Document workflow solutions can help manage the flow of necessary documents. Yet they don’t necessarily communicate what’s needed from clients in an effective way.

Emails sent to request additional information aren’t always read. Let’s face it, it’s easy to overlook that email and move on with our day. This means agents and their staff must personally get involved in tracking all that documentation while pestering clients to send the required information.

Text messaging changes that in favor of your clients and your staff.

The Best Real Estate Text Messages Simplify Every Deal

Advanced conversational text messaging solutions like SMS-Magic give real estate organizations the opportunity to simplify and improve their entire documentation process.

How? By using the best real estate text messages to remind clients when they need to supply information, sign a form, or provide other feedback. Since 99% of text messages are read within 3 minutes, and nearly 50% of people respond to these messages, you’ll get the documentation you need in a much faster and more effective way.

Here’s how it works:

Create automated workflows.

Just set up a simple workflow that shows all the documents you need. Then, set the timeframes for when those documents need to be returned, across the timeline of the workflow.

Add your message reminders.

Next, you can add text message reminders ahead of the due date for documents, as well as past due reminders.

• For example, you can specify that a message is sent to your client 5 days ahead of the necessary return date, the day before and the day of the return.
• If the information isn’t returned, you’ll be alerted. You can either reach out personally or trigger a new set of messages that lets the client know the escrow is in jeopardy.
• All these reminder messages trigger automatically, until the information is received.

Offer Personal Attention.

As part of your reminder messages, you can include an auto-response keyword (like HELP) that clients can text back to you to ask for help. When they respond, an agent or team member is alerted and can immediately reply via text and set a time to discuss how he or she can help your client.

The Bottom Line:

By using the best real estate text messages, automating reminders and the documentation process, you get all that time back to focus on doing what you want to do, helping your clients find the best property to meet their needs. You also assure that every contract process flows more smoothly and delivers on-time escrow results.
Which makes your clients love you even more.

Customer experience is one of the key factors to increasing the emotional connection your customers have with your brand. Consider an omni-channel experience, as HBR’s analysis shows this increases emotional connection. Messaging should be included in your channel mix as it’s a more personal form of communication and provides a means for agile engagement that addresses context in a way that more hands-off communications like email cannot.

Building Empathy Requires Insights

It’s very difficult to empathize with your customers if you don’t know much about them. Gaining insights that help you step into their shoes and see the world through their eyes is the only way to put them at the center of the customer experience. Empathy is defined as the ability to share and understand the feelings of another.

When building buyer personas, for example, it takes empathy to understand the perspective of the persona in relation to the challenges they face and objectives they aspire to achieve. Observing how a lead interacts with your brand can give you clarity about whether your content and communications are connecting with your audience in the way you want.

You’re not only looking for what they think, but how they express what’s important to them. The words they use are a good indication of words you can incorporate into your messages to create instant resonance. User reviews and open-ended survey questions are good places to start. A phone call is even better.

Infusing Marketing Messages with Empathy

Now that you’ve gotten to know your audience, it’s time to apply what you’ve learned to your messaging. Let’s say that you’re an admissions officer at a university. You’ve learned your incoming freshman class’ greatest fears include not doing as well as they did in high school and not making a solid set of friends.

In between their acceptance and arriving at campus, you create and send text messages to help new students increase their comfort levels and confidence.

Empathy Increases the Effectiveness of Sales Messaging

Empathy is also important for closing the deal. Let’s say you’re a real estate agent with lots of younger, first-time home buyers. Buying a home is a major decision and financial commitment. There are lots of things your buyers need to consider.

So instead of pushing them to make an offer, creating a messaging strategy that helps them build confidence in their decision and find an acceptable comfort level can do wonders.

Build Stronger Connections by Applying Empathy to Support Messages

Customer service agents who feel their clients’ pain and let them vent before replying, get them to calm down faster. They think about the consequences of the issue on their client’s business and apply that concern to helping them get to faster resolution of the issue.

A financial software company discovered during quality assurance testing that their application wasn’t as intuitive as they’d intended it to be. The first customers to use it confirmed their suspicions. They immediately created a course as a series of videos that walked customers through each step and helped to orient them quickly about how to use the interface.

They sent out messages to every customer to invite them to use the course-before they became frustrated enough to call customer service, or worse, stop using the software. They also knew their customers were very busy so they kept the videos short, showing them how to do one task in two or three minutes.

The company saw that most clients watched multiple videos in the series. They also replied instantly with high ratings in the survey they received by message, as soon as the course ended. Clients wanted tips on how to get more out of Finopia, in the same format-short, easily digestible messages.

Future Finance Software sent bi-weekly tips by message and saw a marked increase in usage and customer satisfaction. Messaging has become a critical tool for building strong connections with their customers which has also reduced churn.

The Bottom Line

Tapping into what motivates your buyers is critical to establishing an emotional connection. Using a communication channel that they prefer, like messaging, further reinforces your thoughtfulness. More customers will think that you ‘get’ them. Isn’t that what every company wants?

^[1] An Emotional Connection Matters More than Customer Satisfaction
https://hbr.org/2016/08/an-emotional-connection-matters-more-than-customer-satisfaction

The Anatomy of The Best Real Estate Text Messages

No matter what the message is, you can make it more effective by following these simple rules.

Stick to One Thought per Message
SMS text messages are limited to 160 characters before they are split off into multiple messages. To make sure your messages are clear, limit each message to one subject and one call to action. It’s better to send several related messages spaced out over time than try to cram everything into one text. Test your text by sending it to your colleagues to make sure it is easily understood and that the call to action is clear.

Keep it Professional
While your kids use a lot of slang and abbreviations when they text, using them in your business text can cause confusion and a lot of eye-rolling. It’s best to use professional language and spell everything out, but skip the $100 words. To make sure your messages are taken seriously, always be sure to double check spelling and grammar. Also, avoid the emoticons unless your buyer is using them, too.

This is especially important in your first communications with a buyer, as they may be working with multiple agents.

Make it Personal
Personalizing your messages makes them feel more human and assures that the recipient knows who it is coming from and why. Include your name, the name of your agency, and the recipient’s name in your messages. This is especially important in your first communication with a buyer, as they may be working with multiple agents.

Utilize Formatting
Thoughtful formatting can greatly increase message clarity. Using a return (paragraph break), for example, consumes only a single character in SMS and makes messages easier to read. Use capitalization for emphasis rather than squandering space on special characters, like asterisks. Also, capitalize important information such as the call to action and SMS keywords.

Give the Option to Opt-Out
No matter how well you segment your audience, some people will want to stop getting your messages. Be sure to offer opt-out opportunities (e.g. Reply ‘stop’ to stop messages) but you don’t have to emphasize the option by using capitals or bold text. Always ensure that the call to action is more prominent than the opt-out.

Integrate and Automate Text Message Conversations

Crafting the best real estate text messages isn’t just you firing off text messaging from your smartphone. Advanced messaging platforms like SMS-Magic rely on automating workflows and interacting with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database so you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting.

What’s a Workflow?
Workflows are essentially like automated templates that you build based on the expected interactions with your buyers. Using keywords (like texting “2201MAIN” to 55512) triggers a text with a link to the virtual tour.

• From there, the keyword “MORE” triggers a text to send more listings.
• When the buyer texts “TOUR” they get a message to schedule a home tour with you
• and so forth

While you can intervene at any time to answer a question, most of this conversation will happen automatically.

CRM Integration Ties it Together
You and your agency probably use a CRM platform like Salesforce to create a database of buyer information, track conversations, analyze performance, and to engage leads. Conversational text platforms like SMS-Magic integrate with your company’s CRM to help build your database and paint a more useful picture of all your leads and buyers.

Every time a text is sent, the content in the message is recorded in the CRM. This not only builds a record of your conversations, it provides accurate data about the client—the area they’re shopping in, price range, type and size of house, whether or not they’re first time buyers—and this allows you to precisely and effortlessly tailor communications with them that help make the sale.

SMS-Magic Makes it Happen

Companies that use text messaging to create conversations with buyers convert 40% more sales than those who don’t. The changing face of communications is being driven by the next generation of home buyers that make up the majority of your base. To stay connected with them, you have to use the right technology.

Using new technology can be daunting, but SMS-Magic makes it easy to start using conversational text messaging to communicate with digital-age buyers. To see how it works, text “DEMO” with the following details “NAME, COMPANY, EMAIL” to 36343 or click here to set up a personalized demo.

Getting back to everyone by email and phone can become an all-consuming task, so you have to use the right technology to connect with digital-age home buyers. Since 70% of home buyers are now millennials or gen-Xers, it only makes sense that text messaging is the solution.

Using a conversational text messaging platform can help you respond to buyers faster and reduce the amount of time you spend fielding inquiries so you can handle more leads and continually build your database.

Use Your Existing Database

Just as you use your database to mine leads through email or by mailing postcards, you can use it to begin communicating with leads via text. Start by sending a message to all your current leads to let them know you can keep them up to date with text messages. This will also serve as an opt-in confirmation for future messages.

When a lead replies “yes” to this message, they are automatically sent a series of property listings that fit their needs according to information you have previously entered in your database. This way you don’t have to make a call or send an email every time a new home comes on the market and the client can then let you know if they need more information or want to see a home.

Add Texting to Your Home Listing Marketing

Studies show that 90% of leads prefer to receive text messages over calls from a sales representative. Fortunately, real estate agents have many opportunities to let home buyers know that information is available by text message. You can offer your text-based services on all of the marketing materials you already use, like your website, direct mail, online and print ads, social media, property listings, and flyers.

How to Get the Opt-In for The Best Real Estate Text Messages

Say a house hunter stops by one of your properties and grabs a flyer. On the flyer, you can offer to text them real-time updates on the status of the property and to send them information on similar homes.

To invite home buyers to opt-in to your text messaging services and so they can receive the best real estate text messages, include a message with an SMS short code in your promotional materials and advertising. For example, on a property listing flyer, the message might look like this:

Text “220MainSt” to 55512 to see the virtual tour for this property. Up to 6 msgs/month. Reply HELP for help or STOP to cancel. Message & data rates may apply. See Terms & Conditions at  NextCenturyRS.com/tnc.

Once the buyer opts in by sending a text to 55512, they are sent a link to the virtual tour and your SMS platform automatically adds them to your database as a new lead.

Not only do you now know that this is a hot lead, but you get a wealth of information about the buyer-what type of property they are looking for, what area they’re shopping in, etc. From here, you can send them more targeted listings, automatically schedule showings, and up your chances of finding exactly the home they are looking for. This same tactic can be used on any of your marketing materials and mailers.

Note that most messages can be sent automatically by an SMS marketing platform like SMS-Magic. You don’t have to spend all day responding to text messages instead of fielding phone calls-the platform uses keywords in the texts you receive to send the appropriate response, and it notifies you when you need to take action or when an event happens such as when a new lead is added to the database. Of course, you can manually intervene whenever you want to add a personal touch or answer a complex question.

A Few Rules to Follow

Text messaging is a cost-efficient and effective way to engage home buyers. There’s just one hitch-prospects and customers must “opt-in” (give you specific permission) to send them marketing text messages.

Text messages for business falls under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which is the main anti-telemarketing law in the U.S.

Here’s how to comply:

• Get your home buyers to opt-in as discussed above.
• Make sure the invitation you include on your marketing and sales materials tells them what to expect; number of messages per month and types of messages – listings, virtual tours, community information, etc. And make sure you meet the expectations you set.
• Give them a way to opt-out of your text messaging program, should they want to. Use a keyword like “STOP” to opt out and communicate it occasionally. The beauty is that an advanced SMS texting platform will automatically remove them from your list to keep you in compliance.

Check out our guide to the TCPA Guidelines to assure that you’re following the rules and always remember to text your clients the way you would want to be texted.

SMS Texting is a Win-Win in Real Estate

Messaging is the new conversation in real estate. The communication preferences of the next generation of buyers are demanding it, and fortunately, it will make your life easier and help you sell more effectively. SMS platforms can automate a lot of your day-to-day inquiries, save you time, help you serve your clients more effectively, and of course, help you close more deals.

In our next post, we’ll take a look at how you can help clients navigate the buying process with SMS text messaging.