How to Maximize the Results You Get From Your Database

Having a solid database full of prospects, past clients and members of your sphere is exciting as it represents a ton of great relationships and potential business.

That said, not having a strategy in place to maximize the results you get from your database can render all of that opportunity virtually unattainable.When properly managed, your database can help you to effectively contact and nurture the folks you’ve chosen with whom to stay in touch with. Doing this will help you maximize the results you get from your database.

Here are five steps to make the most of your marketing database.

1. Get rid of the junk.

Properly nurtured leads convert to sales at a clip of about 8% on a year-over-year basis. The good news is that you can do some serious business by staying on top of the leads that you nurture.

The not so good news is as with all sales pipelines, you’re not going to capture all of the opportunities that arise...even if you do an amazing job with follow up.

What this means is that there will be people who buy and sell from another agent (or on their own) that you can take out of your database.

The same thing goes with contacts with bad phone numbers and email addresses or no contact information at all.

As well as duplicate contacts and contact records.

Keeping all of this “junk” in your database takes your focus - and time - away from working with the prospects that can benefit from your effort and expertise.

At the same time, there are contacts in your database for whom you have partial contact information; however, you would still like to stay in touch with them but they still represent a good sales or referral opportunity.

Take the time to conduct periodic assessments to explore what data is missing, what data is wrong, and what data needs to be updated. Make note of and fill in incomplete records, delete obsolete records, and/or delete duplicate records.

2. Raise your standards.

Operating from the understanding that good data is king, you need to make sure that you implement a standard for what’s acceptable for contact data within your database.

More specifically, you need to not have allow contact records that are not fully complete to exist in your database.

Complete contact records include:

• Phone number(s)

• Email address

• Physical address (for sellers, sphere and past clients)

• Source

• Updated contact notes

• Next action date (for contacts with whom a follow-up call is due to occur

By making this the minimum standard for your database management strategy, you’ll put yourself in position to maintain better contact with your prospects and improve your conversion ratio because you’ll spend less time trying to contact bad data.

3. Maximize with automation.

Marketing automation makes it so much easier to capture virtually any kind of information from customers and prospects that you desire.

On the back end, automation allows you to maintain consistent contact with solid sales opportunities, past clients and members of your sphere through emails, text messages and automated voicemail messages.

By using automation to collect data, keeping high-quality contact records and then using automation again to stay in touch with the members of your database, you can ensure prospects receive timely, relevant marketing messages.

More importantly, if gives you the ability to “move the ball down the field” with your prospects after unsuccessful appointments and in between nurturing phone calls.

Although automated digital nurturing efforts won’t always close the deal for you, conversion increases dramatically when you combine automation with physical contact strategies like phone calls and face-to-face visits.

4. Segment and target wisely.

Once you have the first three steps nailed, you’re in great position to get some really good results from your database through segmentation and targeting.

Segmentation is breaking your database into like groups: sellers, buyers, sphere, past clients, older leads, newer leads, luxury leads, first-time home buyers, etc.

Targeting is sending specific messages to these various groups based upon their goals in an effort to 1)strengthen your relationship with them and 2) get them to take action based upon the message(s) you deliver.

It may seem like a lot of effort to set your database up this way, but it’s absolutely worth the time and effort.

Untargeted campaigns cost nearly 3.6 times as much as targeted campaigns.

5. Work inbound and outbound strategies together.

A lot of agents don’t want to make phone calls.

Instead, they try to let email drip campaigns, text messaging efforts and passive voicemail strategies do the legwork for them, hoping that prospects will respond by raising their hand asking for help.

As I mentioned earlier, automated contact strategies like these are important, but they’re not going to get you the listing or the buyer client.

Strong lead nurturing requires outbound marketing tactics such as appointment setting, lead qualification and even personalized, outbound email marketing for additional engaging conversation to get optimal results.

Working inbound and outbound together puts your conversion numbers head and shoulders above working inbound only and the efforts of most of your competition.

A properly managed database is a veritable gold mine to a real estate agent.

Follow the steps I’ve identified here to maximize the results you get from your database and you’ll strike it rich.