Tired of constantly looking for new clients? Life is so much easier when you keep your existing customers so happy that they keep coming back.
It’s more affordable to keep your existing customers than to keep getting new ones. That sounds wonderful – after all, who wouldn’t want to save money that way?
According to research, the probability of selling to existing customers is up to 70%, while the probability of selling to new customers is only 5%, so it’s worth putting some weight on customer retention for real estate websites.
To help you profit from customers who have bought from you, let’s take a look at the top 10 customer retention strategies that will increase your sales.
What is customer retention for real estate websites?
Customer retention is the process or activity by which one-time customers become repeat customers. The methods and goals vary from industry to industry, as a company selling high-end software has a different strategy than a clothing webshop. However, it is true for all sectors that high quality and service levels are what keep customers coming back.
On real estate sites, we talk about customer retention if the customer is, for example, a tenant, an investor or a real estate agent. In the case of a tenant, we talk about retention if our goal is to keep the user looking for another rental on the site. For an investor, if the user is always looking for a property for sale on the same site.. And for a real estate agent, if they always try to sell property on the same site.
10 effective customer retention techniques for real estate websites
There’s a wide range of customer retention marketing tools, here are some good practices to help you increase your real estate website’s conversion rate.
1. Know and care about your customers
You can use personalized communication in virtually all your existing marketing tools. On platforms (such as social media) where your target audience follows you consistently, you can also use personalized marketing. Here you can tailor your communications to your target audience by creating segmented pages.
Know who is browsing properties for investment. Who’s looking for a rental property, or who wants to run a thriving office and is looking for property?
Don’t start by presenting your business and why you are the best, but get to know your customers. Before launching your real estate website, find out all the useful information about them:
- What their expectations are when buying or selling a home
- Know what their family and financial situation is, so you can avoid unpleasant side conversations because you know their specific plans.
Be and strive to be unique
And don’t just listen to your clients during the introductory phase, but especially during a property sale or purchase transaction. Make them feel important to your company, even with a thank-you letter. Make your company memorable in the minds of your customers. Believe me, it’s not overkill to even send a housewarming gift after the transaction. A great solution for this is the Capturly Survey feature, as it can be automatically sent out to customers.
2. Strive for customer satisfaction
Keep the communication channels open. It’s pointless to gauge your customers’ needs at the outset, as they can change from day to day. It’s important to keep in touch with what they think about a property, what their expectations are, what they are disappointed with, and what they are satisfied with.
The key is to communicate and be available. Don’t let clients get lost, even if they have already met the target for you because never forget that retaining old clients is much more cost-effective than getting new ones.
3. Retain your customers through social media
There are few better ways to stay in their minds than by engaging with customers on social media. Put social buttons in the footer of your website, on your checkout page, on your contact page, in emails, and everywhere. Communicate useful and insider information on your business’s social media page, announce new offers on a property, and be active!
It’s good to know that the open rate of messages sent on WhatsApp is quite high, more than 75%. But WhatsApp is not the only one, you can also use Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok to share your real estate social media posts.
Not only should your website have a luxury real estate design, but you should also develop a consistent social media feed and image.
4. Develop an effective email marketing strategy
Now don’t think about template emails! A personalized email can bring very nice results in customer engagement. Don’t worry, the Capturly email survey can help you to include similar terms in your emails:
- Use professional email marketing software to ensure your emails are delivered and look good on any device.
- Use a memorable sending name and avoid no-reply addresses.
- Use confirmed subscriptions and easy unsubscribe to comply with anti-spam laws.
- Segment your audience and send personalized, relevant, and timely messages based on their behavior, interests, and needs.
- Send welcome emails to new subscribers and “nurture” them with valuable content and offers.
- Use targeted pop-ups on your website to grow your email list
- Align your email campaigns with your other channels.
- Resend your emails (with a different subject line) a few days apart to those who haven’t opened the message.
If you want to maximize the revenue from your online store and keep customers engaged with your real estate website, it is essential to develop a successful email marketing strategy. Email marketing is a highly profitable marketing channel that offers the opportunity to achieve impressive ROI.
As well as helping you to establish a core market presence, email marketing has many additional benefits, such as increasing website traffic, helping to establish your brand tone, allowing you to communicate directly with your target audience, and easily achieving customer retention for your real estate website.
But to reap all these benefits, it’s essential to follow email marketing best practices. Well-constructed email campaigns can achieve high click-through rates and produce incredibly positive results, but poor marketing emails can in turn discourage subscribers and backfire.
5. Create a loyalty program
Real estate sites do not generally use a loyalty program, but there are many similar solutions:
- Referral programs: if you refer them, you get a cash reward or discount on otherwise paid services
- Exclusive access to new properties, thus gaining a competitive advantage
- Reduced commission: the commission payable is reduced if you are a long-time customer or if you sell a property through the site for a higher amount
- Providing educational material: how to sell, buy, and invest in a property
- Personalized services: sharing extra information to make you stand out from the competition and appear more trustworthy
To encourage a second purchase, you need to prevent abandonment with a “welcome” email. Instead of sending out a generic thank you email, write an extra personalized welcome email that will make your customer feel truly appreciated. Include a limited-time offer on their next purchase. This will create a sense of urgency and may be enough to make a second purchase.
6. Invest in real estate technology
Let’s not forget about 3D apartment tours, as if customers can view the property of their choice in this way, it can be a big competitive advantage. What’s more, if we go even further, there is also software linked to Apple Vision Pro and other such technology devices where the user can look around the property.
In addition to real estate technology, you can also use web analytics tools, which are a must for real estate website builders, whether it’s heatmaps or Javascript error tracking. But more on that later…
7. Generate quality leads and leverage automation
You must find the right people. It’s not enough to find a client, you need to be able to keep them. Automated tools can help you reach customers. Automated tools can help you in all the activities we have mentioned so far. Be it personalization, personalized messages through social media, and email marketing campaigns.
Always keep the customer in mind. Keep them informed about current property offers. This will make customers feel valued, which will generate revenue growth for your business.
8. Target your previous customers
Facebook and Instagram can also help you target your past customers, for example when you’re targeting based on pages that customers have visited (say, they visited your post-purchase “Thank You” page) or attended an event.
In terms of getting customers, many people initially just guess their target audience on Facebook based on location, age group, gender, and interests. When targeting past customers, this guesswork is eliminated as you can pinpoint exactly who the customers were who came in through an ad, making it easier to retain them through your social media platform.
9. Get involved in social responsibility projects
To achieve high customer retention rates for real estate websites, you need to make your customers feel good, not just about the property they buy from you, but about the customer experience itself. This includes price, quality, communication, etc.
Your customers will also feel good if you let them know that they have done something good. This could be something socially responsible they have achieved by buying from you. It could be about protecting the environment and helping the poor and the needy. If your customers know that every property they buy helps a good cause, you’re giving them a huge incentive to be loyal.
10. Keep up to date with website analytics
Using website analytics can make a big difference to the success of those working on your website. Analyzing data helps them to understand exactly what is happening on their website and how users are behaving. This helps them to identify effective strategies and areas that need to be optimized. Website analytics can help you identify:
- which marketing channels are driving the most traffic,
- which pages are generating conversions,
- and which areas need improvement.
To do this, you may need a range of features that Capturly can provide you with, whether it’s:
- heatmaps,
- session recordings,
- javascript error tracking,
- conversion funnel analysis,
- or email survey.
All of these features help you easily crawl your website to ensure successful customer retention for real estate websites.
Summary
It depends on many circumstances what and how to do to retain customers (B2B vs. B2C, type of product or service, geography, economic processes…), but one thing is for sure: by retaining customers (reducing churn) you don’t have to keep pumping calls into the sales funnel and you can spend the time and money freed up on other value-creating processes… like customer retention!
Proptech, an acronym for real estate and technology, is an acronym that combines real estate technologies, whether it’s cloud technology, mobile services, AI, or the Internet of Things. All of these opportunities make it more efficient to successfully drive customer retention for real estate websites.
On the one hand, it can save you money, but customers also like lead generation. There can be benefits such as much faster responses with chatbots. Faster link generation, and faster responses. No need for live customer service, chatbots make all this possible. Also, because the chatbot is not able to connect with people, customers will feel much less pressure to buy a property.
Retargeting is a way of reaching and targeting users with personalized offers who have already visited our website and are therefore likely to be familiar with our services. Remarketing can help us improve the effectiveness of our campaigns and the conversion rate of our users.
Remarketing campaigns not only allow us to retarget people who have already visited our website, but also, through the use of Google Analytics or marketing automation tools, to group users into groups based on their activity and behavior, and target these groups with different banners and messages.
Improved brand value and reputation: CSR builds a positive image of the company among consumers and investors.
Increased customer loyalty: consumers are likelier to buy from ethical and sustainable companies.
Apart from the fact that it is more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones, there are many other reasons why customer retention is important. Returning customers tend to spend more because as their trust in your business grows, they are more likely to buy more expensive products and services.
For example, a real estate investor might buy through the same site and then rent them out, giving them more money to invest. Or a previous buyer’s life situation improves and they buy and sell residential property on the same site because they want to move to a nicer or better house.
So not only is it cheaper to retain customers, but it is also more profitable in the long run. Loyal customers can also help reduce marketing costs. After all, happy customers not only come back to you, but they also tell their family and friends about you.
This kind of advertising (word of mouth, WOM) is more likely to influence people to choose your product than paid advertising, and it also increases your brand awareness and boosts your profits in the long run.