The forget-me-not real estate agent

Where did you go the last time you bought special occasion flowers? Can you remember without looking up your credit card statement? Had you ever been there before, or did you pick the florist ‘on the way’ to somewhere else? Or did you screech to a stop when you saw the FLOWERS sign, remembering that it was someone’s birthday, or heaven forbid, your anniversary?

Think of your last Google search. Didn’t you find that all those websites you visited turn into a kind of online soup in your head? Did you go back to the most useful one, or just the one with ‘good enough’ options you could remember when you got tired of looking? Or maybe even the one that emailed you the next day with “Hey, yesterday you browsed our site, and today we have a sale on the item you looked at.”

It’s no surprise that in the world of real estate people forget to come back, even to a agents that gave them a positive experience. They’re not ignoring you. They’re simply overwhelmed. And they’re likely to choose the most convenient option at that moment instead of planning their purchase…unless they have a relationship.

So how do you build a relationship that is strong enough to put your clients among the 21% of people who decide they will stay with your company because they can’t find what you offer anywhere else?

By offering the intangibles—the old-fashioned values. That’s what your customers are looking for. As I’ve mentioned before, customers miss the values that are absent in our high-tech low-touch marketplace. Even generations that do a ton of business on the internet via their phones—well, they’re looking at review websites to pick a restaurant, or reading customer feedback on a product they’re considering purchasing.

The hardware store owner offered intangibles. He responded to his customer’s wants and needs—even when the customer himself didn’t know he needed it: (“Say, you should see this great new ladder I picked up at the hardware show—might be just what you need to clean out the eavestroughing. And with spring coming, you’d better get to it.”)

The hardware store owner pinpointed his customer’s potential problem, supplied an answer and made a sale. He closed the sale not because he was pushy or trying to upsell the guy, but because he was genuinely delighted that he had a product to solve his customer’s problem. He was proud he could help. To him, it was simply a chat between friends that ended up in a sale—and a happy customer. Win-win.
Try having that kind of a relationship with a computer, however sophisticated.

A newsletter helps by starting and then maintaining a relationship. If you can collect a prospect’s information when they visit your website (or store), then you can contact them with a valuable newsletter to remind them that you’re there, looking out for them. Whether they make an initial purchase or not, you can keep in touch so that they won’t forget you the next time they need what you offer.
In a sea of choices, your newsletter is like a life raft. It’s no wonder clients reach out to you.