How to capture real estate leads on your website
Having a well-designed website for your agency is not enough to help you generate quality real estate leads.
Lead generation is a multi-step process that usually involves putting a compelling message or offer out to market, driving potential leads to your website, and giving them a clear reason to give you their contact details.
Traditionally, agents have offered free appraisals to capture real estate leads, but this isn’t the only way you can entice prospects to join your database.
The benefits of capturing leads on your website
- They don’t need to be active in the market for you to capture them
If a site visitor isn’t in the market to buy or sell right now, you can still capture them using other lead capture tools on your websites such as downloadable content or newsletter opt-ins. Once they enter your database, you have the opportunity to educate and promote your services via email marketing – for free!
- Build trust with potential customers
People prefer to deal with people they know, so through database email communication, you can start to share information (not just listings), solve customer problems, and build trust in your expertise before they need your services.
- Better understand your customers’ needs
If a potential customer downloads a piece of content from your website on ‘buying your first home, you immediately know where that prospect is in their buyer journey and can design an approach to help them get into the property market. The same applies if someone downloads a guide to investing or preparing a property for sale.
- You can prompt referrals
With email marketing to both customers and prospective leads, you can start to build trust in your ability to help them with their property needs. Past customers with great experiences with you are most likely to recommend you, and with consistent communication, you keep your brand top of mind for them to do so.
The best ways to capture leads on your website
- Place a newsletter subscribe button on the header of your website
Placing a newsletter subscribe opt-in in the header of your website is simple and one of the easiest ways to build your database. Generally, your header is ‘sticky’ meaning that as the visitor moves around your website and gets a sense of what you can offer them, the option to subscribe is always easy to locate and use.
- Use a pop-up opt-in form
You need to be strategic with how you use this and decide which pages and actions will trigger the pop-up, but if done correctly it can prompt sign-ups from people who may have otherwise left your site without taking action.
- Free appraisal
A tried and tested method, free appraisal offers should still be a call to action on your website. For the best results, place this option on pages that make the most sense like your ‘Selling’ page.
- Blog page subscriptions
If you publish a blog, ensure you have an opt-in for site visitors to be notified when new blog posts are published. Regular blog posts are a great way to educate, inform and build trust in your brand, so encourage readers to sign up so they can be the first to know when new blog content is published.
- Leverage downloadable content
People want information, and as a real estate agent, you have valuable insights and tips that can solve problems for your target audience. Consider consolidating a series of related blog posts into a downloadable ebook or whitepaper to increase the number of leads entering your database from people actively looking for property information.
To generate the maximum number of real estate leads from your website, it’s important to give site visitors more than one way to enter your database.
With a mix of newsletter opt-ins, blog subscriptions, free appraisals, and downloadable content, you increase your chances of growing your database with genuine leads – regardless of where they are in their property journey.
