Real estate Marketing Blog

HOMEBUILDERS: Extend Your Sales Center Online

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.