When done right, referral marketing can be a huge source of growth for your property management business. Common referral sources are,
Existing clients. Happy clients can become raving fans, if you show them you care and give them something to talk about.
Realtors. Your real estate connections can be a major asset, if realtors in your network trust that their clients will be taken care of, and that you'll refer the business back to them when the client is ready to sell.
LeadSimple enables you to easily organize, market to and track your referral sources, whether they're your clients, realtors or other relationships. Using LeadSimple for this will do the following for you and your business:
Keep data and communication in one place. If you're already using LeadSimple for Owners and Tenants, you can eliminate another system by tracking Referrals as well.
Only learn one system. With all your Referral data in one place with your Owner data, you and your team don't have to learn another system.
Easily build marketing workflows. Using LeadSimple's intuitive, email automation tools, you'll be able to focus on the content of your marketing campaigns and not spend half your time just figuring out the software.
1. Creating a Referral Pipeline
The first step is to create a pipeline for Referrers. You'll need admin permissions to create a pipeline (formerly called "Lead Type").
Log in to LeadSimple and click "Add Lead Type" in the sidebar. Name the pipeline "Referrers" and give it an item name of "Referrer", then click "Save". This will redirect you to your new pipeline dashboard page.
This is where you will be adding and tracking anyone who you think might send you referral business.
2. Build Your Marketing Workflow
Now it's time to build out your marketing workflow. This will be a series of stages for each step of the referring process.
No referrals sent
One referral sent
Regularly sending referrals
You'll want to have stages for each of these categories.
You can start by grabbing our recommended stages from this link.
Copy the workflow into your account:
Then click Use This Workflow, and select your new Referrer pipeline from the list:
These are the stages we recommend for marketing to your referrals.
Each stage should ultimately have a series of 6 to 10 pre-written emails (email templates) that are focused towards leads who fit the description of that stage. For example, for a referrer in the stage "Client - No Referrals", our emails should target an existing customer who has not sent us any referrals yet. Pretty simple :)
Don't try to create email templates for all these stages at once. Start with a campaign that focuses on customers who have not made referrals to you yet. That's the most important use case to cover. If you have some realtor connections, try changing that same campaign slightly in a different stage to market to those realtors. Build one at a time and get it shipped, then move on to the next one.
3. Add Referrers to Your Pipeline and Start Marketing!
Once you have a Referral pipeline and a marketing campaign for existing clients, realtors or other referral sources, you're ready to add referral contacts to LeadSimple and start marketing to them.
You can add them in one of the following ways.
When the leads are in your account, put them in the stage that's relevant to them, whether they're a realtor, client or otherwise. Any automated emails you've set up will begin sending to them according to the delays between each email in the workflow.
Now that you know how to organize and market to your referrers in LeadSimple, learn how to track those referrers on your leads!