How To Lower Your Cost Per Deal With A Call Tracking System

As a real estate investor it’s crucial to know where your leads are coming from.

Meaning you need to know which marketing source is producing the best leads for you.

Knowing this data will save you not only time, but money as well.

You will be able to focus your energy on the marketing strategy that is producing the best leads.

And there’s a very simple way to figure this data out.

Using a call tracking system in your real estate investing business is the easiest way for you to pinpoint where your best leads are coming from.

At a recent REI Bootcamp event, our Director of Marketing Josh Arras broke down exactly how to build this system out inside of your REI BlackBook account. Check it out that training in this video:

In this article, we're going to talk about how to implement a call tracking system in your real estate investing business. We're going to talk about what it is, how it can help you close more deals with less money and overall just help you organize your business better and organize the experience that you're giving to your customers, in this case, being motivated sellers.

Before we dive into the content, we did cover this topic during a live training over on our YouTube channel, and you can check out the training below.

Everything we cover in this article will be covered in the replay of the training.

Again in this article you’re going to learn: 

• What call tracking is and how it can help you lower your cost per deal. 
• How to track your calls so you know where your best leads are coming from. 
• How to route calls to the right member of your team based on the type of caller, the type of lead that you're getting. This can also be used with an outsource service.
• How to record each one of your calls for quality assurance purposes and coaching opportunities if you do have a team. 

Now, before we jump into the content, there's a couple things that I want to share with you. 

Number one, if you are a one person operation, then that's fine. 

You don't have to necessarily route calls to different team members. You can route all of the incoming calls directly to your cellphone or a call answering service or you can maybe route some type of calls to a prerecorded message. 

And you can route the calls that you know are super hot leads, like pay per click leads directly to your cell phone and we're going to chat about that. 

All of this is super easy to set up inside of REI BlackBook. The demo of how to set up a call tracking system is covered in the training replay. If you're not currently an REI BlackBook member, don't worry, this information can be used with any type of system and any type of call tracking system. 

Let's just jump right in. 

What is call tracking?

It's kind of self explanatory. It allows you to track all of your calls and it allows you to track where they came from. 

Let's say  you're doing direct mail. You're also doing some billboard ads in your market. You're also doing some radio ads in your market, then maybe you're working with a pay per click agency or you're running your own pay per click ads on Google.

When somebody goes to Google and searches “sell my house fast” or “sell my Memphis house fast”, then your ad pops up at the top.

Now, why would you want to track the different lead sources? 

Well because you're spending money to market on all of these different lead sources. 

Of course, none of these are free lead sources and most real estate investors that are consistently doing deals, have some sort of a marketing budget. It doesn't matter if it's $500 a month or $5,000 a month or $20,000 a month, you need to know where your leads are coming from so you can track your best lead sources. 

What that allows you to do then is reallocate your marketing budget so you could actually close more deals, generate more leads, and close more deals without having to increase your marketing budget.

You're just moving your marketing dollars around.

Maybe you're experimenting with four different channels like this, direct mail, billboards, radio and pay per click. 

You find out that you're getting a lot of calls from direct mail, but you're only closing a couple deals a quarter, or a couple deals a year from direct mail and you're not getting that many leads from pay per click, maybe just 10 or 15 a month, but you're able to close two of those a month. 

And so what it allows you to do is look back and say, “Hey, in the last month, in the last quarter, in the last year, we closed X amount of deals and 70% of them came from pay per click, 20% of them came from direct mail, 5% from radio and 5% from billboards.”

And so what goes into building a call tracking system?

What does it actually look like?

In the graphic below you can see different marketing channels, direct mail, bandit signs, door hangers, billboards, radio ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, general website lead, people that just come to your website and call the phone number on your website.

As depicted in the graphic, you can see once a lead comes in they will be tagged by the type of lead, and the source where the lead came from.

Now what a lot of investors do is they just put their cellphone number or maybe a Google voice number on all of these different marketing channels. 

The problem with that is you're relying on the person actually calling in to tell you where they found out about you. And the problem with that is, maybe they don't remember so you say, “Well hey, was it from a billboard or direct mail? Or was it from a Google ad?” And they just kind of say, “Yeah, I think it was a billboard.”

And that doesn't really work and it kind of looks unprofessional when you ask them where they found out about you. 

If you take some of the human error out of it and let the system actually just tell you where the lead came from, you're going to be much better off. 

How do you do that? 

Well, the best way to do it is give each one of your lead sources its own phone number. 

I know a lot of investors that have 15, 20, 30 different phone numbers to track all their different lead sources. And that may sound like overkill, but this is actually very easy to set up inside REI BlackBook.

And you can see that you can start small. 

Maybe you just have four different lead sources, like we explained before, direct mail, radio ads, billboard ads and pay per click or maybe you just have two.  Well then just get two different phone numbers.

Each one of these lead sources is going to get its own phone number.

Inside REI BlackBook we have a built-in CRM, and the beautiful thing is, the CRM directly integrates with all of these call tracking phone numbers. 

What that means is when somebody calls into direct mail, that lead automatically goes into your CRM, you don't have to do anything. The lead automatically gets dumped in there, no matter if you answer the call or if you don't.

What's going to happen is you're slowly implementing a system to ensure that every single lead that you have gets captured. 

No matter if you're using door hangers, that lead automatically goes in your CRM. 

Billboards, lead automatically goes in. Radio ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, website leads, all of those different, all of the leads from those different marketing channels get funneled to the same place. 

Now you have a predictable system for generating leads and capturing leads. And then you can either answer the incoming call or follow up with these leads as you see fit.

How do you actually then track this? 

With a call tracking system like REI BlackBook, what's going to happen when somebody calls in and that contact record gets sent directly to your CRM, they're automatically going to get a tag and a source supplied and this happens automatically when you set up your call tracking phone number. 

Our Marketing Director, Josh Arras, shows you exactly how to set this up in REI BlackBook in the video that can be found at the beginning of this blog.

The beauty is it literally takes about 60 seconds to set up. 

You're going to have a separate phone number for direct mail and that lead's going to get a tag and a source. A separate phone number for bandit signs and those leads are going to get a tag and a source. Same thing with door hangers, billboards, radio ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, website leads, etc.

Benefits To Using A Calling Tracking System 

1. You Control The Customer Experience

And then there's one more layer to this, which makes this system even more powerful is you have the ability to choose where that call is forwarded to. 

What some investors will do and this is the beauty of having a system that's flexible, is if leads come in from direct mail, then those might be sent to an outsource call answering service or those might be sent to a prerecorded message or maybe your junior acquisitions manager. 

If a lead comes in from pay per click, maybe that's sent directly to you. That call forwards directly to your cell phone. The fact of the matter here is you get to choose. And then you also get to create that customer experience.

Maybe if somebody goes to your website and they call the number on your website, they're taken to what we call a call tree or an interactive menu where they say, “Hey, thank you so much for calling STL Property Solutions. If you would like to sell your house, please press one. If you'd like to speak to a member of our team, please press two. If you're interested in hard money, please press three.” 

You control the customer experience with a system like this.

2. You Can Record Calls

Another benefit of having a call tracking system in place is you can record your calls. 

Inside of REI BlackBook, every single phone call that you send or that you receive or make can be recorded. 

And why would you want to do this? 

A couple use cases for recording calls is that you can simply have a conversation knowing that you don't have to take detailed notes. 

You can go back and you can recall the conversation that you had with that seller because every single call that is had with a contact in your system is going to be available inside of their contact record. 

You could go back, even if the call was 18 months ago, or two years ago, and listen to that call. It's automatically logged and the recording happens automatically. You don't have to worry about missing any details while you're on the call.

You can also use the recordings for coaching opportunities with your team. 

If you have one salesman that's just knocking it out of the park, you can use those recorded calls for coaching opportunities when you hire future acquisition managers or disposition managers. 

It also allows you to monitor the call quality, whether it's a new hire internally or you're using a third party call answering service like PATLive or something like that, it allows you to monitor the quality of the calls. A little bonus you get if you do use REI BlackBook is we actually have a mobile app as well, that you can download on your iPhone or your Android device and it allows you to access all of your leads while you're out in the field.

You can send and receive calls, you get push notifications, when people engage with you, if somebody sends you a text message, you actually get notified and you can engage with them in a text message, similar to WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. 

It allows you to log and disposition each call. 

If you're out in the field and you receive a call and somebody says, “Hey, I'm interested, but can you call me back in a month?” then you can just trigger an automatic task to follow up with that person in a month. 

And then you can actually add properties while you're on the go, which is an added benefit.

3. You Will See Where Your Best Leads Are Coming From 

At this point, we discussed what call tracking is, and the benefit to implementing this in your business.

Now is the time to go into the software of your choice and get this set up.

If you are an REI BlackBook user you would simply go into your account and set up a new phone number.

You would select the number you want to use, and we recommend you use a local number instead of a toll free number if you’re operating in a local market.

You will get more calls using a local number.

After choosing your number you will assign the callflow you want to use.

A callflow is the series of automated steps that happen after someone calls your number.

For the sake of keeping this post on topic, you can learn more about callflows in the blog post REI BlackBook Call Flows: A Beginner Guide.

The final step to setting up the phone number is how you actually track and identify where the lead came from.

When you configure your phone number inside REI BlackBook you will have the option to have tags and sources applied to each contact that calls into that number.

Going back to the example we used earlier, if you’re using direct mail as a strategy then when you set up your number inside your REI BlackBook account you can use a seller lead tag and then mark the source as direct mail.

Now every single lead that calls in from direct mail is going to go directly into the CRM as a new contact.

It doesn't matter if they've called you before, if they're already in your system, the lead's going to be captured automatically, and then the callflow will follow up with every single lead. 

As mentioned earlier, Josh shows you exactly how to set up calling tracking inside REI BlackBook, so check out the replay of the live training to see how easily you can do it. 

Knowing where every single lead is coming from is how you’re going to know where you should be spending your marketing dollars.

It’s crucial to track this so you can put your time and effort towards the marketing source that is actually producing quality leads for you.

This is where you are going to lower your cost per lead because you’ll have the data needed to see how many leads it takes to close a deal from the different marketing strategies you’re using.

Once you know where the best leads are coming from you will be able to shut off the campaigns that aren’t working, and take the money from those shut down campaigns and reallocate it to the campaigns that are working. 
And you can route the incoming calls from the sources producing your best leads directly to yourself or a team member.

Having a call tracking system in place like the one described in this post will save you time and money.

So if you need the right tools to help you get this implemented in your business book a demo with one of our team members.

They will show you how REI BlackBook can help you create an environment where no lead will fall through the cracks!