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Thursday, September 13, 2018
3 Homes For Sale in Santa Clara County: 889 N San Antonio Road #2000 and more
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
How to improve your website
| Hey all, All month we are going to be talking about how to "fix what matters" in our businesses and systems. By focusing on the three things that matter most, we have been able to grow exponentially even through the housing recession while many agents burnt out or quit. Today we are going to start with the easiest thing, and I want to begin with a question. Does your website convert at least 20% of unique visitors into leads? Seriously, spend a moment and login to your website backend and check it out. Look at the number of unique visitors versus the number of leads you produce. Many agents that I talk to believe the reason they aren't generating business from their site is because they aren't advertising it. That could be part of the problem. But the reality is that for most agents, even if they were to get serious about driving visitors to their website, their website simply isn't "sticky" enough to capture their information and deliver a lead. The average real estate website only captures 0.5-1% of unique visitors. Agent websites are largely designed to deliver information, not capture it. That means you spend time and/money to drive visitors to a site only for 99% of those visitors to leave, never to be heard from again. No wonder many agents give up when it comes to getting customers from their website. Most agents just settle for the website their broker gives them (read: makes them pay for). It sits there like a big online business card, doing nothing. Your site may look great, put a great face on your brand and have tons of powerful information for your customers. But if it doesn't capture well, it's a waste of your time and money. So what does a website that captures 20% of traffic look like? Well, let's start with what it DOESN'T look like. #1 A good website that captures well does not offer free access to information without any buy-in (active registration). The reality is that 99.3% of online visitors to your website are in phase one of the buying cycle. Their attitude when it comes to real estate agents is that they don't need them and don't want to talk to them. And they are right! That's why they are on the site gathering information instead of in the front seat of your sedan on the way to a showing. But that's also why it's extremely unlikely that you will have a customer proactively reach out to you with passive registration. #2 A good website also does not give out some information and then pull a bait-and-switch and require registration halfway in (after looking at 2-3 homes for example). Not only does it not capture well (the best I have seen with this setup is around 6% capture rate), but the few leads it does generate are frustrated that they were mislead as they got to your site. Some of you may be thinking "wait, that's how my site is set up and I like it that way". You may like it that way, but go and look at your capture rate (leads/unique visitors). It just doesn't work to capture leads. A website designed to capture leads will always ask for and require registration right away. The ask will come along with an offer of value. You could experiment with different offers or wording, but we have found the best success with offering a free home search. It will also have frictionless registration. In other words, it will get the information you need ONLY (name, email, phone) and not try to ask a customer to fill out something that rivals an FBI background check form. #3 Finally, it will have been tested for effective lead capture. This may sound obvious, but let me tell you about web designers. Most website designers are far more interested in the aesthetics and the design of a website than its capture rate. The small things matter. How a registration question is worded, images, fonts, colors and even how fast a page loads may all contribute individually to capture rate. A good website that captures leads will have been thoroughly tested for these to see what combination brings the best possible capture rate. If it sounds daunting, it shouldn't. There are a ton of free tools that make creating a good website for lead capture easy. As an example, you could start with a DIY wordpress website with free real estate themes and plugins. Then for your lead capture, you could signup for sumo.com (we are big fans) for their basic (free) plan and create testable A/B capture pages to try out and test every variable you could think of. Or you can use the same site I use: the ultimate website, which is included in our Pipeline Pro Tools software. Btw we set aside 10 spots per week for free demos. We'll talk to you about your business and show you how the software works (no obligation). The only thing that could hold you back is if we have already sold out in your area. Check availability by clicking here. Or you could take these basic principles and carefully review some of the dozens of pre-built real estate websites out there to see if they matchup. Be sure to ask about the capture rate. I know it will be tempting to jump straight to the traffic solutions, but do yourself a favor and make sure your site converts first. Until next time,
Levi Jones Guerilla Realty |
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