Customer recovery strategies for real estate websites

Do you notice that fewer and fewer consumers are interested in real estate on your website? Are former tenants no longer looking for a new home with you? Your best real estate agent is no longer returning to you? We need to find a solution!

Nothing is as disheartening as seeing clients unsubscribe or stop using your service. But it’s an inevitable part of business. Some customers may decide to stop doing business with you for whatever reason.

But an above-average unsubscribe or return rate is a sign that your business is in trouble. This churn can cripple your business and reduce revenue, so it’s crucial to focus on customer recovery for real estate websites.

This step-by-step article provides 10 tips to help you easily win back your customers in the real estate market.

10 effective customer recovery techniques for real estate websites

There are no clear solutions. The emphasis here is on trying. If you’re seeing a drop in traffic to your real estate website, then implement these tips!

1. Identify the problem

Communication is one of the most important things to do when trying to win back a customer. Don’t be afraid to communicate with your unsubscribers, as they are the only way to find out the reason why they have withdrawn from your website and are no longer looking to buy a home or rent a house through your real estate website. 

It’s worth investigating whether this was due to a maintenance error on the site, or whether there was an administrative error that caused them to stop browsing and using this real estate website. 

In such cases, the presence of empathy can be key to achieving customer recovery for real estate websites. Don’t blame others, but look for the problem within yourself and your website. First, apologize for the problem that occurred and ask them open-ended questions to find out the exact reason for their turning away from the website.

2. Make attractive offers

If they have already dropped out, try to lure them back with the most irresistible offers possible.  Identify the segments, i.e. property buyers, estate agents, or tenants.

If tenants were previously dissatisfied, offer them initial discounts. Lower monthly rent for renting a flat. Increase the commission of real estate agents enough to make it worth their while to come back to you and participate in the process.

You can achieve this by sending them personalized messages. These follow-up emails should link to properties that customers have previously expressed interest in, making customer recovery for real estate websites much more effective. 

But it can be even more personal if you make a phone call to them, so they feel that you care about them personally and that it’s important for them to return to the website and complete a transaction.

3. Improving the customer experience with technology 

If there’s anything new on your website, communicate it to customers. Not only will your new customers appreciate this, but you can easily entice customers back to your website with such super cool technology.

Let it be a virtual tour that lets customers view your property without a physical visit. This way, a real estate website builder can easily win back lost customers. But fast and efficient communication can also be a factor that can be important to employ if you are aiming for customer recovery for real estate websites. These can include AI-driven chatbots that can respond to questions asked instantly. That way, if a returning customer is interested in a property, they don’t have to wait hours or days to get an answer. That’s because your AI chatbot will give them an immediate answer.

It’s important to take advantage of the power of data analytics. You can use data from past lapsed customers to create advertising campaigns that target lost customers according to their interests.

4. Conduct customer satisfaction surveys

Customer Satisfaction Surveys are questionnaires designed to help companies understand the level of satisfaction customers feel about their products, services, personal experience, brand image, or customer support. The general purpose of customer satisfaction surveys is to assess how satisfied or dissatisfied your customers are with various aspects of your products, services, or processes.

Capturly Survey Feature offers an excellent solution for this as if you have previously provided your email address to the customer, you can send them an automatic survey. This makes it easy to understand why customers have left the website and what improvements they would suggest. 

With Capturly Survey you can also answer questions such as:

• What are the pain points that are holding back the customer experience?
• What needs to improve to make customer recovery for real estate websites successful?
• What emotions are customers experiencing when they browse a property?

5. Organize community events

In addition to a luxury real estate website design, an offline presence can be important. If you find that you have lost your previous clients, whether they are renters, real estate agents, or buyers, contact them and meet them in person. Where? Regularly open your property doors and invite former clients. This is a super opportunity to re-contact them and show them the property. It’s a super simple and yet very good way to customer recovery for real estate websites.

6. Find out why the customer left

Customers leave services for a variety of reasons, including poor customer service, concerns about pricing, and better alternatives offered by competitors.

One of the easiest ways to gather customer feedback is to send an exit survey to customers or use the survey feature offered by Capturly. You can combine surveys with other customer feedback strategies. 

However, you can also use other features to explore why customers have left and no longer want to interact with your real estate website. The Capturly Session Recording feature can be a perfect solution for this, as it allows you to easily see what happened before the user left the site.

With session recording, you can assess minor or major errors on your website, so you can see which website errors are causing the website to drop out.

7. Increase your real estate website’s conversion rate

Conversion rate optimization for real estate websites can be a very important step. Because conversion rate optimization is a process of using different methods to get more visitors to convert. In fact, through this process, you can assess why as many of your website visitors are not converting as you would like them to. Why are conversions not happening? Conversions may not be happening because your customers are leaving your website prematurely due to some error. To be successful with customer recovery for real estate websites it is important to know what is causing the low conversion rate. 

Conversion is defined as any action that you want your visitors to take:

• Let it be a tenant choosing the ideal apartment for them
• Or a real estate agent who is constantly making transactions 

These are also called conversion operations.

The better your conversion rate, the more value you can get out of your website traffic. This is especially important if you are paying for this traffic (e.g. if visitors come to your site through ads).

You need to pay attention to optimizing conversion rates on your website and mobile app. So, while we’ll mainly focus on the websites below, the principles below can be applied to optimizing in both areas.

You can also use the Capturly Conversion Funnel feature to help you with this, where you can track the drop-off points in the customer journey.

8. Allow taking a break

Buyers appreciate freedom, as they don’t want to commit to a single real estate website because they may find it too rigid. If the rules are too rigid, don’t be surprised if a customer cancels as soon as they get a more flexible offer from another market player.

Flexible models give the customer the possibility to pause the service without canceling it. Offer them this option instead of unsubscribing, as a month’s break may be exactly what they need and save them from unsubscribing. The cost of doing so will still be much lower than acquiring a new customer or enticing a user back once they have unsubscribed. So, if he’s about to give up real estate through your website, go for it! Let him look around at other options! Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can’t come up with some fantastic offers for him after a while, which you’ve already read about above.

You can also offer the option of a break at the time of signing the contract, making the offer more attractive to the new customer. The majority will not need it, but the chance itself will encourage them to buy.

9. Create your customer retention strategy for real estate websites

By grouping customers by spending habits and engagement, this analysis provided valuable insights into the customer journey. It also identified the problems that customers encountered on your website. 

You then need to develop marketing strategies that do two things:

• Anticipate the customer journey so you can offer real estate to people when they are most likely to buy based on their buying habits.
• Develop a marketing strategy to win back lost customers, based on your understanding of your customer insights.

10. Remind lost customers that they are missing

There are simple and effective ways to use targeted content to win back customers.

There’s a reason marketers love using fear of missing out (FOMO) to drive engagement and sales. FOMO thrives on customers’ desire to not let good opportunities slip away.

A real estate website builder should apply these methods as follows:

• Remind clients that you are missing them and have a great offer for them, so they should visit the website.
• Uses excellent visuals to get the message across, which also helps build brand identity. For example, include in the message an aforementioned 3D virtual visualization of the latest property that interests them in a personalized way. Be it a super office, a larger apartment, or a super modern smart home.
• Have clear calls to action in your messages. 

Summary

When you realize you are losing customers, don’t throw up your hands in despair. A certain amount of reticence is normal for any business, and the tactics outlined in this article can help you win back customers even as they leave.

But to keep customers from leaving, every business needs to focus on keeping customers happy and satisfied by putting customer service first. Consider customers as a gift: recognize and reward customer loyalty; encourage customer feedback; and respond promptly to concerns or difficulties with the property. 

Do all this and your customers will remain satisfied and happy.

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