Introduction
Traffic alone is not enough to increase sales and grow your real estate business. Improving the quality of that traffic and converting that traffic into high value, qualified leads is what really brings growth to any real estate company; even working in residential or commercial real estate, or developing new properties.
In this guide, we will explore how customer conversion works in the real estate industry, recent trends, and by going through multiple ideas and tools, help to improve your business.
Everything in this guide is designed to be practical, easy and simple to implement.
With this guide you will be able to:
1. Aim at doubling your website conversion rate.
The minimum goal is to increase your website conversion to higher than the industry average. The average across the industry is 0.62%. This is low compared to any other industry, and we will uncover why in this guide.
How much you can improve depends on the amount and quality of your traffic. With this guide, you should be able to reach at least a 1.5% conversion from your website. If your current conversion rate is higher than this - great, but this means you can still aim at doubling it!
Turned into revenue, following this guide means for example, if you have 3000 daily visitors, increasing your conversion by 0.8% to 1.5% will increase your yearly leads from 8760 to 16425.
If your average lead value is $500, this would be $ 4,380,000 to $ 8,212,500 of additional, potential lead value generated with simple changes, that can be implemented at a very low cost and in very little time.
Read more on tools and conversion2. Compare your conversion rates against the industry.
We have compiled statistics from over 147 agency websites to arrive at averages for the industry. You can compare your own statistics to the industry average, and if you don’t know your conversion rates, we run through that as well.
Read more on standard conversion rates3. Explore new tools.
We explore new conversion tools released in the last few years, and how they can be used to give website visitors a better experience. These tools can often have a big impact on lead generation.
Read more on new tools4. Understand what conversion rates are and how to set up tracking.
Knowing how your website visitors convert is almost as important as the conversion rate itself. We will explore this as well.
Read more on setting up analytics
5. Be mindful about trends in the industry.
We quickly touch on the trends in the industry in 2020 and what we and other sources expect to happen in 2021 and beyond.
Read more on industry trends6. Implement practical proven conversion optimization ideas.
And last we’ll be exploring ideas that anyone with any budget can implement on their websites to improve conversion rates.The data in this document is compiled from 147+ globally renowned websites. We don’t focus on a single market, but explore trends globally within real estate businesses.
Who is this guide written for?
This guide is for any marketer, business owner or web user interested in benefiting from online real estate marketing insight, in particular conversions.
To get the most out of this short document matching the following criteria and prerequisites makes you a perfect fit for following this guide closely and making a difference to your real estate business.
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You have a website
AND -
You are driving traffic to your website through digital paid campaigns, SEO efforts and traditional marketing
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You want to qualify your leads and save time
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You want to stand out from the competition
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You want to convince interested buyers and sellers that you are the best and the only choice
If you’re trying to figure out how to drive more traffic to your website, then this isn’t the guide for you. Learning about trends and conversion rates may still be useful, however.
To benefit from this guide, it’s important that you already have people visiting your website i.e regular traffic or that you’re implementing strategies to drive that traffic.
Terms and definitions
Before we get further into the guide, let’s clarify a few things. It’s important to define the words we will be talking about so you’re not confused. Here is a quick overview of the most important terms. If you feel lost by a term, feel free to check back here.
Website conversion marketing
Website conversion marketing refers to the specific efforts spent converting site visitors into qualified leads.
This includes things like; website copywriting, website conversion tracking, installing tools, optimizing, A/B testing and a lot more.
What it does not mean is focusing on driving traffic to your website, outbound sales or other areas of marketing.
Website traffic
Website traffic or visitors are the people visiting your website. They can be visiting for the first or even the tenth time. They are browsing through your website and reading the information you have.
They may have navigated to the website because they searched for a term and then found you on Google, saw an advertisement on Facebook or other social platforms, a real estate listing platform or even because they heard about you on the radio.
There are different types of website traffic that can be broken down much further but these are the main types.
Organic traffic means visitors that come from search engines, such as Google or Bing. Nowadays also social media traffic that is not paid for is often accounted for this type of traffic. However, for clarity, we’ve separated them.
Social traffic means visitors that come to your website from any social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Referral traffic means visitors that come to your website from any other non-social media/search engine source. This could be for example a blog linking to your website.
Direct traffic, means visitors that type your website URL into their browser and directly enter your website.
Paid traffic, means visitors that come to your website from any source of paid traffic, including social media and search engine advertising.
The most common form of digital paid advertising is through PPC. This stands for Pay-per-Click. Google Ads is a good example of this. It was formerly known as Google Adwords.
There are different types of classifications for website traffic, but we have found that the previous are the most common and most meaningful ways of separation, as you can focus on increasing each type separately.
For example; to improve paid traffic, all you need to do is to run ads, and to increase your organic traffic you need to work on your SEO.
Website conversion rate
A website conversion is a visitor engaging and taking action on your website. This action is usually by entering their details on a form, bot or giving you a call.
These actions are also known as different types of conversion events and are defined by your own parameters. This could mean that they left their contact information because they were interested in a certain property, subscribed to your newsletter or took another action and left their details allowing you to continue a conversation with them.
The Conversion rate on your website is simply the percentage of people who have visited your website that become a lead.
Calculating your website conversion rate is very simple;
Conversion rate % = (Number of people who converted on your website / Number of people who visited your website) x 100
For example, if 1,000 people visit your website in a given month and if two people express their interest by leaving their contact information, your conversion rate is 0.02%.
That is, 2/1000 = 0.02%.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is an older term, which is still widely used. It’s loved and hated as it’s a very hard thing to define, but in the end a very useful number. For clarity Google Analytics has replaced the bounce rate number in their new version of Google Analytics with a more friendly term, interaction rate.
What Bounce Rate means is how many people immediately exit your website after seeing it. If you get 100 visitors, and 50 of them leave very soon after, your bounce rate will be 50%.
This can be used to track the effectiveness of your copy and users interest in the website content that you provide. You can find the average bounce rate in real estate later in this guide. Page loading time is also important.
Read more on new generation of Google Analytics|
Agencies |
Developers |
Commercial |
|
|
Bounce rate (Average) |
64.47% |
68.23% |
62.32% |
Trends
The importance of mobile is growing
One of the more obvious trends that we see is that more and more people are starting to rely on their mobile devices to interact with real estate agents and agencies.
More than 55.1% on average of all leads are sent on mobile devices, compared to our previous data set from last year where the number was 52.2%. However often people still seem to be browsing on mobile first, only to make their enquiry via desktop afterwards. This can be seen by the larger number of conversions on desktop devices.
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Mobile usage leads percentage 2021 |
55.1% |
|
Mobile usage leads percentage 2020 |
52.2% |
It’s very important for websites to be mobile friendly. When browsing through products i.e real estate properties and especially when on contact pages and screens mobile friendly designs make or break a website. If they are not able to get through to you via their mobile device, there is a big chance that they will forget you the next day.
For example the tools that we build at Uprealer are first built and tested on mobile devices, and then implemented on desktop browsers. We would recommend anyone working in the same way, even if it causes a slightly longer development time.
Google the still the dominant traffic source
Traffic sources have remained similar to the past ten with a few changes, more focus on social media traffic, new search engines and more direct traffic.
Google still accounts for at least 40-75% of all traffic in all of the websites that we analysed, with second most coming 15-30% being direct traffic.
The second most common search engine in US-based real estate companies has been Duck Duck Go with a 1-2% traffic share, and that has replaced Bing for the second spot. In Europe Bing still brings 0.5%-1.5% of traffic, and Duck Duck Go came in second at 0.2-1.2%. The third in all markets except Asia has been Yahoo search.
Social traffic accounts for 1.2-8% of all traffic with the top source being Facebook.
A lot of social media traffic gets also attributed to direct traffic, as many applications such as WhatsApp and Signal don’t allow us to track their source. This would mean sharing your properties links to your family, and them clicking on the link would still count as direct traffic, even though actually it would be social traffic.
Social traffic is increasing, but the value is low
More people than ever are coming to real estate websites from social media, especially Facebook. This is due to two things; agents taking use of social media to share listings and the increase in advertisement campaigns.
However, we see from the numbers that usually the quality of this traffic is slightly lower than average and conversion rates are lower than with organic traffic.
It seems to us that the reason for this is that social media users are in “browsing” mode, and not actively looking for something.
Social media serves as a great tool to build awareness, but if you are looking for immediate conversions it’s not the best way to go.
Other social media sites are still accounting for very low amounts of traffic; including Twitter and Instagram.
COVID Impacts
Online tools are gaining importance
We explore the tools later in the chapter on new tools, but it is important to take note of the following. The industry has been relatively stagnant over the past 20 years, but with the global COVID pandemic, new online tools and ways of working have been completely transformed.
We interviewed 10 agencies. All of them have been using tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts or other video conferencing tools to show properties in 2020. Only 2 out of 10 did a year before.
The real estate industry stands strong
Real estate as an industry has survived the pandemic better than most other sectors. Commercial real estate and offices have regrettably taken the largest hit. Even if COVID had an impact on early 2020 residential sales, towards the end of 2020 things were normalising almost globally.
A good home sells, just as it did before the pandemic. In the US especially, demand is much higher than supply, which has caused steady price increases particularly since 2000.
Mortgage rates globally, especially in Europe and US will remain low in 2021 even in Asia rates have been relatively cheap in 2020 and will continue to be so in 2021. This will encourage more first time buyers, as well as property investors to take advantage of low rates and get less expensive debt.
Government infrastructure projects are on hold
An analysis by the National League of Cities predicts that 65% of cities will delay or cancel infrastructure projects due to COVID-19.
This may cause delays to expected property value and land increase in locations where the plans for infrastructure improvements are already agreed. .
Offices and commercial real estate is losing value
Due to the extended lockdowns as well as the change in thinking about offices, we have seen office rental prices drop across entire markets; Europe, Asia as well as North America.
Large commercial spaces in key locations are not worth what they used to be. Around the world we have seen key stores closing, and tenants unable to pay rent or delaying payments.
It is difficult to predict where 2021 will take us, but the takeaway is clear; in 2019 most employers would not let their employees work remotely for more than a day during the week. Now in 2021 it’s common for people to visit their office once a month or less. In three words: a complete reversal.
As industry professionals, it is our job to find innovative new solutions for these now vacant spaces, and this is where the year 2021 will be interesting. We will update this report in the fall of 2021 to include some intriguing developments on this subject.
Industry standard conversion rate
Let’s take a look at the standard industry conversion rates for real estate agencies, brokerages and developers.
For the statistics following we have analysed conversion from 126 real estate companies that all have 50 000 visitors or more every month. All websites are split into the three following categories.
Average conversion rates in Real Estate are very low compared to other industries. This is due to the type of traffic that real estate gets. An average person might purchase and sell a home only a few times in their lifetime, while still searching for properties on a weekly or monthly basis.
Average conversion rates in other industries:
|
Desktop |
Mobile |
|
|
E-Commerce |
1.82% - 3.71% |
1.35% - 3.25% |
|
B2B Websites |
2.13% - 5.75% |
2.01% - 5.42% |
|
Landing pages |
2.25% - 6.74% |
1.93% - 5.66% |
These numbers are from research from websites outside of the real estate industry who’s conversion rates have been analysed. We have also cross referenced our numbers to the averages in multiple different articles and found that these numbers are realistic if not exact.
We have broken the numbers by agencies, developers and commercial real estate companies. These three segments cater to such different customers that separating the data is necessary.
|
Agencies |
Developers |
Commercial |
|
|
Conversion rate (AVG) |
0.62% |
2.45% |
3.34% |
|
* Property page (%) |
1.5% |
4.3% |
|
|
** Home page (%) |
0.3% |
1.2% |
3.34% |
** Conversion on home pages, out of 100 people who see a property, 1.5% leave their details
We have taken 147 real estate websites, where we have access to the data, gotten the average conversion for each and found the averages for each. The conversion rate in the industry is less than 1%. Best websites range around 2-3% and worst under 0.3%. The split is large and caused by multiple factors such as traffic quality, property value and website conversion focus.
For example, we see that highly trafficked sites with extremely high property costs often have much low conversion rates as people have no real purchase intent, but are interested in browsing the properties.
New tools
Many tools have been released in the last few years that have positively impacted lead conversion rates on websites. Those with the time to implement them saw the best results.
In this section, we explore new tools that have wide adoption and discuss the impact on conversion rates that they have.
Uprealer's chatbots.
New tools to move the “open house” online
3D virtual tours do an amazing job of showing a property in more detail. It feels like you are actually there in person because you can practically move from room to room. This function has been an incredible tool during the lockdowns caused by COVID, wary potential customers who do not want to visit a location are more likely to be converted
There are many 3D tour providers out there in the market. One of them that has stood out with many agencies and developers is Matterport. They provide amazing 3D tours, however as a stand alone feature, it misses out on a huge opportunity for converting website visitors into leads.
Combine 3D tours with virtual assistants to create a truly unique experience. As much as they provide a lively experience, it’s unnecessarily making the website visitor work to indicate that they are interested in the property. Usually what happens is, if the visitor is interested in the property and wants to learn more or get in touch with an agent, they need to get out of the tour, go back to the property page and scroll up and down until they find a contact form to get in touch with the agent. It makes it even more difficult, if the visitor has to go all the way to the contact page only for a phone number.
Create an interactive experience with the 3D tour and any other visuals of the property on the left side to share with your prospective buyers. Then on the right side start an engaging conversation to arouse their interest, tell them a few things about the property, give them options to make it easier for them to discover answers to questions they have about the property.
Once all that is there, give them an easy window for them to leave their contact details, to schedule a live viewing or even to say that this is not the type of property they’re looking for but they can add their own information about what they need.
The great thing is, all of this happens in the same place. The prospective buyer didn’t have to go around the property page or website in general for a way to get in touch. It all happened through that single touch point and the whole process became much easier for the prospective buyer.
Before
After
This is how 3D tours can be used to there maximum potential!
Stop your visitors from leaving and turn them into leads with exit popups
Remember that feeling where when visiting a website and not even two seconds in, a flashing pop-up blocks your screen?
The immediate reflex is to close it because you don’t know anything about this brand and it’s demanding your attention and contact details. Who would want to share their email address to join a newsletter about a business they barely know or care about?
Pop-ups when used correctly can work extremely well for lead generation. They may be used for lead generation, growing newsletter subscribers, getting feedback and directing visitors to other important pages of your website.
When creating one, you should start by imagining yourself as a visitor.
Here are a few things to avoid every time to ensure visitors aren’t annoyed.
1. Identify your business goal - what do you want your website visitor to do? Is it for them to leave their contact details, join your newsletter or leave feedback?
2. Don’t request too much information - This is potentially where your funnel begins with the pop-up, so don’t make it too challenging for them to opt in. You can ask for more details later.
3. Show it at the right time - This is where lots of websites go wrong with the pop-up. The biggest reason why people get that immediate reflex to close and never visit that page or site again is when it’s as soon as the page has loaded or another inappropriate time.
Show the pop-up only if they have been engaged with the website for a certain amount of time. There is no best timing written in stone as it varies by website. Start with 15 seconds and then overtime check your website analytics to identify the average time spent.
Exit-intent - If they are about to leave the website, that's a perfect time to show it. As it is one last chance for them to engage.
4. How often to show it - For first time visitors, show the pop-up once per session. When they are returning back to the website, you can show it to them again.
How to get started with Google Analytics
Engage your customers inside your content
Want to add one more layer of conversion on your website, but don’t want to bother your users with more pop-ups?
A good new solution for this is inline bots, a technology to create conversations and place them inside content. It is practically a choice-driven conversation that gets started inside your website, usually inside a blog, after a search or other similar non-conventional place.
This has been proven to work well with highly trafficked content, and as another layer of conversion in the footer or other generic page structures. You can create these types of chatbots using Uprealer.
Create seller leads with automatic value estimations
More and more real estate agencies are utilizing automatic real estate home valuations through a range of different tools.
Mostly the tools are still inaccurate and rely on data from marketplaces. However as lead magnets they are great, and can be used widely to capture the attention of a large number of buyers on Facebook. Many of these buyer leads will not be ready to sell as they will be just interested in getting their home valued.
These types of automatic value estimations can be built very quickly by asking the user simple questions and then generating a value based on it. You can utilise API’s such as Zillows API or utilise the prebuilt tool from us at Uprealer. Our property valuation tool can be white labeled for your business.
Install a chatbot, preferably a pre-built “non-ai” version
Chatbots have been around for some time now, but only recently have they really started impacting conversions. There are a lot of misconceptions about chatbots. Most people we talk to have a feeling that “chatbots don’t understand anything”. This is true, but only for the “AI” type chatbots.
Chatbots can be used in a lot of different cases; Allow customers to get in touch easier with floating touch points, help them find the right property, get a quick home valuation, or talk directly to an agent over live chat. In the last case, the chatbot can be used to pre-qualify the lead so the agent doesn't spend unnecessary time with the prospect.
There are two main types of chatbots;
1. AI-driven chatbots
When businesses hear or think about the word chatbot, they immediately think about AI chatbots where a bot can answer any question. AI chatbots are very far away from being AI. It requires a lot of manual training.
AI chatbots sound nice and fancy, but often have a detrimental impact on conversion. At Uprealer we built AI-driven chatbots for dozens of real estate companies as a pilot and saw queries that had nothing to do with the business or with real estate in general.
This is due to the fact that bots don’t have the answers users are seeking and end up confusing and repelling customers compared to pre-scripted flows.
Benefits: Can answer thousands of customer service related questions and provide fast answers.
Cons: Horrible for lead generation, reduces the lead count.
2. Pre-built “click” chatbots.
Pre-built chatbots that have a goal to gather users leads on the other hand work very well in real estate.
After giving up on AIdriven chatbots for real estate, we started focusing on click driven chatbots and saw success. Now as a team we have built over 200 chatbots and have 99.4% customer satisfaction.
This type of lead generation just works.
Benefits: Lead increase of 30-40% on most websites
Cons: Don’t expect it to be smarter than you build it
Here is an example of a very well converting chatbot with pre-built answers. The goal is to explain the USP of your company and drive the user to choose the actions they want to take immediately.
Agent appointment scheduling
Appointment scheduling tools have been available for quite some time now, but recently we’ve seen more utilization in the real estate space. A good example of this is arranging a property visit, you can get your visitor to book a good time slot for them, and then organize everything for their meeting. Just make sure to call them up, as we see a lot of these types of meetings being ignored.
There are many tools to accomplish this, one excellent example is Calendly. If a customer is very interested in a certain property, don't make them wait. Just give them access to your agents' calendar availability and ask them to book an appointment.
Example
This will work extremely well for developers more than agencies. Even if you are an agency and you know exactly when to show the house, you can keep your calendar open. It might not be a live viewing but the person might just want to talk to the agent, so give them that flexibility for anything they need, when they want it.
Conversion ideas
Improve your copy: Explain why a customer should choose you
We have analysed over 200 different real estate websites and noticed a recurring theme.
Most real estate brands don't explain their value proposition clearly enough for their potential customers to understand why they should be choosing that particular provider instead of someone else.
Most websites focus on the brand. Making things pretty and the goal is to seem large and all-knowing. But why would the customer choose a certain real estate company to sell their property?
Why should Brand A deserve the chance to be chosen instead of Brand B, C, D or E. What’s your speciality? Are you a trusted authority? Can you really help me with what I am looking for?
Have you seen how so many brands create websites and leave their main page empty? Unless you are Facebook, Apple, Zillow or a similarly reputable business no one will really know who you are and what your strengths are unless you let them know quickly.
Let's look at an example;
Strand Properties is a real estate agency focusing on helping you find the best properties for resale and developments in Marbella, Spain.
Screenshot of the front page before
With one look you can see that the front page is very clean and simple. As soon as you get here you read the words ‘Strand Properties’ and look at the background image. Now with that bit of information, you can easily guess that Strand Properties has something to do with real estate.
However, beyond this, you don’t have more information to find out what their speciality is. Are they more focused on rentals? What locations do they focus on? Are they a developer or constructor?
For a lot of people buying their first home, holiday home or even retirement home is a big experience that is also a huge commitment to them. Your unique selling point should immediately make people feel that you are the best and the only choice for them.
Strand Properties’ focus was hidden on the bottom of their website when it should have been highlighted in a prominent place at the top of the main page.
They made a change by bringing it out in the open with a chatbot.
Screenshot of the front page after
Let’s take a closer look at what the chatbot is saying.
The chatbot simply welcomes the website visitor by saying “Hello! Welcome to Strand Properties.”
Then it tells the visitor what their unique selling point is by saying “We sell properties all over the Costa del Sol with a focus on Marbella and its surroundings.” This highlights that their main focus is properties in Marbella. If a visitor is looking for a property in Barcelona, Strand Properties might not be the right fit for them but if they are looking in Marbella, the visitor knows they are on a highly relevant and useful page.
Turn your high traffic blog into leads with popups and chatbots
You spend hours writing great content, you make sure you put in the effort for keyword research to boost your rankings up your ranking and come up with the best titles, get them intrigued or have someone from marketing to do the entire job for you.
Most marketers spend all their time making sure enough people read their content but don’t really stop to think if their readers like what they can see or whether they are looking for something else? Whether the article really got them thinking and generated more questions in their mind? People read blog posts when they are in research mode before making a purchase, wanting to get all of their burning questions answered.
For the whole reason you created that content, you want to get the most out of it. You want to keep identifying if this is the type of content your readers are looking for or do they want different topics? How can I convert my readers into potential customers? You won’t know that unless you engage with them and ask directly about it. Now you might think that you don’t want to interrupt them, you won’t, you simply will be engaging with them on the topic and creating a more dynamic experience.
So how can you do this? Use a conversation somewhere around the pages that has a lot of traffic to ask them if what they were reading was more interesting to them and if they’d like to be kept up to date with similar content.
Giving your website visitors more than one way to get in touch
We understand that you don’t want to annoy your visitors but your website is technically your “real estate” space for them to learn about and engage with you if they are interested. Especially on mobile, having to scroll up and down for pieces of information and then having to find the contact form all the way at the bottom can be frustrating.
Don’t just have one contact form at the bottom of the page. Give them multiple touchpoints to express interest. Make it more engaging. Use a conversational form or a chatbot, and an exit pop-up.
Qualify your leads - but not too much
When buying or selling a property the process is practically almost the same around the world. However, certain agencies might have their own process when they do things, or certain countries might have different procedures in applying and qualifying for a bank loan.
Most importantly, if someone is interested in buying or selling a property, as a brokerage or agency, you want to qualify them. Quality matters more than quantity. Don’t let someone just type in their name, email and phone number when they are interested in a property.
Ask them a few more questions that matter to you. For example, it could be something like how many bedrooms are you interested in? What location is it that they are interested in buying? This mostly matters if the lead is submitted through the home or the other pages that they submit on your website, other than the property page.
Qualifying the customer prior to any of your agents making that first phone call will help save a lot of time.
We have seen that 5-7 questions from the customer is a sweet spot where you lose some leads, but the quality of the leads is higher and drop-offs are still very low.
Always send leads directly to the right agent
Do you want to lose prospective buyers or sellers to your competition?
When a person is interested in buying or selling a property, they are not going to just look at one source and wait for one agent to get in touch.
They will look at different websites and providers. Because they want things to happen fast, in their mind they keep thinking, ‘I want someone to get in touch with me now'. Not that they want to rush the process but they want and require immediate attention as to who will help them get started.
If a prospective buyer is looking at a certain property, one way you can not lose out to the competition is by sending the lead details immediately to the relevant agent who is responsible for that particular property. Or if the prospective buyer had a question, the agent could join via a live chat conversation to share the information the buyer is looking for. Or if not, for the agent to simply pick up the phone and get on a call immediately.
However, if the lead goes to a middle management person in the organization and has to redistribute the lead to the relevant agent, that's a lot of time that has been wasted and you are letting the competition steal your prospective buyer.
Always make sure to have a picture of the agent so the prospective buyer feels that they can trust the company.
Lead will go directly to the right agent. This speeds up service and improves customer experience.
If they can't find what they are looking for - step in to help
Many times when people visit a website and what is being said isn’t clear or they can't find the information they are looking for, they are just going to leave your website. This results in a higher bounce rate.
This usually happens because you run ads with a certain value proposition and if once they visit the website it doesn’t really match the advertisement they saw in the first place or simply because the home page isn’t saying much to spark their interest.
When you understand they have been browsing for more than 45 seconds, you could set up a pop-up or form to say ‘Did you not find what you were looking for?’ Just tell us what you were looking for and we will search our listings to match your ideal home and send it your way. Then grab their email address and send more listings.
Buyer leads are almost always sellers leads
Unless it's a first time home buyer, usually when people are looking for a new home, it’s likely that they also want to sell their current home.
This is another place where you can use two qualifying questions to identify that. Simply ask, ‘Are you a first time home buyer?’ and if the answer is yes, great then ask ‘Are you looking to sell your current home?’.
If they say yes, this is wonderful news and you can easily kill two birds with one stone. You can help them find the dream home for their next chapter in life and you can also be the trusted advisor helping guide them through the process of selling their home.
"Always asking our clients if they a property to sell increased our revenue by 17.4% in 2021."Miranda - Williams Estates
Build content to create authority and trust
This is a hard one, requiring a lot of work. This is what we are doing with this content piece and ideally what you want to do with your customers as well. Great examples of this type of content are local market reports, guides on getting the most out of their property etc.
Offer something for the people who are browsing. There are people who just browse through websites to see what’s out there. This is literally window shopping. They are thinking of buying their first home and they know it’s a major commitment so they want to make sure that they are doing the right thing and will be working with the right brokerage.
If they are browsing through websites, reading many blog articles is usually in research mode. This is a great way for you to learn more about them by asking a few questions. For example, asking them when they are looking to buy their first home?
If they say in 6 months time, then great! Add them to an email nurturing list and occasionally send them more information about the steps involved in buying a house, what is required of them and the time frame for the purchasing and moving in process.
In about 3 months time, you can reach out to them and find out where they are at in terms of progress. You won’t be going in cold because you have warmed them up and are their trusted authority to help them through the entire process. And they are simply going to be happy that someone they trust is going to help them through it all.
Utilise context on your contact forms and CTA’s
Make sure you speak to your customers in personalised ways, for example; if a user is on a property page, you can have your contact form and chatbot on that page talk to the user about that property.
For example: Are you interested in [address]?
We ran an A/B test on this versus a generic form and got a 24% lead conversion increase on property pages. From 1948 leads to 2234 leads.
Similarly on your website’s agent pages, use copy like “Buy with [agent name]”, “Sell with [agent name]” to create a relatable context.
You could also welcome back your visitors and change your websites H1 or chatbot copy based on the users cookies.
How to get started with Google Analytics
Track your website conversions
Most importantly track all your conversions - this is the only way for you to learn what is working the best. If not how can you test things that work and don't. Things that aren’t working need to be identified quickly and changed.
Most importantly, start with thinking about what numbers really matter for your business. Does it matter for you to know how many seller leads your website generates, or would you rather track your website visitors. Figure out the numbers you want to grow and focus on them.
The numbers to track we recommend for real estate agencies:
1. Seller leads
2. Buyer leads
3. Website visitors (To see the growth of your website)
4. Bounce rate (To see if your users are engaging)
How to get started with Google Analytics
How to track conversions
Let’s go through a couple of ways on how to track your conversions. There are a few most commonly used ways to track conversions.
The most common way to track your website is to use Google Analytics, it gives you a good way to track your website traffic right out of the box. Most likely, your website already has Google Analytics installed, and you know how to use it to an extent.
Tracking conversions is where Google Analytics gets a little more difficult. To track conversions you will need to create JavaScript events, or separate thank you pages and place them on the right pages. To track seller and buyer leads, you could create two separate thank you pages, and add goals to those thank you pages. You would still need to do the redirects on all of your forms.
An alternative solution for the tracking of your website is Uprealer insights, which is focused on exactly these goals, and does the job automatically for you. Uprealer analytics gives you full form tracking out of the box, as well as allows you to create chatbots, forms and pop-ups for your real estate website. Lead types can then be easily tracked and sent to the right people.
Learn more about Uprealer insights
Converting more leads is simple, start today
We have explored the trends, tools and conversion ideas on how other real estate companies are improving their conversion rates, and growing their businesses. We would like to encourage you to implement a few of these things to get your website lead conversion to the next level.
Small efforts can make a huge impact on your conversion, especially if your traffic numbers are high.
Let’s say you have 3000 daily visitors. Increasing your conversion from 0.8% to 1.5% increases your yearly leads from 8544 to 16020. With the average lead value of $500, this would be $3 738 000 value generated with small changes. Taking a small effort, in this case, is simply worth it.
The simple steps you can get this done is.
1. Set up analytics that matter and you can trust
2. Add new conversion tools to your website and improve existing
3. See your numbers grow
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3
If you don’t have the experience, time or just want a professional to do this for you, who has done it more than 100 times, you’re in the right place. At Uprealer we focus on making this change for you, we have developed a toolset for real estate website conversion and analytics, which comes with a hands-on service.
We can help you get there faster
If you want to double your leads in 2021 and infinitely into the future, check us out on Uprealer.com and get in touch with us for a free website conversion strategy. Our Real Estate conversion specialists will reveal the best ideas to improve your website conversion and ROI.
Free consulting call