Capturing Your Prospects' E-mails and Names on Your Real Estate Investor Website

  Not capturing visitors' e-mails is the biggest mistake you can make online.

If you have a website for real estate investors and no effective mechanism of capturing your visitors' names and e-mail addresses - you're burning your marketing dollars big time.

Even more importantly - you're losing a lot of prospective customers, because they just won't remember where/how to come back to you.

Well, the reality of your real estate business is such that your product/service has to do with the extremely high-ticket item - a house. In the consumer arena - it's the HIGHEST ticket item.

For most people it's their lifetimes "largest investment".

We're talking easily thousands of dollars in down payment funds at stake for buyers, and potentially tens of thousands in equity at stake for sellers.

Because of that, it's extremely rare when you can convince a home buyer or a home seller to do business with you on a first outing.

Yes, there're exceptions... and these exceptions are GREAT for you and me, because when someone is hot to buy or hot to sell a home - we have a pretty easy deal to make.

However, most of the time it's just not the case.

What we do know is - the time leads to changes in the financial and other circumstances for both buyers and sellers.

A seller might stumble upon your ad and visit your website to check if you might be a faster alternative to a listing arrangement. After realizing you want some flexible financing arrangements or a sizable discount on a price, that seller decides to stick with the listing.

Six months later, after unsuccessful attempts to sell the home through the MLS, having moved out of the house, having bought another larger home, having to take care of the empty property, make double payments and having no buyers in sight, perhaps even falling behind on payments.... that same seller might turn into a HOT prospect for you to buy a home from.

But, and it's a HUGE BUT, can you count on that seller to remember you from that first visit to your website?

Absolutely NOT!

He'll probably go back to the same classified ad section he went to last time and again call on a few ads.

Would you be the one he ends up selling his home to? Who knows!

That's where your website can make a difference for you.

Your real estate investor website must collect the names and e-mail addresses of all visitors - buyers and sellers.

If it does, then that seller above would have left his name and e-mail address while visiting your site. It'd be saved in your e-mail database.

Then you can continue to follow up with that seller for as long as it takes, until he un-subscribes from your e-mails…or sells the house to you!

Bottom line is - if, indeed, you captured that seller's e-mail, and continued sending him soft, friendly, caring follow up messages over e-mail, reminding him of your services as his "PLAN B" by the time he can't wait anymore in all likelihood, he'd skip the "checking the newspaper ads" part and go straight to you, when his situation changes.

The same holds true about buyers. They might be just looking now, because they still have 4 months left on their lease. They're useless to you today, as you have the inventory to move right now.

Yet, they'll be valuable in 4 months when they are free to move at the end of the lease.

You should keep your name in front of them and educate them about your services over a period of time.

The only efficient way to do it is by capturing their e-mails and doing an automated follow up, spread over a period of time.

Does this really work?    Absolutely!

I recently signed a Lease on one of my homes with the client who stumbled upon my website while stationed in Germany in the army service.

He signed up for my e-mails and was getting educated about my owner financing and lease purchase plans over e-mail from my website. 

Four months later he e-mailed me when he moved back to Austin and was looking for a place.

He pre-paid 6 months of lease payments in advance, because he had no rental history locally.

Needless to say, he was sold on my services via my e-mail follow ups. I was the first and ONLY person he contacted about his housing needs.