ENEWS > SUMMER 2008

ACT! Industry Solutions
Communicate to the masses with ACT! by Sage for Real Estate 10.0

If the key to finding a good property is; location, location, location then the key to marketing a property is; communication, communication, communication. With a more challenging market comes an opportunity to hone your marketing and sales skills. Turn to your network to generate new leads and maximize every lead opportunity. Here are a few simple tips to help you outpace your competition.

Organize Prospect Clients into Groups
Is your contact list organized into groups? This is a key first step to segmenting your communications or other marketing activities. Groups can be static or dynamic; choose carefully to avoid putting prospects into multiple groups – you need to be able to control how many emails or newsletters you send them! A good rule of thumb is to setup dynamic groups according to area (zip code or city), which saves you time when you enter new prospects – they are assigned to the correct group automatically! Then, you can add other static groups that you would use only occasionally. For example, a group of prospects who favor golf properties, or a group of former buyers, or groups of close personal friends. Managing multiple communications then becomes easy.

To create a dynamic group, select New Group from the Groups menu. Type the name of the group into the Group field (for example, create a group named “Tempe”). Then click the “Add/Remove Contacts …” button. Since this is going to be a dynamic group, you will click on the Edit Criteria button in the Dynamic members area of the dialog box (see figure 1). A group criteria dialog box will pop up (this is the same dialog box as an advanced query, in case you’ve ever performed one of those before).

To setup the criteria for a dynamic group, click on the Field Name dropdown list and scroll down until you find “City” (or ZIP Code, if you want to do it that way. A hint: ZIP Code is the very last field in the list). Then click on the dropdown list for Operator, and select “Equal To” (There are some other operators you might use, but Equal To is probably the best one for this example). And finally, click in the box below Value and type in the city you want (or select it from the list, if it’s there). Then click the Add to list button to the right. If you want to see the list, click on the Preview button and the list of contacts in your new group will show up in the bottom pane. You can add other criteria as well, such as “ID/Status = prospect” to help qualify your group better, if you like. See figure 2 for a screenshot of a completed criteria. Click OK, and you will go back to the Add/Remove Contacts dialog. Click OK once more, and your group is finished. From now on, whenever you add a new contact into the database, if the city field is Tempe (and if they’re a prospect), then they will be automatically added to your Tempe group!

If you want to create your dynamic groups using zip codes, you have even greater flexibility. Thanks to the US Postal Service, most zip codes are numbered sequentially by area, so when you create your groups you can choose individual zip codes or “clumps” of zip codes. Your criteria for the group members could be set to the following:

Using the above criteria, your group would consist of any of the zip codes 85250, 85251, 85252, 85253, or 85254. You can design the groups however you think would be best for your territory. Experiment with the kinds of capabilities ACT! offers for criteria!

You can even have overlapping dynamic groups. For example, you can create groups for each city in your territory and for some of the most important zip codes in each city. ACT! will automatically sort them out, and some prospects will be part of multiple lists. Just be careful to design your communications carefully to avoid hitting them multiple times with the same email or newsletter!

Static groups are created using the same process, but instead of specifying criteria for them, you just select and add them from your contact list. Once you have a Group created, you can add more in the same way or highlight new contacts in your contact list and then from the Groups menu select Group membership | Add Selected to Group

Designing your communications
Now that you have your territory divided into groups, it’s time to design your communications. You can setup templates for any kind of marketing message you can dream up! For example, perhaps you like to email prospects with a listing of the most recent closings in their neighborhood (that’s my personal favorite to receive). Or perhaps you like to send out real estate industry news. Or tips & tricks for sellers. If you already have a template, then select Write | E-mail message (from template). If you want to design a new one, then create it using by using the template designer: select Write | New Letter/E-mail Template. For more information on designing email templates, see KB article 13706 on ACT! knowledgebase You can also watch the mail merge feature tour by selecting Help | Feature Tours | Mail Merge.

When you’re ready to send a marketing piece, go to the groups list and highlight the group you want to send to. Then select Write | E-mail Message (from template), select the appropriate template, and fire it off through your email client (or your printer). If you want to send a newsletter through the mail, select Write | Other Document (from template) … and the marketing piece will be sent to your word processor for printing. If you prefer to use a wizard, then select Write | Mail Merge and follow the detailed instructions.

Tips and tricks to staying on top of communications
Consider timing when using communications like e-mail. To get the most readership for e-newsletters and email promotions consider days when users are most likely to have time to review this material. Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoons are generally accepted as good delivery times, but check out your own e-mail box and see if there are any patterns where you receive less e-mail communication and target those delivery times.

A common rule in marketing is the “law of 27 touches” where on average a consumer has had 27 interactions (marketing and sales related) before becoming a customer. It’s important to recognize communication as an ongoing process and ACT! can help you stay on top of your mass communications. One simple way is to setup recurring activities on your calendar to remind you when to send new pieces to a particular group. That way you will have it on your calendar when it’s time to send out a new piece. Your old pieces will be stored in history, so you can check who has received what past pieces.

If you want even more automation, you can setup an Activity series task to design a communication campaign. You can setup an activity series for each group, or one for all of them. For example, you can setup an activity series to send out an introductory piece every six months, with your letterhead, company logo and picture, with short emails regarding property listings in their area every month in between. Another activity series can be for a different area that receives bi-monthly updates on recent closings. The sky’s the limit on how many you can design, and you can store as many templates as you need so each piece takes only a few minutes to update and send!

If you need a refresher course on creating an activity series in ACT! for Real Estate, see the help topic “creating activity series templates.”

The powerful capabilities of ACT! for Real Estate will help you establish and manage your communications to fully realize the value of your network to generate leads and keep in close contact with your customers and prospects!

Paul Buckley
Product Management, ACT!
Sage Software

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