As a Realtor ®, your sphere of influence is the most valuable part of your database. These people know you, like you and trust you. Given the opportunity, they will refer you to others.
When it comes to email marketing, robust SOI campaigns should the first campaigns Realtors® establish.
The good news is – when using Infusionsoft, Real Estate Agents have a tool that can handle not just their CRM needs, but also full-blown marketing automation that allows them to create full-blown, automatic marketing campaigns, including of course the so very important SOI campaign.
With that in mind, I want to share with you four elements of a perfect Infusionsoft Sphere of Influence drip campaign.
1) Monthly Check In Email Messages
The very first thing you want to put into your campaign are monthly follow up emails that will go out to your sphere of influence. The key to these messages is they can’t sound salesy.
A lot of Realtors® are intimidated by the need to create such emails. Some may start writing few and then give up.
But remember, you are simply trying to stay in front of them and keep top of mind. They are already sold on your services. They do not need to be resold.
Some ideas of some value-added items you might include in these check-in messages include:
- A local restaurant recommendation with a picture of you eating there
- A success story of a house you have helped selling
- Seasonal value-added items, such as planting guides or home maintenance guides
- A local Real Estate market report
- Holiday/Seasonal Messages (e.g. Happy Holidays, Happy Spring, Don’t forget to turn your clocks back, etc.)
2) Auto schedule Coffee/Lunch Meet up requests
Undoubtedly you have some people in your sphere of influence that are way more valuable to your Real Estate business than others. By segmenting these people in your Infusionsoft database, you can set up your campaign to automatically invite these people out to coffee or lunch, so you can get a little face time with them and build goodwill.
If you stagger this correctly, you can set things up so it’s not a burden on your time. Perhaps set up your campaign to invite 3-4 people each month, for instance.
3) Birthday, Anniversary And Home Anniversary messages
Another great way to build goodwill is to remember your sphere on important dates in their lives.
Infusionsoft CRM to keep track of key dates, such as birthdays, wedding anniversaries and home move in anniversary dates.
And it could do few things with those dates:
- Send you or your assistant a reminder to send a greeting card or to make a phone call.
- Automatically send an SMS message to your contact on their birthday. This looks much more personal than an automatic email …
- Automatically send an email on their birthday day.
The import thing is letting your contact know you remembered and are thinking of them on their special day.
4) Ask for referrals
This should seem obvious, but this is perhaps the most overlooked element of Sphere of Influence campaigns we find, when we take a look at what Realtors® are doing and how they are following up with people. Simply put, Real Estate is a referral business. Without referrals, you are not going to grow your business effectively and get to the level you want to be at.
The National Association of Realtors® did a study and they found out that 80-90% of an agent’s sphere of influence will actively seek to refer the agent to their friends or family. The trick to this stat though is that the 80-90% figure is 80-90% of people the agent actually asked for a referral. The average homeowner does not realize that Real Estate is a referral business. So what it boils down to, if you don’t ask for them, you won’t get them.
While some agents feel uncomfortable calling their past clients, Infusionsoft offers the perfect solution for this. Program your campaign to send quarterly emails to your sphere of influence list, detailing for them how Real Estate is a referral based business and you would love nothing more than to help anyone they may know that needs your services, just as you helped them.