Buying a house is something completely different than buying a bike or a Snickers bar. It therefore often takes a long time to make the right choice and to make sure you get picked as the right partner to help with this. A variety of websites get browsed and eventually a real estate agency gets selected. But what if you acquire a customer’s dream house only days after they abandoned your website?
Thanks to house alert systems you can easily inform potential buyers when new houses that match their criteria show up. With the following three steps, you can retarget potential customers and help them to find the house of their dreams.
Step one: collect their preferences
The very first step of helping your customers to find their perfect house is knowing what their criteria (preferences) are. Preferences can nowadays be obtained by creating a profile on your website and filling in a form that clearly states what they are looking for. The problem is that it takes too much time and it often puts the customers off.
Luckily for you, this process can be simplified. To find a suitable home, preferences can be collected by analyzing the visitor's website behavior. Algorithms examine how long someone looks at certain houses and determine their taste by studying their search history. This significantly reduces the time of application and increases relevancy since the website knows exactly what they’re doing and who they are.
All the data you collected has to be linked to someone in order for the house alert to work. This immediately brings us to the next step: collecting email addresses.
Step two: collect email addresses
The second thing you have to do is to acquire the potential customers’ email addresses. This step doesn’t ask much from the customers but it is crucial to complete the house alerts.
Implementing a pop-up is a great way to retrieve email addresses. A message like: “Haven’t you found the house you were searching for? Don’t you worry! Leave your email address and we’ll find the house of your dreams.” works like a charm. “Leave your email address here.” is often off-putting and will turn the customer down.
An important thing to keep in mind is the timing of these pop-ups. There are a lot of different options, but one very effective one is the exit intent pop-up. A message will get triggered to show up when a visitor is about to leave the website.
Other alternatives could be:
- the time a visitor spends on a page,
- entry pop-ups: when someone enters your website,
- scroll pop-ups: the message will get triggered when the visitor has scrolled down to a certain point on your website.
Only asking for an email address will hold fewer people back to subscribe than demanding them to complete a long form. It’s much easier and takes no time at all.
Step three: provide house alerts
Once you have collected the customers' preferences and email addresses, you can kick-start your final step: match the right properties with the right house hunters. This has a lot of benefits for both you and your possible buyers.
First of all, it will cause lost customers to become potential buyers. Even when they forgot about you, they will get triggered to visit your website yet again. By showing the right properties you will become relevant and useful during their journey.
Another benefit of using preference algorithms is that it will automatically update whenever customers change their minds and search behavior. If they started their search with properties in the city center but somewhere along the journey changed it to properties in the suburbs, the system will automatically update the alerts as well.
Worth remembering
Providing customers with tailor-made house alerts without demanding a lot of time will generate a higher click-through rate to your website. The key to succeeding is to remain relevant and interesting and to make sure you give them exactly what they want.
Personalizing the customers’ online journey will simplify the way they search for houses and real estate agencies are able to retarget them much easier. Furthermore, it also shows that you care about helping them in their search for the perfect home.