The traffic to your website does not automatically translate to sales and growth for your real estate website business. To make the most out of web traffic, you have to increase its quality and turn it into high-value qualified leads. This advice applies to all residential and commercial real estate companies.
In this guide, I will explore the inner workings of customer conversion to help any real estate business struggling with poor conversion rates.
Definition of Terms
Before we begin, let’s define some terms you will find multiple times in the guide.
1. Website Conversion Marketing
It refers to the effort spent converting site visitors to qualified leads. These activities include copywriting, installing tools, optimising, and A/B testing.
2. Website Traffic
In a nutshell, they are the people that visit your website. It doesn’t matter if someone is visiting for the first or hundredth time. If they’re on your website, they are visitors. There are numerous types of web traffic, including organic, social, referral, paid, and direct traffic.
3. Website Conversion Rate
It is a percentage figure referring to the visitors to your website who become qualified leads.
A conversion occurs when visitors take action on your website. When a visitor fills their details on a form, calls your support team, or does what you ask them (call-to-action), you can consider them converted.
4. Bounce Rate
It is an old term that is still quite relevant. Google Analytics now calls it interaction rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site immediately after visiting it.
With those terms out of the way, we can now get to the meat of this article.
Tips to improve the conversion rate of a Real Estate Website:
The following mentioned below here are some of the ways in which you can improve the conversion rate of the audience on your real estate website:
1. Moving the “Open House” Online
One of the best ways to show off your properties is to create 3D virtual tours. These tours have proved to be worth their weight in gold during the Covid-19 lockdowns. You are more likely to convert a wary customer who does not want to come to the property when you give them a tour.
If you want to go a step further, combine the tour with a virtual assistant. The assistant eliminates the need for the customer to exit the presentation to perform simple actions such as going back to the property page to find a contact form. You are more likely to convert a customer by answering their questions instantly.
2. Use Exit Pop-ups to Prevent Visitors from Leaving
The reputation of pop-ups has taken a thorough beating over the years because of how often they are misused. The immediate response for people when they see a pop-up is to close it without paying any attention.
When used correctly, pop-ups can be excellent lead generation tools. You can use them to grow your newsletter subscription, get feedback, guide visitors to other pages, etc. Most people fail when using pop-ups because of improper timing. A pop-up that shows up after the visitor has stayed on the page for a while is unintrusive.
The best time to show a pop-up is when the visitor is about to leave the page. At this time, they are more likely to interact with it and perform an included CTA.
3. Use Automatic Value Estimations to Create Leads
You can use a range of tools to generate home valuations automatically. Visitors like the convenience they get out of automatic valuation tools.
Although these tools have questionable accuracy, they are great lead magnets. After getting people to visit your website, you can use other closing strategies to turn them into customers.
4. Installing a Chatbot
Chatbots continue to prove their worth long after their introduction. Unfortunately, most people think that chatbots are unable to understand anything. AI chatbots fit this bill, but they are not the only type available.
You can use pre-built interactive chatbots to generate leads while understanding visitors better. An example of a pre-built chatbot welcomes visitors and gives them several choices. Every time a visitor answers a question, you get data that you can use to customise their interactions with the website and potentially sell to them.
5. Agent Appointment Scheduling
Scheduling tools have existed for a while, but they are becoming more popular in the real estate industry. You can use a digital appointment book for visitors to book property visits. After visitors book appointments, call them and arrange to meet them at the chosen time.
A real estate agent can slash a customer’s wait time for a tour of the premises by giving them access to their calendar to pick the best time to visit.
6. Improve Your Website’s Copy
Real estate websites are notorious for failing to mention their value proposition early on and in a way visitors can understand. Websites often mistake by focusing too much on the brand instead of showing the visitor how they will benefit.
Some real estate agents create websites and completely neglect to add descriptions. Visitors looking for properties might change their minds after failing to get impressed by the website.
7. Provide Multiple Ways for Visitors to contact you
Sometimes you don’t want to annoy visitors by posting contact information in too many places. However, remember that your website is your best way to get information to visitors.
Don’t force people to scroll to the top or bottom to look for your contact. You can distribute varying contact information on several parts of the website to minimise visitors’ trouble when they want to talk with you. Scrolling around to look for contact information can be frustrating, especially on the smaller screen of mobile devices.
8. Qualify Your Leads
The process of buying a house is almost the same everywhere. However, each real estate agency does things differently when they get hold of a lead.
Always make sure to qualify your leads as soon as you get them. The reason is that the quality of your potential customers is more important than their quantity. If the person is filling out a form on your website, don’t allow them to get away with just their name and email address—ask a few more questions to determine if they are likely to buy a house from you. Always qualify leads originating from any page that is not a property page—you will save a lot of time.
When asking a visitor about themselves, avoid asking too many questions. The sweet spot is between 5-7 carefully chosen questions. You might lose some leads, but the quality of the remaining ones is high.
9. Send Leads to the Right Agent Quickly
Do you want to avoid losing leads to the competition? If your answer is yes, keep in mind that a potential customer is not looking at just one real estate agency. They usually consider multiple options simultaneously. Serious customers often want things to happen quickly, and in their minds, they are eager to get a call from an agent. Sometimes it’s not because they are in a rush to buy a property but because they want immediate attention from someone who can help them decide.
One way to avoid losing such a potential buyer is to send their details to a relevant agent as soon as possible. Alternatively, the agent responsible for the property a potential customer is interested in can initiate a conversation via live chat. You can also call the potential customer if you are confident that you can convert their interest into a sale.
Timing is critical when you are dealing with a potential customer. The time it takes to reroute the potential customer to the relevant agent is enough to lose them to a competitor. Another thing you should do to increase a customer’s confidence is to have a picture of the agent they are dealing with on the pages they visit.
10. Step in to Help if They Can’t Find What They are Looking for
If people visit your website but what they are looking for is not clear for them to find, they will not stick around. Your Bounce rate will be high for such web pages.
Your website conversion marketing suffers in pages where customers expect to find one thing but instead find other things. The common reason for this problem is running adverts with a value proposition that the web page fails to meet.
If a customer spends about a minute or so on a page, you could display a pop-up window asking them if they have found what they want. If not, you can follow up by requesting them to give you their contact details so that an agent can get back to them.
11. Add Social Proof
If you are not a big company that customers inherently trust, like Amazon, you must go the extra mile to make people trust you. How do you make your website appear more trustworthy?
The answer is simple–generate reviews from your former clients and show them on your website and social media pages. Studies have shown that 9 out of 10 customers will hesitate to buy from a company that does not have customer reviews.
Final Words
The real estate industry is uber-competitive, and if you work in this space, you must take advantage of every opportunity. One difference that successful realtors have from the rest is their ability to identify leads ready to be converted to sales and pounce on them. If you are wondering why you still don’t have many sales despite having many visitors, following this guide is the first step towards improving sales from your website.
Furthermore, you can also have a look at the best digital marketing ideas for your real estate website to target the audience and improve the conversion rate of the audience.
