign, because that’s a touch. Here is the challenge with that. Not all touches add value to you.

Touching your sphere of influence with positive real estate marketing ideas that seller leads will value

I have a loan officer who keeps touching me with an email drip campaign. I actually received an email this morning from him. All it said in the subject line was, “It’s Spring.” Well, that’s obvious. What type of email is that? I know if I open it, it will say something obvious like, “Hey, it’s getting to be springtime. It’s time to plant your flowers.”

I had already received a meaningless email from the same email drip campaign that says, “Here is how to clean pillows.” In all my years of life, I’ve never cleaned a pillow. Why do I want to get that? It adds no value. When talking about touches, you have to look from the consumer side/sellers side, not from your perspective/real estate agent side. What does the consumer want that they will value?

Most real estate agents say, “I want to touch that consumer, so I’m going to think of quick things to touch my sphere of influence with.” So I do this, boom! Then I do this and, boom! This adds no value. If it doesn’t add value, then here is the risk. It’s either neutral at best or it’s negative at worse.

When marketing to your sphere of influence list, give seller leads valuable information with each of your real estate mailers

Let me pose a question. I’ve got two real estate agents marketing to their sphere of influence lists. Let’s just say they are the same list. They have the same sphere of influence. One real estate agent is touching the list with touches that have no value, so the results are either neutral or negative. The other real estate agent is touching with content that has value to that homeowner’s life every single time.

Which of those real estate agents is going to be favored? It’s going to be the real estate agent making the impactful touches.  That homeowner is going to be looking forward to those helpful touches and cringing at the thought of the other touches. They’ll think, “Oh man, here comes another stupid email from that realtor, let me delete it.” That’s what I actually do with my loan officer, I delete the email before I even open it. In fact, it’s a hard delete. I just get it out of there because it’s a nuisance.

Now, I want to share a story with you. What do homeowners want? They want to receive real estate mailers including information that they want to learn about. There are all kinds of things you can do on that, but something that a client of ours does is this. He’s been marketing to his sphere of influence list for 17 years with an email every single week. That’s 52 touches a year by email. And they love it so much that this is what happens. If he forgets to send it out one Monday, he gets emails or phone calls from them saying, “Hey, I missed your email. Can you resend it?”

We’ve actually just incorporated his emails into our system and we are using them with our real estate agent clients. I’m not putting a plug in with our system, I’m just stating what has occurred. What has happened is that one of our real estate agent clients who just started with us with 160 records has received two or three email replies saying, “Jaime, thank you, I love these emails, please continue.”

When was the last time you had one of your sphere of influence contacts say, “Hey, I really appreciate you touching me with this stuff. Please keep it going”? It never happens. That’s why most email campaigns are set for once a month so you don’t wear out your sphere of influence list.

My real estate agent clients are doing it once a week and they love it. The difference is, what type of touches are you doing?

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