About a week ago we told you about a survey of more than 6,000 consumers on our new home shopping site, NewHomeSource.com. We lamented that less than 10% of consumers would fill out lead forms. While we were encouraged that 23.5% said they took action, this still left 76.5% not taking action. SO, WHY NOT?!
Of course we asked this question as well. While some consumers really took no action, some merely took no action we could measure from our website. What do you think was the #1 reason consumers told us that took no action? The #1 reason consumers gave us for not taking action was "I might later, but I’m just looking today." Have you heard this one before? That group really took no action ... at least that day.
More interesting was the #2 response. 22.0% said that they would prefer to visit the community in person. The chart below shows the breakdown of why consumers took actions other than those we could measure.
The consumers in this survey were motivated shoppers. After bouncing around NewHomeSource.com (i.e., they are motivated), they then opted into the survey. So, the absolute percentage taking action or giving a reason for not doing so is less meaningful than the ratios.
In my blog entry about the actions consumers take on listing websites on the November 20th, I reported that 23.5% of 4,245 consumers surveyed said they took some form of action on NewHomesource.com. 32.3% of these, or 7.6% of the total, filled out a form asking for information. While 76.5% took an action we could not measure, 22.0% of these or 16.8% overall, said they preferred to visit the community in person. So, for every person filling out a lead form on NewHomesource, 2.2 times as many said they would rather just showing up.
I always thought it was 3-4 times that number showing up as physical traffic relative to leads (early, presumably less scientific research), but I am okay with 2.2 times as many shoppers showing up as physical traffic as those filling out a lead form. Think about this when considering the number of lead request you get from your website. 2X the number may just show up instead. This has huge implications for any internet marketing expenditure.
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics:
- 12.9% of new home shoppers in this survey (19.9% of 76.5%) really don’t want to be contacted. That does not mean they will not show up in person, but that they are not ready to talk to you. Does this mean that the other 87.1% are waiting for your call and wondering why you are ignoring them?
- 10.3% of new home shoppers in this survey (13.4% of 76.5%) couldn’t find a community they were interested in. We either have the wrong builders 10% of the time or maybe these consumers don’t know your community well enough. Give them some pictures, video, and tell them why they should want to live there.
- 2.1% of new homes shoppers in this survey (2.7% x 76.5%) aren’t even interested in buying a new home. To heck with that half-full mentality! 97.9% are actively shopping for a new home.
Come on you market research types, tell me how it is. Let me know what you think.
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-- Blair Kuhnen, Builders Digital Experience, bkuhnen@thebdx.com, 512-289-7370
Since the launch of our Hot Homes feature a few months ago, more and more builders have utilized this unique merchandising opportunity to create increased awareness, exposure, and inquiries for their new home communities. Best of all, it’s free and easy to add Hot Homes.
Are you are on the sidelines waiting to see if it’s worth the effort?
Well, it’s time to get off the sidelines and into the game – it works! And we have the numbers to prove it. More on that in a bit.
Separate yourself from the crowd
There are several ways for consumers to respond to Hot Homes as they search and browse new homes on NewHomeSource.com. Here, on a search results page, those communities with Hot Homes feature a special “HOT HOMES” emblem:
(By the way, promotions are also merchandised with a “SPECIAL OFFER” emblem. Together with Hot Homes, we call these “Hot Deals” on the New Home Source website.)
Visitors to NHS are also invited to go directly to “Hot Deals” in their market, either by doing a dedicated Hot Deals search, or by clicking the Hot Deals tab from their search results page. In either case, this search results view is shown:
Here, the consumer sees the Hot Homes title and description data fields you created to induce the visitor to investigate further and to request more information.
Results
On average across market areas on New Home Source, builders who have one or more communities featuring a Hot Home get 20% MORE consumer inquiries per community (AKA leads) versus builders who don’t have a hot home in that market area.
Your “action items"
- Learn how to input Hot Homes Data
- Log-in to BHI Live and go to the manage homes screen, select 'Yes' in the "Hot Home?" column and follow the prompts to enter a title and description.
- If you feed data to us, contact us for information on how to add the data to your feed
- For each of your communities, find two homes that you can feature as Hot Homes and create marketing copy that highlights the home or plan's uniqueness, value, or scarcity
- Ask questions -- we love to help you use our listing and advertising features to the fullest! Contact buildersupport@newhomesource.com
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Paul Gruber, Senior Product Manager, leads product planning and development for BHI’s Consumer Products and Websites including www.newhomesource.com
 The new strategic partnership between Builder Homesite and BuildTopia, which was announced today, has made the lives of builders who use NewHomeSource.com a lot easier. While they may be used to getting great exposure online due to BHI's other partnerships with sites like Zillow, Yahoo! Real Estate, and AOL Real Estate, builders may not have been able to effectively manage all of the leads from those sites.
With BuildTopia's BTLead, builder can now have access to a web-based lead management tool that is feature-rich and designed specifically for the home building industry. Read more about this partnership in this press release.
If you haven't considered a Mystery Shop of your online lead follow up system (both human and electronic), you should. You may cringe at the results, but considering your investment in generating those leads, you need to know what really happens to them.
What if you have leads coming in and nobody is responding to them? Wouldn't you be upset? It may surprise you to know that not only does it happen, but it happens at some of America's largest builders.
Even if your leads are getting a response of some kind, you need to assess the quality of that response. Often an unprofessional response is worse than no response at all. If this is the first contact a lead has with your company, what kind of image are you projecting?
Online Mystery Shopping helps you ensure that customers have a quality online experience with your company. It allows you to assess your strengths and weaknesses, effectively train your associates, raise the bar on your communication skills, and increase sales. It should never be used to single out a sales associate, which is why it's so important to do a full market area shop.
There are companies that specialize in online Mystery Shopping, such as LM Marketing Online (www.lmmarketingonline.com) located in Houston, who works nationwide with builders of all sizes. The cost to obtain a comprehensive report, across all your divisions and communities, is well worth it. This also applies to custom builders, remodelers, and trade partners - anyone who has a lead generation system that includes a “Contact Us” page on their website.
The cost for an online Mystery Shop report is generally per community, so it will vary according to your size. Always ask about volume discounts. The minimum you should receive in the report is:
- an Executive Summary (including response rates and times)
- a complete transcript of all correspondence
- an individual response analysis
- a copy of all materials sent either via email or U.S. mail.
The report may also include suggestions for improvement and recommended implementation of Best Practices.
In today's challenging market, it doesn't make sense to invest thousands of dollars in a website to promote your company, pay listing services such as Move.com or NewHomeSource, generate sales leads, and then essentially throw them away. Remember, customers shopping online are building a short list, and you want to be on it. Some buyers buy via a process of elimination.
Don't get eliminated.
Erik Cofield, CGA has leveraged technology and provided business management consulting for all sizes and types of builders, developers and Remodelers since 2000, including volume, multi-family and custom, to help them improve their business. He is the National Accounts Manager with BuildTopia (www.buildtopia.com), a widely used international construction management software company. He is the Houston Sales and Marketing Council 2008 Associate of the Year. He is an author, educator, consultant and speaker. He can be reached via ecofield@buildtopia.com.
How many times has someone suggested that you treat your Internet leads differently from your normal physical traffic? Pundits and sales trainers often tell you this. Since these buyers have already visited you online, you have to treat them differently. They tell you to treat them as a Be-Back. The explanation for this prescription is quite logical. First, the Internet is an integral part of more than 80% of shoppers’ new home searches. Second, it is annoying and a waste of time to go through all the general information about the community that these prospects already know. Finally, you are wasting a tremendous opportunity to move the dialogue and sale along by not treating these folks differently. These prospects have already read about the community and looked at plans and inventory, and may already be comfortable with the location, product and price. Well, those pundits and sales trainers are right. What they rarely explain is how you should treat these Internet savvy buyers differently.
This month, I share with you what it means to treat Internet traffic as Be-Back. I loosely paraphrase from a script Myers Barnes delivered at IBS in 2006. Myers is a friend, so I hope he will forgive me for butchering his carefully crafted script. What he had to say was quite profound, because it is a short-cut to improving your Internet-related closing rates. Here it goes:
Salesperson: Welcome to Winding Creek. Thank you for coming in today. May I ask you a question?
Prospect: Certainly.
Salesperson: Our marketing department tells us that a large percentage of our customers visit our website before visiting this location. Did you happen to visit us online before coming in today? [I know it seems to be far too leading of a question]
Prospect: Why, yes, we did.
Salesperson: Great. So, we could say that this is more like your second visit to Winding Creek. Isn’t that right?
Prospect: I guess so.
Salesperson: Welcome back. Tell me. When you visited us online, were there any plans that you remember particularly liking?
Prospect: Well, there was one. I think you call it the Collette.
Salesperson: Fantastic. We happen to have a model of the Collette available here to see. Should we have a look?
Prospect: That would be great.
That wasn’t too bad, was it? You will have to practice, and a little role playing will go a long way to making it natural. You will soon be cutting short the critical path and jumping ahead into your product demonstration. More importantly, you will close more sales.
What goes up, must come down. After seeing "new home" related searches match their high point in July, we saw a substantial decrease in search volume traffic for the month of August. A decrease is to be expected, as the selling season cools, and families prepare their children to go back to school. The cyclical nature of the market along with the national market conditions have made this recent drop more extreme in comparison to other years.
Below is a snapshot provided by Google Trends highlighting the August dip relative to the rest of the year. (Note:Google does not publish actual search volume quantities performed but they do offer this graph.)
 From Blair Kuhnen, VP of Marketing at Builder Homesite
Several builders have asked me "What should my online lead conversion rate be?" and it is a perennial favorite when I speak about online sales counselor (OSC) programs. This month I share with you a few guideposts you can use when setting up your initial goals and expectations.
There is not a specific lead conversion rate target for a best practice OSC program. Every builder operates with a different set of variables. Some of the factors that affect your conversion rate include:
- The strength of your market - hot markets get better, more complete leads
- Your calls-to-action - a good offer gets consumers clicking
- The usability of your website - if they can't find the button, don't expect them to use it
- The quality of leads - leads from your own website are always your best leads
- The effectiveness of your lead handling process and your on-site sales force.
Does this mean, there is no answer? Let me share with you a starting point.
Continue reading "Online Lead Conversion Rates: Maximize Your Results" »
 Part 1 of our Search Engine Marketing Series will focus on the basics of PPC.
Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote a website by increasing it’s visibility in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when someone enters a keyword phrase that is relevant to that website or business. There are 2 main types of results on a SERP – Sponsored Listings (PPC) and Organic (Natural) Listings (SEO).
The Sponsored Listings are Pay Per Click Advertisements that are created by an Internet Marketer or firm that wants to present an advertisement to those users searching for specific keyword phrases. These Sponsored Listings will show up at the very top of the Search Results Page or on the right hand sidebar. The Internet Marketer responsible for creating the Pay Per Click Advertising Campaigns will assign a maximum bid to each keyword or group of keywords and establish an overall monthly budget that they are willing to spend on those designated keywords.
With each search performed on Google, the ad will post what is called an impression in the Sponsored Listing section. They will only need to pay for that advertisement if someone clicks on the displayed text ad and the user is then redirected to their website. This is referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising. Initiating a PPC Campaign is rather simple to get started (you can see your advertisements posted within minutes of setting them up) but maximizing the amount of clicks you get for your money is a daunting process that deserves continuous attention and improvement by a PPC Expert.
Check back next week to learn about SEO - Search Engine Optimization. Yes, it is different than PPC...
 Be sure to read this article on cnn.com about a $3.1M mansion in Washington State that has been re-created in the 3-D online world, Second Life. This is a fascinating and innovative way to market real estate for prospective buyers online. This first attempt has attracted a lot of interest in the virtual community:
"In real life, a house like this might normally attract the attention of 50 to 100 people, but since Wednesday 3,500 people have toured the home in Second Life, according to its broker, Suzanne Lane. Not all of them are prospective buyers of course -- in a virtual world it's easy for anyone who's curious to just stop by.
"I feel comfortable that it will sell within the next couple of months," she said, despite the fact that the Seattle real-estate market has cooled recently."
This gives food for thought on the impact 3-D visualizations have on buyers, and the increasing importance of utilizing advanced visualization tools to attract interest in real estate properties. Consumers will soon expect to see 3-D walkthroughs and video tours of homes they are researching. Pictures and traditional virtual tours are becoming more and more obsolete by the day. As an industry we need to start creating interactive content, such as video and 3-D walkthroughs, that will excite consumers for years to come.
Thanks to Crystal Christopherson from Envision for this post.
 To paraphrase the cartoon on the left, The greatest technology in the world won't guarantee you better lead conversion. You need to leverage the latest technologies alongside tried and true lead generation techniques to truly maximize conversion. This post is the first in a series that will help you generate and convert more leads. This post comes from Blair Kuhnen, VP of Marketing at BHI.
Simmons Homes is the leading builder in Tulsa. Tulsa, Oklahoma is a small, but good, homebuilding market. Being a smaller market, with limited relocation and easy commutes, lead volume for builders tends to be low. Many home shoppers are reluctant to give up their contact information and prefer to just visit communities without ever becoming a lead. Simmons has no problem generating lots of leads and converting a great many of them into sales. Here's how they do it.
First a little background. Simmons created an OSC program in October of 2005. When Simmons started their OSC program they were generating well under 100 leads per month. Since that time, they have added NewHomeSource.com, Move.com, NewHomeguides.com, and pay-per-click campaigns to drive up their website leads and third party leads. They have improved their monthly lead volume by 491%, plenty for an effective OSC program.
Simmons sees 20-25% of their total sales coming from their Internet leads. I spent some time this month with Mike Lyon, OSC for Simmons Homes, about techniques for converting more of these leads into sales. Mike is a master of online sales. His strength is in setting appointments. You can order his book on the subject here. After reading it, I would consider buying it just for his phone scripts. Continue reading this post. Click on the link to see the rest.
Continue reading "How to Capture AND Convert More Leads" »
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