Back To Real Estate Investing Basics: How To 10x Your Conversion Rate

Are you following up with every lead that you're generating?

If you answered no, then you are leaving money on the table.

If you answered yes, how often are you following up? Is it often enough to stay in front of your lead, so you are there when they’re ready to sell? 

If not, then we’re going to show you the three proven campaigns to turn your dead leads into deals so you can close more deals from the leads that you're already generating.

Before we dive into it you can check out the short video Josh Arras, Marketing Direct of REI BlackBook, shot.

He explains everything we’ll be covering in this post.

Did you know, most companies waste 71% of the leads that they generate? 

That's basically like flushing money down the toilet. These are leads that they've already spent money on, but they're just left for dead. 

So why is this happening?

Well, let's see if you can relate to this scenario. 

After a couple of months of marketing, you finally get a motivated seller on the hook that's ready to talk business and ready to sell their house. So you drop everything and you focus 100% of your attention on that deal. 

While it's super important that you get that deal to the finish line, the problem that you're inevitably going to run into is your business is going to come to a standstill. So when that deal finally does close, you're back to the drawing board, trying to find your next lead so you can close your next deal.

And that's why you experience the peaks and the valleys in your business. 

It's because you don't have a consistent flow of motivated seller leads coming in month in and month out. And furthermore, the leads that you do have coming in probably aren't qualified to be talked to quite yet, because most people just aren't ready to sell their house the first time they reach out and talk to a real estate investor. 

So if you're not following up with your leads at least 8 to 12 times, then you're leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table. But how could you possibly follow up with every lead 8 to 12 times? 

There's so much that you have to do day in and day out in your business. It just seems impossible. The answer is actually pretty simple. 

You set up something that we call a drip campaign. 

It's a prebuilt campaign, that is set up with the intention of following up with a specific lead, and it just drips out communication via a ringless voicemail, text message, email, you can schedule reminders for you or your team to actually just pick up the phone, and make a manual dial. 

However, the fact of the matter is, it's a prebuilt campaign that you can trigger, and it's going to run on autopilot. So every single lead that you run through that campaign will be followed up with, and will be treated as if they're the only lead that you're talking to at that moment.

Lets see what these three campaigns are going to look like in your business.

The Seller Acquisition Workflow Map is a resource that we developed at REI BlackBook and it's something that we train all of our users on. We teach our users how to build their business around this framework and how the three campaigns we've been talking about fit into this framework.

Fresh Leads Are The Lifeblood of Your Real Estate Investing Business

So it all starts at the top, which is generating leads. It really doesn't matter how you're generating leads. It could be direct mail, it could be SEO, it could be pay-per-click ads that you're running online. 

The fact of the matter is you have to supply your business with a healthy stream of leads. It doesn't have to be thousands and thousands every single month. It doesn't even have to be hundreds, but you do have to have consistent leads coming into your business for this to work.

Regardless of how you're generating leads, we're going to walk through what this looks like in a perfect world. And then we're going to talk about where these campaigns come into play. 

So in a perfect world, what would happen after a lead comes in? 

You're going to reach out and you're going to contact that person. They may actually be calling you and you're just answering the phone live or they might go to your website and submit a web form. And then you have to pick up the phone and give them a call. 

The fact of the matter is it all starts with that initial point of contact. 

It's extremely important that you reach out to them in some way, communicate with them in some way, within the first five minutes.

Now, if you can't do this manually, then I would suggest you set up some sort of an automated text message that gets sent to them, just to let them know that you received their information and you're going to be following up. 

This is going to dramatically increase your ability to qualify that lead and your ability to actually contact them the first time around.

So in a perfect world, you’re going to reach out and you’re going to contact this person. It's going to be a deal you're going to analyze, and you're going to make an offer. After you make an offer, there's an opportunity for that seller to either accept the offer or reject the offer. 

(Again, we're talking about a perfect world here…)

 So the seller accepts the offer. You close on the deal, and then you're going to dispose of that property however you need to. 

So if it's a wholesale deal, you're going to go alert your cash buyer list. If it's a rental property, you're going to go through your checklist of filling the vacancy. And hopefully you've got some sort of a waiting list, like a tenant waiting list or a tenant buyer waiting list if this is a rent to own deal that you could send a text and email blast to.

Real Estate Investing Basic Strategies

So again, we're talking a perfect world here…

You contact them, you analyze the deal, you make an offer, they accept, and you close. 

But unfortunately we don't operate in a perfect world, right? 

So what we have to do is build in what we call contingency plans. And those contingency plans are these three campaigns that we've been talking about. 

So what happens when things don't go as planned? When somebody opts into your website and they don't answer when you pick up the phone and give them a call? 

What most investors do is move onto the next lead. 

They're working the next lead, trying to chase that ever elusive hot deal that's ready to close right now. 

And it's really tough to build a sustainable and predictable business only going after these hot leads, unless you've got tens of thousands of dollars to dump into marketing every single month. And that's not what this post is about.

This post is about showing you how to close more deals from the leads that you're already generating, and the best part about that is it goes straight into your bottom line in the form of profit, because you've already spent money on that lead.

Engagement Campaign

If a lead comes in and you're not able to contact them, what you need to have in place is something that we call an engagement campaign.

With an engagement campaign, we're just trying to engage that lead over the next 10 days. All we're trying to do is reach out to touch base with them. And what we recommend doing is having an email drip sequence, text messages, and ringless voicemail. 

So you're going to have a drip campaign that's going to reach out and send them an email, a text message, or a ringless voicemail, basically every day, for 10 days. You can stagger the types of communication as well. You don't have to send three messages to them every day (email, text, ringless voicemail etc), but you need at least one point of communication every single day.

The reality is, if somebody raised their hand and they submitted a form on your website, or they picked up the phone and gave you a call, there's some form of motivation there. It might not be high enough for them to actually sell their house today, but there's a lot of things they could have done that day that don't include talking to a salesperson. So there's some sort of motivation there. They might just be busy and they weren't able to answer the phone. 

And when that happens, you want to trigger what we call an engagement campaign, which is just a 10 day drip campaign.

Revival Campaign

Now, if they don't reply after 10 days, you want to have another contingency plan in place.

If they do reply, then that's great. You get them on the phone. They're back in this green line and we're back in that perfect scenario.

But a lot of people still aren't going to reply. So you need another contingency plan. You need another drip campaign.

What we recommend is having a three month campaign that again, sends text messages, emails, ringless voicemails, automatically. 

You can just click a button, and that campaign gets triggered.

Now those leads are being followed up with automatically. All we're trying to do is get them back into that green line, back to the perfect scenario. We're just trying to reengage them, to get them back into conversation.

So we’re going to ask again, are you following up with every single lead that you're generating and are you doing it past 90 days? Because that's really where the money is made, past about 60 or 90 days.

Resubmit Offer Campaign

All right, let's assume that you’re able to get these leads back into conversation. You analyze the deal, you make an offer, and they don't accept your offer. 

You need another contingency plan in place. 

A lot of investors stop here.

Even if all you did was put these two campaigns in place, (the 10 day follow up campaign and the three month drip sequence,) you're going to pick up a lot of extra deals. 

However, there's another one because there are a lot of people that are not going to accept your deal. 

So what do you do?

You put in another campaign.

Another contingency plan.

And what we recommend you do is set up a sequence that's going to remind you every three months to go to the County Assessor's website, research that property, and if it hasn't sold, resubmit an offer to them. 

And what does that offer consist of?

It can just be a very simple email template that's in the form of a letter of intent.

One of our users, Darren Buttram, actually put this system in place a couple of years back. In one year he was able to close an extra 37 deals from people that rejected his offer simply because he followed up with these leads every three months. 

He assigned a task to himself to research the property at the County Assessor's website, see if it was sold, and if not, he just resubmitted a letter of intent via email. 

Very simple to do. 

You could even have a virtual assistant do this if you'd like.

So to recap…

• Engagement Campaign ( which is a 10 day drip sequence)
  
• Revival Campaign (which is going to revive your dead leads after they don't engage with you after 10 days)
  
• Resubmit Offer Campaign (which is just going to help you resubmit rejected offers because some people aren’t going to be ready to sell)

Once these leads are safely stored inside your CRM with these follow up campaigns in place, they can’t be neglected or marked dead.

If they are…you are losing out on money.

As they say, fortune is in the follow up, so download the Seller Acquisition Workflow Map today!