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Upgrade Your Online Selling
Generating Online Sales Can Reap Many Benefits — If Done Correctly
By Blair Kuhnen, Contributing Editor
February 1, 2005
GIANTS
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If you're like most builders, the answer is probably "not very well!" Such shortcomings are costing you business and hurting your bottom line.
According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), there are now at least 606 million people online regularly. Together, they share information — equivalent to the entire content of the Library of Congress — more than 64,000 times every day. NAR also reports that in 2003, 71 percent of home buyers used the Internet to research their home purchases.
Builders working in this marketing medium find they are improving leads and sales to customers by several hundred percent — a staggering improvement that leaves builders both dumbfounded as well as delighted.
Three areas of focus seem to lead builders on the cutting edge to these extraordinary returns:
- They make Internet technologies and their Web presence an integral part of an overall marketing strategy. The Web site becomes part of a larger marketing system, with processes and tools that glue all the elements together.
- They constantly search for Web site best practices and execute quickly on those shown to drive higher response rates from consumers.
- They have a systematic methodology in place—both people and processes—to deal with leads and follow up fast to convert them into prospects and buyers.
Your Web site needs to be part of an overall marketing plan that may include radio, TV, direct mail, print advertising, outdoor advertising, public relations and promotional events. To generate higher sales velocities, lower marketing costs and build momentum in every community, you should integrate your Web site with all of these other activities.
Every ad, no matter where it appears, should prominently feature your Web site address. That site is the hub of your interactive marketing strategy. Use every means possible to drive traffic to it. In the same way, the Web site should reference and reinforce the other elements of your marketing campaigns. Ads that appear on billboards or in TV campaigns for specific communities should also appear on the Web site to link electronic traffic to that portion of the site featuring the advertised project.
Your Web site must be more than an online brochure rack of community information and house plans. If done properly, it will generate more, higher quality leads, than any other source. When your Web site is part of a larger marketing system, it will integrate upstream, to reinforce all your other advertising, and downstream, to make sales people in the model homes far more productive.
Upstream ImpactsMake sure all your external marketing encourages use of the Web site and funnels those prospects directly into an automated system for follow-up contacts. Does this mean every ad should be an ad for the Web site? No, but what it does mean is that every time you plan a campaign on your own or with your ad agency, consider how home shoppers can learn more when they are not yet ready to visit your site or pick up the phone. The Web site is a soft tickle for prospects not yet ready for the hook.
Your Web content should also cater to prospects from third party sites you may use for electronic advertising (such as www.homebuilder.com, www.newhomesource.com, www.americanhomeguides.com and local media Web sites). In most markets, these third party sites generate awareness and leads at very favorable costs compared to print media.
Several savvy national builders, aggressively promote their Web sites in all offline media and provide external partners (such as www.NewHomeSource.com) with a data feed of their Web content.
Reinforce your print and other advertising media buys (such as Web, TV and radio ads) by featuring them on your Web site. Consumers need to easily find the details of a promotion or featured community on the Web site. On a Web site, you have more space and time to deepen a buyer's interest than a 30-second TV ad can provide. Reinforcing offline promotions and advertising on your site will drive immediate improvement in leads generated.
Downstream ImpactsDownstream integration is where the rubber really meets the road — feeding leads into your automated systems for follow-up contacts. Many large, public builders have become masters at downstream integration. They generate leads on their Web sites or from third parties and have automated systems for importing these leads into sophisticated follow-up systems, and even further — into point of sale applications.
Even if you don't yet have a fully automated system for following up on leads, you can still put a process in place to handle Web-generated leads. Genesis Residential Group, a small suburban infill builder in the Tampa market, does this with just a Web site and an inexpensive follow-up tool. The firm still has manual handoffs, but it has a systematic approach for managing its database of leads to make sure every lead is treated well.
Design Your System For ResultsWhen redesigning your Web site, consult the following practices to ensure extraordinary results:
- Make your pages light in content. More than a third of Web site users still access the Internet through dial-up accounts. If your average page download is more than 75K, don't expect those dial-up users to stick around long. Test your pages on a dial-up modem — after clearing your memory cache — to make sure the user's experience will meet consumer expectations.
- Make the site easy to use and test it to make sure users can accomplish their goals. Ask someone from your company to carry out these instructions: "You are relocating to this city from out of state. Go to our Web site, find a neighborhood and home you like, get directions, find the elementary and secondary schools, and ask for a brochure." Then, just observe. Where does the search get stuck? What's confusing? If you develop a new Web site, make sure this type of usability testing is part of your early design process. Don't wait until the site is complete to find out it's too hard to use.
- Make it easy for users to ask questions and start a dialogue. Invite them to talk with an online sales counselor or on-site sales agent. If you have an online sales counselor, promote that fact on the Web site and offer that person's services to online home shoppers.
- Use space on your Web site to leverage current promotions in other media. The clear calls to action will improve lead volume, and since you've already created the content, the marginal cost is near zero.
- Add "coming soon" community subscriptions. People are drawn to anything that is "new" or "free." Allow home shoppers the opportunity to receive free information about new communities. Let Web site visitors sign up for a shot at the first release of lots, at advantageous pricing.
- Allow users to customize their experience via e-brochures, "my favorites." By letting users interact with your Web site, by selecting what they want or saving their favorites, you provide a reason for them to return. When they do so, you can remind them about communities they might like to visit in person.
Each of these best practices is fairly inexpensive. For the price of one good ad in a major newspaper, a builder can have a first-class Web presence that sells 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Fire Up Your Follow UpThe key to converting all of your Web leads into physical traffic in the models, is the combination of people, processes and tools that smooth the transition from browser to buyer.
Designate — or hire — a staff member to be responsible for handling incoming Web leads. Since sales people don't always rely on Web-generated leads, it is important to have someone handling Web-generated sales leads.
Having a sales force that does not utilize Web-generated leads often degenerates into slow and inadequate responses that do not meet online home shoppers expectations. Hiring a specialist in online lead generation, follow-up and selling can cure this problem.
The consequences of poor lead follow-up are profound. Each time a prospective buyer asks for help and the plea goes unanswered or is poorly answered, the builder's brand is damaged. It reduces trust and the effectiveness of all sales and marketing efforts.
Bad word of mouth spreads like wildfire, and that's what you're launching whenever you disappoint home shoppers online.
Builders often hire on-site sales people for their closing skills. However, the sales people sometimes lack good prospecting skills or any interest in dealing effectively with leads generated on the Internet.
Centex Homes has developed one of the most effective online sales counselor programs in the housing industry. In many of its strong markets, Centex is now able to generate more than a dozen sales each month directly from contacts initiated on its Web site.
Putting someone in charge of Web-leads makes good business sense. Whether you plan to hire someone, or search from within, the person in this position should have the following traits:
- A self-starter. Someone who can work with little supervision and without the exact mix of tools and technology he or she may regard as ideal. The person should be a problem-solver and able to come up with solutions to unique challenges. Some might describe this personality as a squeaky wheel. But these individuals see themselves as business owners.
- A salesperson. To do this job effectively, you need sales skills and the motivation level good salespeople possess. But this is service-based selling. Think of an online sales counselor as a concierge. The person needs good writing skills, and a pleasing telephone personality. But first and foremost, this is a salesperson.
- Extensive product knowledge. The person must fully understand the product — both house plans and communities — to be effective. After spending a good deal of training time in the communities and talking with on-site salespeople, the online sales counselor can talk with prospects about communities and individual house plans. That helps add value to the home shopping process.
- Solid computer and Web skills. This person has to juggle a lot of interactive balls at once. The ability to cut, paste, manipulate and insert links here and there has to be strong.
After you have the right person in place, you need a method for processing all those leads your Web site will generate.
Start with a close look at your processes and tasks to help determine your needs. Look at the work now being done and what you can hope to migrate toward. If your organization and the lead volume you are now generating from your Web site are relatively small, you may be effective with less sophisticated systems than the largest builders require.
To determine the right tools for your company, ask these questions:
- Will you advertise in builder portals? If so, you need the ability to send data electronically and receive leads in a data format.
- Do you have a number of communities and generate many leads? Then perhaps you need a system that will automatically individualize message campaigns.
- Do you want different messages going out to leads versus those that go to people who visit the models and those who actually buy homes? Then your system will have to be integrated with online activity.
- Do you have a system for generating contracts and production schedules? If so, your system for handling online leads may need to feed that system.
The bottom line is that you need to put tools in place to support your methodology, or what you will generate will be chaos, not sales. When you shop for these tools, boil your needs down to a few simple requirements, and then ask the prospective vendors to show you how their systems will work to accomplish these specific requirements.
| Author Information |
| Blair Kuhnen is a partner and marketing system developer for Realty InfoLinks in Dallas, Texas. He can be reached at 972-661-1975 or via e-mail at blair@realtyinfolinks.com. |
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© 2009, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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