Building Contact Lists

At the heart of any marketing effort is the contact list: the people you're sending the marketing materials to. There are usually several such lists in real estate: your previous clients, your current clients, prospective clients you met at open houses or who contacted you via your Web site, and lists of people whose information you get from other sources (such as title companyprovided mailing lists for neighborhood postcards or e-mail lists obtained from a commercial list company). These lists might include e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or postal addresses.

Then there's the marketing you do through ads, where you don't know exactly who is seeing your materials, but you have (you hope) targeted the ads to a reasonable set of potential customers, such as by placing a print ad in a community newspaper or buying an online ad that appears for a specific search such as San Francisco real estate agent or Las Vegas relocation. There are no contact lists to manage for such ads, but you should keep track of who responds, as I cover later in this chapter.

As you acquire contacts, be sure to gather consistent information for them. For example, if you send out e-mail newsletters, gather e-mail addresses for everyone in your contact lists if possible, so you can distribute that newsletter broadly. If you send out postcards through regular mail, collect mailing addresses. If you call people to promote yourself, collect phone numbers.

Another way to build your contact list is to acquire lists from other people. For example, to get new mailing addresses (beyond the people I already know, such as past clients, and those who respond to my marketing), I use a service from a local title company that gives me a Web-based interface to my state's title records. Then I can get a list of homeowners, their mailing addresses, and their phone numbers for a specific area and even refine that list by excluding, for example, non-owner-occupied addresses or properties that were purchased in the last three years.

Some title companies provide real estate agents access to public records on property ownerships so they can create contact lists based on various criteria. Ideally, this data is accessible through a Web interface, such as this service from Fidelity National Title, so you can create the lists at your convenience.

One idea if you use such a title recordsbased list: Find out how long the typical homeowners in your area stay in their home, so you can search for properties that have been owned for that length of time. Nationally, people tend to move every five years, so you might search for addresses of homeowners who bought four to six years ago, since they're statistically more likely to sell (and buy) in the near term than other owners.

Some title companies will give you this data if you ask a title officer for it. The information is usually sent as an e-mail attachment or mailed to you on a floppy disk or CD rather than provided through a self-service Web interface. (Typically, title companies that provide access to such data limit it to agents who've brought them business. But it never hurts to ask.)

Of course, these title-records lists won't have e-mail addresses, or names of renters for rented properties, so they're mostly useful for printed mailings, door-knocking visits, and telephone solicitations.

Managing Your Contacts

You can manage your contact lists in two basic ways, each of which has its pros and cons:

• You can use a unified database of all contacts, and then export the appropriate subset for a specific marketing effort (such as sending new property listings to buyers who've contacted you in the last three months). This database requires consistent data entry and enough information per contact to be able to create those subset lists when you need them. All this information can lead to complex databases and complex search settings.

• You can have multiple databases (typically in the form of address books or contact managers), one for each type of contact list. For example, you might use a bulk e-mail program's address book to store e-mail addresses and an Excel spreadsheet to store mailing addresses. Multiple databases help you keep each list's purpose clear and each list easier to manage. But it's hard to make sure contacts that belong in several lists are actually in all the lists and that you keep them updated to boot.

As the number of contacts becomes larger, the more you should have a unified database strategy, using a database like FileMaker's FileMaker or Microsoft's Access, or a professional contact manager like Eurekaware's Real Estate Contact Manager(which works as a companion to Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program), Now Software's Now Up-to-Date and Contact, Sage's Act, or Top Producer's Top Producer. For smaller lists, you can use the address book features in Microsoft's Outlook and Entourage e-mail client programs or use a handheld organizer such as a Palm or Hewlett-Packard iPaq.

Even with a unified database, chances are that you'll still have extra lists of contacts floating around, such as client profiles stored on the client management page of your brokerage's and/or MLS's Web site and in your client folders. But these are more for current transactions, so you have, for example, a client's work fax number handy to get a paper signed. The basic contact information for these clients should be in your database or other standard lists, but don't worry about putting every detail about these clients used in a transaction in your databases.

CD Resources: For database and contact management software, a tryout version of Eurekaware, plus links to Eurekaware, FileMaker, Microsoft, Now, Sage Software, and Top Producer Software. For bulk e-mail delivery, links to AtomPark, FNIS, G-Lock Software, LmhSoft, and Top Producer Software. For national do-not-contact information and registries, links to the relevant federal agencies.

Differentiating Active and Passive Contacts

Your contact lists will grow over time, as you meet people at open houses and on floor duty, as people call or e-mail you, and as friends and former clients make recommendations, and so on. I recommend you differentiate active contacts from passive ones, and skew your marketing efforts to the active ones.

An active contact is someone who called you in the last two months about buying a house, or someone you met at an open house. Members of the active group are serious about a realestate transaction, so they're in the process of choosing an agent. These people have the most immediate payoff potential for you.

A passive contact is someone in your "farm" area who's never contacted you or someone who contacted you a while back but hasn't responded to your follow-up inquiries. Members of the passive group may one day be clients, but more often will not be. You essentially are sending ads to these people hoping that when they're interested in real estate, or if asked by other people if they know a good agent, that they'll think of you.

The passive group will likely take the majority of your marketing dollars simply because they will far outnumber the people who are actively interested in real estate at the moment. But if you think of your marketing in terms of cost per contact (both time and money costs), you should spend more per person on the active ones to focus your efforts appropriately.

Don't Bug People

Understand that many people don't want to give you information about themselves, especially contact information, because they don't want to be bothered. Therefore, be sure that you state up front (in your Web forms or on a sign-up sheet, for example) how you will use any contact information you collect.

I find it helpful to tell people that I will not bug them if they give me their phone number and that I will not deluge them with e-mails if they provide their e-mail address. You must also honor all requests to stop contacting peopleand do so immediately. After all, if you annoy someone, they're pretty much gone as a possible client.

Federal and state laws also require that you honor "opt out" requests for phone, e-mail, and fax solicitations, as I explained in Chapter 5. There are also requirements for providing notice on how to opt out, as well as rules requiring you to remove phone numbers and some e-mail addresses from your lists if they are in national do-not-contact rolls. But even if these laws didn't exist, it's smart to not annoy someone you hope to gain as a client. And hounding people won't turn them into clients, anyhow.