As real estate investors looking for great deals, we tend to concentrate on direct mail and other offline methods. Yellow letters, postcards, bandit signs – you name it. It seems like we advertise in the real world. Not so much in the digital world.
Yet it seems like sales people in lots of other industries are turning more to the web and email marketing to find their prospects. The reason they are turning to the digital world is because their consumers are turning to the digital world. So why can’t real estate investors follow their profitable lead?
Many offline marketing methods make sense. It is much easier to find a physical address of a motivated seller than an email address. Not to mention we get tons of emails in our inboxes every day, but people don’t get too many letters.
But if we just think about motivated sellers, we are neglecting a large portion of our business. For every house we find with a motivated seller, we need money to buy that house. That means we need to find investors. Once we buy the house, we also need a buyer to turn that house into cash for us.
How about landlords? Are you in an area where your rentals or your pricing for your rental is popular? You may have 20-30 people interested in your property for rent. Many of these people prefer email over any other communication method.
How to Combat Email Information Overload
That’s where a product called Yesware comes in. Yesware is a plug-in for Outlook or Gmail that makes email a lot easier for you – especially if you are selling something like real estate. Take a look.
Yesware not only lets you track your email, but it can also:
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Tell you who has opened your email
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Tell you if they opened the email on their desktop or mobile device
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Tell you if the recipient opened your attachment(s)
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Tell you how long the recipient spent on each page of your presentation and how often they access it
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Tell you who has forwarded your email
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Create templates to send to people
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Schedule emails and alerts to send when they are most effective
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Interface with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software if you have it
In order to install Yesware to Gmail or Outlook, you just click on one of these buttons on the main page of Yesware. One important note is that you need Google Chrome or Firefox browsers to use Yesware.
Then when you go to your email, you should see a big pop-up box asking you to activate Yesware. It will automatically activate the free version of the software.
After activation, you will see a menu bar at the top of the screen explaining all your account information, navigate to reports, make templates, etc.
At the top of your email lower down on the screen, you will have another Yesware email bar where you can pull down a list of your latest email activity. There you can see who has been opening your emails, your attachments, how long they have spent looking at presentations, etc.
For more information on setting up Yesware in Gmail (although it is similar in Outlook), you can review this cool video.
Yesware has four different pricing plans. The free version allows you to track 100 emails a month, which should be enough to get you started. The free version will also allow you to create your own templates and provide reports of the effectiveness of your emails.
After your business grows, you may want to upgrade to the Pro version for $10/month. The Pro version allows you to track an unlimited number of emails, and:
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Allows you to schedule email sending
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Provide reminders to follow up with an email
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Track attachments, whether they are opened and how long they are viewed
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Copy Yesware data to most CRM platforms
The other two pricing programs, Team and Enterprise, are for larger businesses that have a sales team on staff. If your real estate business is growing to that level, congratulations!
Benefits of Yesware for Real Estate Investors
Yesware can really help out wholesalers, or anyone else looking to put together a great real estate deal.
On the prospecting side, once your offline advertising finds prospects, you can follow up with them from their email. When you send them the follow-ups, you can see how motivated they are to sell to you by how quickly or how often they open your email.
You can also set reminders (with the Pro version) to follow up with leads. Many times the motivated sellers take a lot of time and contacts before they are ready to pull the trigger.
A buyer’s list is also a great place to use Yesware.
Setting alerts to send information along to your buyers will keep them interested in you. You can also set up templates for each house you have under contract. Then just fill in the details of the particular deal and send out the ad to the list with just a couple of clicks.
Speaking of templates, landlords have lots of emails that could be set up as templates. Examples might be:
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Applications to prospective renters
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Routine maintenance reminders such as changing the furnace filter
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Non-payment of rent
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Eviction Notices
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Notice to Vacate
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Welcome Packages
Yesware can set up all of these templates and even schedule them to go out automatically at the right time.
How about potential private investors for your deals? Do you have a presentation you can send them? Interested to see if they open it? And if they do open it, how much time they spend on it? It might give you an idea of whether it is worth spending much time with that potential investor.
Yesware can really make your life as a real estate investor much simpler. You might want to test drive the free version to see if it right for your real estate business.
Systematize Your Business – It really helps to put systems and processes in place to run your business. In fact it is virtually impossible to grow beyond a certain level without systems. Take a look at your business and figure out what you can systematizing.
Investigate CRM – Customer Relationship Management is a hot buzzword, but what it really means is following up with your customers to let them know you care about their success, not just yours.
Organize Your Email – Email can really get out of control if you let it. The the best thing you can do is take some time to develop a strategy for handling your email, rather than racing through it while multitasking.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.