What or how do you handle your real estate investor leads? You need a system most preferably an automated way to communicate with your real estate investor leads.

I’m all about automating as much of my business as possible.  One of the most important parts of your business that you can automate is following up with new prospects/leads.

The easiest ways to do that is to use an email autoresponder/follow-up service.  Some people call this “drip marketing”.  What they mean by that is, your marketing message slowly drips to people over a period of time.

Whatever you want to call it, it basically involves setting up a series of emails that will automatically go out to each new prospect over a period of time.  If you have ever signed up for anything online (and who hasn’t?), you’ve likely experienced this.  Maybe it’s a free report or some other free resource.  To get it, you have to enter your email address.  And then what happens?  You start getting emails from that company.  Usually, they’re personalized with your name.

You know someone isn’t manually sending out each of those emails.  Rather, they’re using an email marketing system or email autoresponder system to manage it all.  Each system is a little different, but they all work basically the same way.

You go in and write your emails and tell the system when you want them to go out.  For example, Email 1 will go out immediately after someone signs up.  Email 2 will go out the day after they sign up. Then  Email 3 will go out two days later.  Email 4 will go out after 1 week, and so on.  With most systems, you can plug in as many follow-up emails as you like, over as long of a period of time as you like – even months down the road.

Once you set it up, each person who gets plugged into your mailing list will get this series of emails automatically.

One great benefit of using something like this is that you can educate your prospects and answer a lot of questions they may have, but also pre-sell them on working with you.  By keeping in touch, they’ll remember you.  In a sense, it’s like you’re building a relationship with them.

If you have a website, you’ll want to set it up where, when people contact you to request information or a free report or something, they’ll automatically get added to your mailing list, which starts the follow-up messages automatically.  This way it’s mostly hands-off.

Plus, once you have people on a mailing list, you can go in and send the entire list an email at once.  So if you have a list of buyers, when you get a new property under contract, you can go in and send out an email to your whole list about it.  This can save a ton of time over manually emailing each potential buyer, and may help move your properties faster.

Author Responder Services

There are a number of services out there that offer this.  Here are a few:

• MailChimp – This one is nice because they have a free level. This is a great way to start out because you can start building your list without any expense while your list is small.  Once it gets to a certain number of subscribers, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.  Their rates are competitive and they have a good service.  The only thing is, with the free level you can’t really use their automation.  You can put people on a mailing list and send out manual, one-time emails, but you can automate the follow-up process.  You’ll need one of their paid plans for that.
• Aweber – They’ve been around a while and their system is pretty easy to use.
• GetResponse – Has also been around a while and easy to use.

Also, our Done Deal Website Pro plan includes a built-in email follow-up system.  That means you don’t have to go out and pay for an extra service.  And it makes the setup easier because it’s built right into your website.  Everything is easier to connect together.  If you prefer to use one of the services above, the forms on our website will connect with those services so that when someone fills out a form on your site, the person can get added to the appropriate mailing list.

But if you’re using your own hosting and want to use one of the services above, you’ll most likely want to connect the web forms on your website with those services.

If you’re using Formidable for your web forms, you may need to upgrade to their paid version.  Then you can search on Google for the word “formidable” and whatever email service you’re using.  For example, “formidable MailChimp” or “formidable Aweber”.  You should find instructions or WordPress plugins that will help you connect them together.

By automating your follow-up process, you’ll not only make life easier, but you’ll be following up more consistently, which will help you put more money in your pocket.

Again, if you want to make it easier to set up, I’d suggest checking out our Done Deal Website Pro plan since we include a built-in email marketing system that you can set up without having to install anything.

Disclosure:

Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. However, we recommend these services because we use them and have had good success with them so far. You don’t have to use our links, but we’re a small business and this helps us offset our costs, so we appreciate it.