Lean Marketing in 2023 with SMS Marketing Engagement

Table of Contents

1. Mine your CRM
2. Cut back on PPC
3. Ramp up your Text Message Marketing
4. Dial Back the Cold Calls & Direct Mail
5. How Much are You Willing to Spend to Close a Deal?
6. The Payoff to Going Lean with Your Marketing Budget
7. More insights from the Blog:

January is all about starting fresh with the best intentions. We’ve all made (and hopefully kept) New Year’s resolutions, but when it comes to marketing your REI business, what can you resolve to do in the new year?
We’re going to cover:

• Hacks to maximize your CRM
• Cutting back on costly marketing channels
• Using an SMS engagement platform like Launch Control to revive stalled leads
• Reviewing the real costs to close a deal for various marketing channels

If you’re zeroing in on going lean, cutting budgets and pushing hard to fill your REI pipeline, read on. Here are the top ways you can stay lean and be proactive with your lead gen, rather than passively waiting on expensive marketing channels to pay off and running up your 2023 budget.

Mine your CRM

First place to look for leads in the new year is the last place you might think to look: your existing database or CRM. How many names do you have that have not been touched in the past 3+ months? Did you disposition each potential customer appropriately? Or could you be missing out on hidden revenue opportunities with sellers looking to let go of properties in the next financial quarter?

Don’t forget that marketing is never a one-and-done practice. It’s all about relevance and timing, and research shows it takes an average of 8 touches to make a sale. Are you sending the right message to the right person at the right time? If the timing was wrong before, you need to stay in front of those potential clients. Look in your existing systems for:

• Lists of names previously used in direct mail campaigns
• Unresponsive contacts with accurate contact information
• Phone numbers that have not been used in text marketing
• Any communication post-discovery that never converted

Cut back on PPC

According to 2022 research, the average cost per click (CPC) is  $1.40 in real estate, with an average 7.75% click through rate on pay per click (PPC) campaigns. This means you’ll be opening up your wallet to pay out for each potential lead. PPC is not the best way to fill a lead pipeline when your sights are set on lean marketing. Cue $$$$ for one potential lead and compare that to more successful, less costly channels.

Additionally, another downfall of PPC is the nature of passively waiting around for the right web traffic to see your ad, then to be motivated to click through and have your message resonate enough to send their contact details–it’s a slow, passive process that takes weeks of refining to optimize for the highest click through rate (CTR). That’s not to say you should avoid this channel completely, but it’s best to prioritize your spending and go after keywords with an achievable level of competition.

Ramp up your Text Message Marketing

Remember those untouched names sitting in your CRM? Time to pull out those lists and put them to work initiating conversations through SMS engagement. This proactive approach puts you in the driver seat, retargeting previously cold names to hook them into conversations and mine for new opportunities.

With an SMS engagement platform for real estate, you can import those previous direct mail lists and unresponsive, “ghosted” leads into your platform, customize your  messages with the right strategy to draw them into a response, and kick start a new campaign. Data shows that your prospects are far more likely to  open and respond to text messages compared to other channels like email or direct mail. 

And, to top it off, according to e-commerce research, 33% of text recipients respond to a call to action (CTA), and off that third of the audience, a full 47% will end up making a purchase. While we might still be in the early stages of seeing how that data translates for the real estate industry, the numbers speak for themselves. Your best bet to stay lean is to tap into the potential of text messages through SMS engagement. Finally, another alarming data point from that research shows that a full 61% of marketers are not using SMS as a marketing channel. Investing your lean marketing budget into SMS engagement could put you far ahead of the competition in your markets.

Dial Back the Cold Calls & Direct Mail

Where do you put your junk mail? Could your ideal customers view your prior direct mail campaigns as junk? Research shows approximately 90% of direct mail ends up in the trash. That’s a high risk if your message is off or your mailer simply doesn’t resonate with your key targets. Direct mail is another passive marketing channel that needs a large upfront investment for a low response rate averaging 0.5% to 2.0%–and that’s only counting responses. You still need to close the deal.

Let’s consider cold calling. Long held as a staple to a marketing and sales strategy mix, cold calling, while essential, costs your REI business tons in terms of time, a valuable but limited resource. If you’re going lean with your marketing budget, cold calling is not going to get you very far. Lean marketing means cutting back on costly, time consuming methods that are hiding in your marketing mix, even if they appear “free” at first glance. You can better allocate your time to focus on closing deals, rather than be slow or reactive in finding them.

How Much are You Willing to Spend to Close a Deal?

At the end of the day, lean marketing really boils down to your bottom line. If you have great data, you’re probably ahead of your peers. How much did you spend in the previous year toward marketing and cultivating leads? Did you track each channel down to a cost per lead? Let’s assume that you have and now you’re looking at a baseline of marketing spend for each of your marketing channels. Can you track that back to how many leads you need to close a deal?

We did the math on typical marketing costs to close a deal in popular channels and here are the results:

Cost per deal comparison: 

• Texting: $451/deal 
• Cold Calling: $2906/deal 
• Direct Mail: $3312/deal 
• PPC: $3640/deal

The Payoff to Going Lean with Your Marketing Budget

Not only will SMS engagement with your REI prospects help you kick off 2023 with a lean marketing initiative, but text message marketing with Launch Control, the #1 SMS engagement platform for real estate, will help you keep your cost per deal low. We can help you deliver the most value for every marketing dollar you plan to spend this year. Take advantage of the active strategy built into our SMS marketing engagement platform to stay lean with your marketing budget while pumping up your pipeline so you can close more deals each quarter. (Hint: when you work with Launch, you get the inside track to SMS engagement, including expertise on writing messages that perform and how to best engage with your clients and prospects).

Stay lean and mean in 2023. Get started with Launch Control.