How to Leverage Automation for Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing, or guiding leads along the customer journey so they become buyers, is one of the more important and time-consuming tasks real estate agents do every day.

To nurture your leads, you have to communicate with them frequently through a variety of channels. However, sending hundreds of emails, texts, or social replies is not always the best use of your time, especially when you have to customize the email to each customer and their place in the customer journey.

One of the best ways to nurture your leads is via marketing automation. If you’ve dreamt of being in more than one place at once, read on and learn what automation is, which tasks can be enhanced with automation, and how this all ties together for easier lead nurturing.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the simplification of repetitive marketing tasks through software. Marketing automation allows you to create specific trigger events on your website and elsewhere in your marketing that set a series of events in motion, helping you to monitor the status of the lead, nurture them on the customer journey, and manage your own internal database of leads.

For example, a prospective customer fills out a form to download an e-book from your website. You have set a trigger here, and now an email series will be sent to the customer in a specific time frame of your choosing.

While automation can be a great tool, know that it can’t replace your marketing strategy, only compliment it. Hubspot recommends that marketers put in the amount of effort that they want to see returned, which includes writing messages for customer journey phases, planning email timeline series, testing their website triggers, and other pre-automation tasks. Automation won’t fix any problems you already have with your marketing strategy, but it can help make great parts even better.

Setting up marketing automation can be daunting, but we’re going to show you the steps you need to take to automate your marketing communications to encourage your leads to become buyers.

What Tasks can be Automated?

There are several tasks you do every day that can be automated to improve your lead nurturing process. Below are just a few examples of areas where automation can boost your lead nurturing success:

• Email newsletters
• Social media
• Email updates
• Text messages
• Lead follow-up
• Website updates

Making the process of lead nurturing more efficient has several benefits for you other than saving time. Depending on how mature your business is, there are different use cases for marketing automation.

Pick Your Use Cases

Decide when, where, and how you’re going to use marketing automation. Where you use automation you use depends on how established you are in the area you want to automate. The more established you are the more helpful automation will be.

If you’ve got a powerful blog with great engagement and you want to take it to the next level, automation could be the perfect step. If you have great website traffic and conversions through contact forms, you might want to automate the response process or create automated reminders to contact leads to ensure they are never left hanging after contacting you. Automation can enable a smoother user experience for your new and existing leads. When they get contacted right away after they fill out a form or download a product they are reassured that your business is professional and trustworthy.

Automation can also be used for internal purposes, like monitoring performance, creating reports, and sorting your leads. We’ve already written about a few other ways to organize your leads and convert them, so check out that blog before you go for marketing automation.

We encourage you to take a long look at your pain points. Think of what where you fall short with your clients. If you’ve had any complaints or comments, review them and prioritize what areas need of your strategy need to grow before you enhance them with automation. Doing this will help you find the use case that makes the most sense to nurture more leads.

Keep Your Personal Touch

Even after you’ve implemented marketing automation, you still need to reach out to your leads personally outside of pre-planned email drip campaigns. Your clients expect a personal touch, and agents should still make their clients the top priority over getting more leads or even increasing awareness. After all, clients are the core of your business.

Once your leads are sorted or segmented in some way there is a much higher chance they will be converted even before you pick up the phone. Automation is a great way to maintain crucial relationships with your clients and keep yourself connected to them.