Ep23: Realtor SMS Engagement Strategy for Moving Companies

All right, here we go. When sent back with the moving game, this is a great one right here. Okay, so if you're looking to get more leads, more referral business, lower your acquisition cost per customer, then this is a great episode. We're going to talk about realtor SMS engagement. So one thing that I, as an owner, you know, I've learned that the best way to really grow is getting out and shaking hands. The struggle for me is I just, you know, in my lifestyle, having multiple businesses. I just wasn't willing to be out in the community five nights a week. And there's other owners that are doing a great job with this and they're growing really fast and getting good, organic, referral, repeat growth. But again, I just, I valued being home in the evenings and there's a lot of good networking opportunities, but a lot of them are after hours. And while I'll go to some of them, but I just wasn't going to be out there every other night. And so instead I wanted to have a system that I could make a quick engagement. And really I just wanted to get my company name in the hands of realtor's. And so I focused on realtor's and brokers. And so what we did is we use USA Home listings. We have tier two data, which gives you the agent name and phone number who listed the property. And we have a marketing assistant. And what that person's job is is every day, we do this Monday through Saturday, every day. He goes into USA Home listings and he does an SMS to every agent who's listed a new property or went pending. And we have a series of SMS templates. And basically it's really simple. He messages as if he's the owner. So he uses my name. So the text basically goes, Hey Mark, it's Winston. I'm the owner of big, like moving exclamation point. Saw you just listed one, two, three main street, wanted to say congrats. Dot, dot, dot. Curious, do you have a great go to moving company yet? Question mark. And that's the template. And then it gets adjusted a little bit if it's a pending and we've got just a couple templates. It's easy. And so the goal is to make engagement. And so Brett, our marketing assistant, he sends these messages every single day. What's some key concepts here is that every agent, their phone number gets saved into our main phone system. And beside it, we put all caps agent. So we're increasing our phone database, putting every real realtor and broker in there. And we pay our guy $150 a week. We're already paying for the data through USA Homeless Things because we're on tier two. So we're just kind of double, you know, we're leveraging the data cost more. And what happens a lot of times is we'll get, we'll probably get, we don't have this down to the T, but it's about a 20 to 30% response rate each week. But it goes up as we message that agent multiple times. And we have, we deviate the message template if we message him a second, third, fourth, fifth time. And so what a lot of times will happen is we message the agent. They say, oh, thanks. Actually, I don't have somebody right now. Could you send me some info? And what we created was we created a curate, like a template curated email that is really helpful. It's got kind of a little bio about me and my wife. It's got all of our licensing and insurance and our unique selling propositions. It's got some useful tips. But on the top, the subject line of the email, it says forward to friends, family, and clients. And so what we tell the agent is, hey, this has everything somebody would need to know. If anybody ever asks you about moving, just forward this email. You don't need to type anything just forward this. And we have some special coupons in there as well. And the second thing that we do from the SMS engagement is we set up realtor phone calls. So again, you can go a step further and set up coffee meetups and really dig into it more. I just needed to do something that was better for me as an absentee. Semi absentee owner. So Brett will engage with people. And if they're interested to have a call, then he just lays it up to me and says, hey, this person wants to get on the phone sometime this week. And then I will reach out to them personally then and call them and have a 5, 10, 15 minute phone call, create a relationship. But I didn't have to go do all the prospecting and heavy work. I just got the phone call boom right there. And you can do that. You can set that up to an owner or you can set it up to a sales rep or to a biz dev person really easily. I think that this is a great tool because it gets us a lot of touch points. We've drastically seen our referral business climb and it's going up month over month over month. And there's tons of times where we'll message in same day we get a lead from a referral lead from this agent. And you can have a VA do this. If you've got somebody, I just already have like a marketing part time assistant. That's a college student and he does multiple things for me. So that's it's a good good thing for us. But you can make your cost on this even lower if you use a VA because it's so easy. They don't have to talk to anybody on the phone. All they have to do is log in to like three things. You need a template. You need to talk for them. You need the data and you need your VoIP system. So it's really easy to train and plug somebody into this. And it's going to get your name out. So now what's happened is me and my wife, we've went to some like bigger events for like our common wealth area. And I'll have people come up to me and be like, "Hey, oh my gosh, you're Winston." Oh, we spoke a little bit via text and I kind of have to keep my head on a swivel because I'm like, "Oh yeah, you know." So you just have to look at it with the right heart. We're not trying to mislead people. It's just I know that if we make these messages so it leads as me the owner, they're going to be a little more inclined to respond and engage because everybody wants to talk to the owner. And over time I do connect with people on a one-on-one basis. It's harder for me as an owner to be in the trenches on the biz dev side and the prospecting side and that you can create a system and delegate that out. This is work super well for us. If you're looking for a way to increase referral business, maybe not increase your overhead super big, then you can make all kinds of adjustments to this process to make it even better for you and engage your realtors and brokers in your market. We will try to find lots of ways to engage, we'll offer, "Hey, we could do a drop off some print marketing materials at your office next week. When are you going to be there?" And then the marketing assistant just passes that off to an outside sales rep and they put that into their route. So that's one thing we do. We will offer if it's an agent that we see regularly having stuff come up, we'll say, "Hey, let us know when your next open house is and we'll have one of our sales reps come out with food and we'll sponsor and help you with your open house." Right. We're just trying to find any way possible to bring value and grow the relationship, but you have to get started at the end of the day. If you're not in their phone, if they don't know your name, if they don't know your company and what you do, then you're not going to get a referral. So you just have to start with planning seeds and that's why I love just a strong SMS engagement program because you're getting your company name in a lot of people's hands. And then it's just the process of doing great business, being reputable, caring about other people, right? And so going the extra mile. So I hope that helps. If you are struggling with finding the right person to do this, reach out to Move Up. Move Up can help you if it's maybe a marketing role or if you're looking to find a referral for somebody to get you a VA to run this program. You can help you with that. And as always, if you're struggling with movers and drivers, there's nobody else other than Move Up. Go to MoveUpConsolting.com, fill out a quick form. Those guys will help you out. and build a rock star, A team, and be able to rock your market and be super profitable. Alright, we'll see you on the next episode.