Best Practices for Following Up With Email Leads

What does your drip campaign to follow up on leads look like and how do you automate it? How many emails do you send and how often?

@freesiapropco are you talking about the people who sign up for your buyers list, or some other type of email list?

In terms of "how", pretty much any email service (MailChimp, Drip, Constant Contact, Aweber, etc) will let you set up autoresponders IF you're paying for the service (some services will let you start building a list for free, but the autoresponder functionality will cost you something).

If you're going to take any kind of list seriously, you really should have some kind of autoresponders going out. It can be a pain, I know, but if you don't send out some kind of regular communication (say, every week or two, maybe even a month... but that's pushing it), people will quickly forget who you are and be unresponsive and/or unsubscribe immediately when you finally send them a message again.

In terms of what you should say in those autoresponders, it depends (again) who they are and why they signed up in the first place. You generally want to keep your flow of communication consistent with the reasons they signed up.

@retipsterseth Thank you! I currently send out an email once every couple of weeks with new properties, but it's not to follow up on leads that have currently expressed an interest in the land I am selling. It is getting really, really time consuming following up on those folks weekly. Wondering how I can automate the follow up without losing the personal touch.

@freesiapropco you know, another way I've seen some people handle their lists (the people who actually do get a lot of engagement from them) is to not even mess with email addresses and instead, collect phone numbers.

I mean... you can certainly collect their email address too, but for most intents and purposes, the phone number is the REAL value, where people will actually see your message and respond to it. Once you've got a phone number, you can either call them up directly (I think this will get you the best results) or you can send them a text message (but use this with care, so you don't become known as a text spammer) or you could leave them a ringless voicemail (where it doesn't even ring their phone, your message just shows up as a voicemail that they can listen to).

A lot of people view their email inbox as a spam bucket, but their phone is a little bit different. We all get robocalls, but that's not really what you would be using it for. You would actually keep detailed notes about each person on your list and only send them the relevant deals that fit with what they're looking for. This approach will take a lot more attention and maintenance than an automated email list, but it will be more effective in the long run.

I push seller leads that have gone cold into a “holding pattern” stack on my Airtable.
These are zapped into a list on activecampaign where I have programmed email follow ups every 14 days with titles like “Did you give up on selling your land?”

I get someone responding to the emails about every week.

@jawollbrink can you share what your flow is to follow-up with those that have expressed an interest in purchasing your land?