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Every Home Builder Marketing Plan Needs Live Chat

Posted March 27, 2012, 7:22 PM by ReadyChat

Online home builder marketing has evolved dramatically in the past few years. Many builders have realized the potential in online marketing and allocating a higher percentage of new home marketing budgets to online marketing spend. As such, home builder marketing plans have been relatively successful in generating a high number of quality website traffic, registrations and leads. But most builders struggle having an efficient follow-up procedure that works to move a Web-generated lead further down the sales funnel, and transition from online inquiry to in-person meeting.

A large aspect of our business relies on the ability to not only capture website visitor’s contact information, but to qualify them as a valid sales opportunity (essentially purchasing within 3-6 months) and schedule in-person meetings with our client’s sales people. Sure this can be done by a series of follow-up phone calls and emails exchanged between the sales people and customers, but this usually takes several days, or even weeks to coordinate. There are more efficient ways to do this. Yes that’s right, your home builder marketing plan needs to include live real estate chat!

As you may or may not know, live chat has the ability to communicate with your online customers via real-time text-based conversations from your website. It’s like having a human concierge helping your online visitors find information easier and quicker than the traditional “do-it-yourself” model of traditional home builder websites. Further, and more importantly for sales, live chat can significantly shorten the sales cycle by eliminating the need for follow-up of web-leads. How? Well, consider having a conversation with an online prospect the second they visit your website. The prospect can have their question answered right away by a live chat agent and then an appointment to visit your sales center can be scheduled during the initial conversation. Consider the following comparison of between the traditional web lead follow up procedure and live chat interaction.

Traditional Phone & Email Follow-Up Time:

*Stats taken from a recent study by InsideSales.com of 700 companies

Step 1: Customer fills out online form (initial contact)

Step 2: Salesperson responds by email (approx. 19 hours, 31 minutes)

Step 3: Salesperson responds by phone (approx. 36 hours, 57 minutes)

Step 4: Meeting successfully scheduled with Customer (approx. 57 hours)

Total: 3 days

Initial Live Chat Interaction:

Step 1: Customer accepts invitation to chat

Step 2: Live Agent uncovers customer needs and provides information.

Step 3: Based on customer needs, live agent schedules meeting with salesperson.

Step 4: Live Agent sends warm lead to sales person for meeting confirmation.

Total: 15 minutes

There really is no comparison between minutes vs. days here, and it is quite obvious that live chat can play a major factor in simplifying the follow-up procedure by eliminating steps such as email and phone response times. However, as a best practice, we encourage follow-up by phone once the appointment has been set by live chat so to confirm the meeting time with the customer.

Make sure you use live chat as part of your home builder marketing plan to shorten your home buyers purchasing cycle.

Live Chat for Home Builders: Improve Online Engagement

Posted February 5, 2012, 7:13 PM by ReadyChat

Here at ReadyChat, we are often asked what is the average visitor interaction and conversion rate from live chat? In general, your website visitor to lead conversion rates will depend on several factors, such as, how trust worthy the site looks, human-touch, call-to-actions, video, images, content, etc., etc. Thankfully with live chat, there are far less factors involved.

Just like in real estate, location and timing are everything. Live Chat is no different. Let’s examine some of the common factors that influence visitor interaction rates with a live chat operator.

Chat Button Visibility: The placement of a live chat button on your homepage or webpages will significantly impact interaction rates with your website visitors. We generally advise our clients to place click-to-chat buttons above the page fold (where the page cuts off on the bottom of your computer screen). See example below.

Image: Live Chat button placed above the fold (before the screen cuts off)

Humanize Your Website. Having human images included in your chat button can dramatically increase click to chat and interaction rates. Studies show that the more human your website is, the more likely your visitors will be to convert (i.e. submit their contact information in the form of an inquiry). It’s important to include any human images you can to represent a live chat operator. This image can be either a commercial image or actual image of your staff member responsible for answering customer chat requests.

See below for some human chat button examples:

Image: Click-to-Chat Buttons with Human Faces

Click-to-Chat vs. Proactive Chat. Proactive chat invitations are key to see any real ROI from your home builder live chat service. Without proactively engaging your website’s visitors, your site remains reactive like every other home builder website out there. By reactive, I mean you are waiting for your online customers to take the initiative to contact you for your business, when it should be the other way around. Engaging visitors with a polite invite for online assistance through live chat is an excellent way to initiate sales related conversations and conversions.

Timing is everything! Effective live chat engagement for your home builder website will depend heavily on when you choose to engage your online customers. If you are engaging too soon, then your visitors will ignore your efforts and close any chat invite. To capitalize on proactive chat, you must identify the best time to send an invite. A chat invite is best received when the visitor has had a chance to view your website and likely has a question in which you can then interact by sending a chat invite. When this occurs on your site will vary. The best place to check when to engage your online customers with a chat invite can be found in your website analytics. See when the majority of your visitors are abandoning your website. Based on our experience, most website visitors will leave a home builders website after 30-60 seconds (if they don’t see what they like or get the help they need!). If your home builder marketing team doesn’t have analytics setup, you might want to get on top of that.

Many home builders from large to small have already deployed a live chat service on their website or are considering it. Unfortunately, live chat is not the same as setting up a phone line. There are best practices that should be followed for maximum ROI and ideal results. We will be posting more tips that will help you either fine-tune your existing home builder live chat service or consider the benefits of adding one to your home builder website.

Three Ways to Improve Your New Home Marketing ROI in 2013

Posted January 5, 2012, 6:55 PM by ReadyChat

2013 is upon us and new home marketing budgets are being set and allocated for this year’s sales push. But with economic factors and the price of land increasing in most provinces here in Canada (and in US states), builders have been feeling the squeeze in recent years. Marketers should be weary (as if they were not already) on how much cash will be spent on customer acquisition in their 2012 new home marketing plan.

Consider these direct sales and marketing related costs you’ll likely incur this year:

Total commissions paid out to sales agent plus base
Commissions paid to broker
Cost of marketing collateral (brochures, flyers, etc.)
Cost of traditional advertising (Billboards, print adds, mailers)
Cost of web marketing (community website design and amortization, website hosting, SEO, PPC, Email, Social Media)
Cost to build, maintain sales center or lease back.

I’m sure I’ve missed some other costs, but these are the main ones that come to mind.

So, how will you be able to increase your marketing ROI in 2012? Below are some proven and sound Web marketing strategies for home builders to consider.

1) Offer something of value to improve conversion rates. You train your sales staff to hand out sales packages to each prospect that walks in to your sales center: why not offer the same package on your Website?! It’s simple, allow your website visitors to download floor plans or a community information pack by submitting their contact information through the website. This way, you are offering them valuable information in exchange for their contact details, which you can then send more marketing materials by email; even better yet, have your sales team call them. This is easy and most builders don’t offer this feature on their websites.

2) Engage your online prospects the moment they visit your website. You’re likely investing in traffic generation strategies to drive traffic to your builder website, but have you thought about how you will be able to convert that traffic into sales? Far too many home builder marketing departments spend thousands each month on traffic generation and neglect the actual web visitor to lead conversion process (NO, having a “contact us” form is not a good strategy). The fact is, there are more than enough options for buyers these days, so you need to be first to interact and communicate with consumers. Web-based communications, such as Live Chat allows you to do just that, by allowing you to reach out to your online visitors and connect with them in real time as you would normally in your sales centers. The Internet can be a cold place and there is no better way to warm up your website than with human interaction (whatever you can do to make your website visitors feel welcomed), or risk your website visitors to click away likely to never return.

3) Respond to Internet leads instantly. By now I’m sure you’ve heard that the sooner you follow up with your leads, the more likely they are to remember just who the hell you are and why they would want to communicate with you. Your online visitors want information fast, and if you can’t deliver it they way the want, they’ll move on in a heartbeat. Again, utilizing real time technologies such as live chat allows your online prospects to connect with you instantly and get fast answers to their questions. Furthermore, live chat is a two-way channel so info can be collected and relayed to and from your online visitors. This has opened the landscape for many of our builder clients by being able to interact with online leads instantly while having the ability to capture valuable insights as to individual buyer needs, online behaviour and intent to purchase.

Armed with these three strategies you should be able to easily improve your new home marketing ROI in 2012.

HOMEBUILDERS: Extend Your Sales Center Online

Posted December 27, 2011, 6:37 PM by ReadyChat

Getting more home sales starts with creating more relationships with prospective buyers. In order to achieve this, you will need to create opportunities for this to happen.

This seemingly simple step is critical to your sales cycle, as we all know; you cannot sell anything to someone you do not know or who does not trust you. So how do you expand your reach? The Internet seems like the most logical place to start, it offers a powerful home builder marketing reach and strategies to gain more web traffic. Although many home builders invest in traffic generation strategies, many are faced with the dilemma and problem of converting this valuable traffic into qualified leads and revenue.

Improve Your Online Presence

With shifting consumer behavior, New Home Builders have faced some of the greatest challenges recently in finding the right channels to market and promote to consumers. The market shift has been primarily the way buyers search for information on builders and new homes before deciding on a purchase. The Internet now provides the consumer with more than enough information on homes and real estate, that even individual agents are becoming less useful to a prospective home buyer. Consumers are now more educated and will gather information online before ever visiting any of your sales centers or model homes. So what is a builder to do? Spend more on Internet marketing with unfavorable results with low visitor to lead conversion rates? No…the answer is quite simple actually.

Consider your home builder website to be like an online sales center. Prospective home buyers search for your homes and land on your website. In fact, your website is likely the most visited asset your company owns, yet every time someone visits your website, no one is there to assist them. You wouldn’t leave your sales center empty for customers to browse and gather information on their own would you? ABSOLUTELY not. So how is your website any different? Frankly, it’s not.

The traditional self-service model is just not enough anymore. Sure this works well for e-commerce sites and websites that sell software, but these are usually small purchases and the buyer knows exactly what they are getting. With a home purchase, it is entirely different. If you are serious about selling more homes and attracting more buyers into your sales centers, then it’s time to get serious about your approach to online sales and service. Just like your sales centers are full of eager sales and service staff, your website will need to apply the same principal.

Create Relationships Online

Most websites are automated and rely on the “self-service” model for customer service and sales support. How can you expect to build a relationship with a prospective buyer through an automated system? Instead of looking for new ways to advertise your homes, what about maximizing your existing website traffic by engaging your online customers in sales focused conversations and personalizing the online shopping experience – just like in your sales centers. The best way to achieve this is through live chat. Imagine having a live sales or support representative on your website meeting and greeting your visitors in real-time conversations about their needs? Yes, a real human being reaching out to your customers and servicing them one on one. Major industries such as the automobile and banking sectors have all begun to adopt live chat as a major channel for online customer engagement, sales and support. In fact, a survey conducted by Bold Software uncovered that “77% of chatters agree that live chat technology positively influenced their attitude towards the website and their organization.”

If you are looking for ways to attract and acquire more customers through your website – your most visited asset – then you should really consider establishing a live chat system and operation that will allow you to extend your sales centre online. Remember, as a home builder, you are in the business of personal selling and building trust through relationships. There is no better way to connect with prospective home buyers through highly personal conversations in a non-threatening way (like a phone call or in-person) than live chat.

How To Get More Real Estate Leads: Building Trust Online

Posted October 27, 2011, 6:47 PM by ReadyChat

Consider your website to be like your office. Your prospects search for your services and enter your website looking for help in buying or selling their home. But, unlike your office, you’re website still relies on the self-service model and no one is there to greet and meet your online visitors.

Now imagine if you walked into a store and showed signs of interest, yet no one was there to help you. You would likely leave and never come back. This is what is happening on your website every day!

How can you capture more leads from your website?

Think about the last time you purchased something online (if you’re a dinosaur, then the answer will be never)? It would be a safe bet to make that you went ahead with the purchase because you trusted the website/vendor you were purchasing from. This is exactly what is lacking in many realtor websites – the trust factor.

In the service based industry such as in real estate it is even more important to be able to establish trust quickly with your online prospects. Without trust or credibility, your website is like a brochure that is nice to look at, but is not compelling visitors to submit their personal information.

Just like in-person selling, trust between buyer and seller must start with the conversation. Let’s look at how you can turn your reactive brochure-like website into a place where conversations flourish (to build trust)!

Building Trust With Live Chat

Sales, online and off, are closed when the customer trusts the seller. There is no better way to do this than to create a conversation with your online prospects via live chat for real estate. Live Chat is a non-threatening, real-time communication tool that can allow you to connect with website visitors while allowing your clients to ask questions and get help before having to be pressured to provide personal details.

By having open conversations with your online visitors in a non-threatening environment such as a telephone call, you’ll be able to warm them up before taking the next step – getting their contact information. If you can demonstrate that your intentions are to be helpful and that you value customer care, you will not have any problems when the time comes to asking for a visitors contact details, or to even carry on the conversation to the phone or in-person.

The whole notion behind being able to communicate with your online visitors instantly while they are on your website is a powerful thing and can help you to improve your website conversion rates significantly.

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