Real Estate Text Message Marketing

Here’s How Realtors Use Text Marketing

No matter how much technology is available to automate and streamline processes, real estate is all about establishing and managing relationships.

The key ingredient of any good relationship? Communication. Texting offers busy agents and brokers a quick and effective way to:

• Follow up with new leads
• Organize phone calls, viewings, or other meetings
• Automatically send new Facebook leads a text message
• Place a keyword (a word or phrase) that customers can text to a number to receive more information on a property

We’ll cover what both use cases look like in more detail. But first, here’s why Realty Biz News declared texting as one of the most invaluable communication channels.

The Problem Text Messaging in Real Estate Solves

There’s a contradiction at the heart of modern real estate sales and marketing. There have never been more ways to reach people, yet people have never been harder to reach.

Email open rates continue to decline, and the response rate to phone calls is below 6%. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the 98% open rates of text messages helps realtors to:

• Keep in front of clients
• Improve response rates
• Generate more leads
• Quickly find buyers

What’s even more important is that the vast majority of people want you to text them: a National Association of Realtors report found that 62% of all home buyers prefer their agent to send property info via text message.

The good news is that only 5% of realtors currently communicate by text, so it’s an opportunity to delight customers and stand out from the crowd.

How Real Estate SMS Marketing Works

There are two interrelated ways agents use real estate text message marketing—to generate leads and then follow-up with them. We’ll outline how both work and then cover some other text messaging use cases.

Generating Leads With Realtor SMS Marketing

Real estate text message marketing can help you promote listings, generate sales, or handle sign in sheets for open houses. There are a couple of different strategies you can apply here.

One of the most popular approaches involves keywords. (An SMS keyword is a word that your customers can text to your number to opt-in for messages.)

Here’s how easy it is to create one.

Now you’re probably wondering how keywords work in practice. Say a house-hunter walks by your property and spots a rider with the keyword “321MainSt” and your phone number.

You now have a new lead you can follow up with and automatically send a series of texts using our autoresponder feature.

With text message marketing, you can also send a text blast to a database of prospective buyers’ phone numbers.

For example, you could let them know about a new property that’s for sale. You can include photos of the property as well as links to the online listing.

How Josh Barker Real Estate Advisors Generates Leads with SMS

With over 45 homes their inventory at any given time, it’s essential for Josh Barker's team to connect with every interested buyer. Find out how text messages help. READ MORE

Texting 1-on-1 With Leads, Customers, and Clients

Many SimpleTexting customers use texting to follow up with leads generated from other marketing channels like their website and social media ads.

It’s a much quicker way to engage people, given the average response time for a text message is 6,000% (60X) faster than email.

You can add a click-to-text button to your website to encourage leads to text you. This functionality is more important than ever since mobile continues to take a bigger slice of the real estate web traffic pie.

RE/MAX Okanagan lets its website visitors book private appointments by text and even check-in for appointments upon arrival.

Many of our customers also connect their Facebook Lead Ads or web forms to SimpleTexting so that they can automatically send a text message to new leads. The benefit? Instant response times leave an impression on clients.

Finally, you can use text messages to:

• Send appointment reminders before a showing
• Reach out to cold leads

How to Choose the Best Text Message Marketing Real Estate Service?

At this point, we should state the obvious: we’re an SMS marketing real estate service. We’ve worked with thousands of real estate professionals to help them text with their leads, clients, and customers, but we’re not going to do any hard selling here.

We encourage you to do your research, read plenty of reviews on third-party sites, and sign up for a free trial.

If you’re only starting to SMS for real estate marketing, here are some of the boxes you’ll want to tick when choosing a service:

• A lot of text messaging platforms allow you to either text 1-on-1 with customers or send bulk texts. You want a platform like SimpleTexting that will enable you to both.
• Do you need to integrate with other platforms or send automated text messages? If so, you’ll want a service that offers multiple SMS integrations.
• Real estate professionals need to be careful of services that limit the number of keywords you can create. (We don’t.)
• If you plan on using a real estate texting service for two-way messaging with customers, you want an SMS inbox with the functionality to manage multiple conversations.

The final consideration is the cost of SMS for real estate marketing. The per-message price is a huge factor. It’s also worth understanding if credits rollover from one month to the next.

Examples of Real Estate Texting In Action

Once you’ve chosen a text messaging solution, you might suddenly face writer’s block. So, to preempt that, here are nine real estate text examples

In general, we recommend the following when writing SMS campaigns for real estate:

• Keep it short: keeping a message as brief as possible allows the recipient to scan it and respond before you lose their attention.
• Aim for clarity: while text messages should be short, they shouldn’t be cryptic. Ensure that the SMS will make sense to the recipient.
• Make it personal: use the recipient’s name, location, or previously-specified areas of interest to know that the message is for them.

Here’s The Next Step

That’s it—everything you need to know about real estate text marketing in one straightforward guide. The next step is to sign up for a 14-day free trial and try it for yourself.

If you have more questions, you can also request a demo. Alternatively, you can text or call us at (866) 450-4185 or use the chat at the bottom of your screen.