Page 122 - Social Media Marketing

Dating Your Leads before Someone Else Does 105

to contact the lead has by far the best chance of ultimately landing
the sale.

If you are commonly out of the office when leads arrive and you
are in charge of making the initial contact, make sure your system
includes a method for notifying you of leads as soon as they arrive.
If your lead-generation service can automatically forward leads to
your cell phone, this is probably the best option. Otherwise, make
sure the person in charge of receiving leads in your office knows to
call you or text-message you with leads as they arrive.

I cannot stress enough the importance of being the first sales rep
to contact the lead. Ideally, you should contact the person by phone
to introduce yourself personally and find out more about his or her
needs. This is especially important if the person requested specific
information or a quote, such as available interest rates on loans, the
cost of insurance premiums, details about a product or service, and
soon.

When prospective clients are simply registering to receive general
information, you may want to add them to a drip campaign, as
explained in the following section.

Launching a Drip Campaign

A drip e-mail campaign consists of a series of soft-sell e-mail mes-
sages delivered to a prospective client automatically over an ex-
tended period. Unlike form letters, a drip campaign personalizes
the e-mail messages and targets them to whatever category you as-
sign the prospect. In other words, in the real estate business, a first-
time buyer would receive a different series of letters than would an
upsizer or downsizer.

Once or twice a week over the course of a few weeks or a few
months or years, depending on the prospect category, your drip
e-mail software sends a message to the prospect. The messages
typically contain a valuable piece of information or a tip that the
prospect is likely to find very helpful. In drip campaigns, you gen-
erally want to avoid heavy-handed sales pitches.