Modern digital marketing is complex and almost impossible to run successfully without at least some type of automation. Fortunately, marketing automation has become increasingly commonplace and accessible for homebuilders, with nearly 85% of marketers adopting some version.
Done right, studies show that marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity alongside a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. It increases efficiency for your homebuilder marketing by automating daily repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on more important, strategic efforts.
But of course, you have to do it right. These seven types of homebuilder marketing automation can help you get there.
1. Lead Nurturing Through Automated Emails
Homebuilder marketing has a long sales cycle and an even longer customer journey. During that time, builders that can stay top of mind for their prospective clients will have a massive advantage over those that try to sell their benefits in the early stages of the funnel. Lead nurturing is essential, and marketing automation can help.
You can create automated email nurturing drip campaigns that land in your audience’s inbox at strategic times through CRM and email marketing software. They’re triggered by an action, like a lead entering your CRM database, downloading your floor plans, or scheduling a visit to your model homes. From there, they automatically execute with follow-ups that provide relevant content for your audience.
Especially as your audience grows, manually nurturing your leads becomes almost impossible. Automating these nurturing drip campaigns can keep your brand and business relevant for your audience until they’re ready to pull the trigger and sign the home purchase or construction contract.
2. Dynamic Marketing Personalization
In addition to automating basic nurturing campaigns, you’ll also find homebuilder marketing automation in the form of dynamically personalized messaging. According to one study, 97% of marketers saw an improvement in business outcomes as a result of personalization. Another noted that 63% of marketers found personalization to increase customer interactions and engagement.
Personalization can be automated through direct connections with your lead database. For example, you can dynamically insert potential homebuyers’ names and personal information into your emails. Meanwhile, you can personalize your website by showing different versions to different audience segments, like changing the listings shown on the homepage based on the user’s location.
Of course, personalizing your messaging depends on your ability to gather that information. Fortunately, Deloitte found that 60% of millennials would not hesitate to share personal information if it improved the relevance of the messaging they’d receive from brands.
3. Marketing Automation Analytics
One of the core advantages of digital marketing is its inherent measurability. Put simply, you’re able to put numbers to all of your efforts, allowing you to evaluate exactly which of your efforts have performed well enough to warrant further investment and which might need improvements to be more successful in the future.
But pulling these analytics manually is difficult to impossible. There is simply too much data to analyze on your own. According to Forbes, 95% of businesses consider their lack of ability to analyze unstructured data a significant business problem.
Fortunately, marketing automation can help in this area as well.
Free solutions like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights allow you to pull comprehensive reports that tell you exactly how your marketing efforts are performing. Data visualization tools like Tableau and Google can turn those analytics into visual reports you can share with core stakeholders, allowing you to quickly see the success of your efforts while highlighting improvement opportunities.
4. Social Media Marketing Automation
Social media has become a primary marketing channel across industries, in part because of its popularity among consumers. After all, about half of the world’s population has at least one social media account, and they spend about two hours and 32 minutes on their favorite account every single day–more than any other type of digital channel.
But social media marketing is also incredibly time-consuming. Nearly every network requires posting at least three times per week, with some outlets rising to multiple times daily. Each post has to be crafted to represent your homebuilding business well, generate awareness and engagement, and help drive traffic to your website.
With that said, you can automate many of the tasks required to run a successful homebuilder social media account. We already discussed analytics above. In addition, you can pre-schedule posts on most networks to fill your content calendar.
You can even automate monitoring social media networks for mention of your brands and homes. Social listening helps you gauge customer sentiment about your business while allowing you to gather user-generated content to share on your own networks.
5. Backend Workflow Automation
Not all marketing efforts, of course, happen in front of your audience. Many of the most important tasks have to occur on the backend in order to feed the beast and effectively promote your business to potential homebuyers. Automating tasks like these can help you save significant time and effort:
- Create automated workflows to segment and assign leads for automated follow-ups.
- Automate your data entry, feeding data about your customers from multiple systems into a centralized database for deeper insights and better follow-ups.
- Dynamically track customer interactions, like logging phone calls between your sales staff and potential customers in your centralized lead database.
- Automate your keyword research to create more relevant, popular, and search engine-optimized content on your website.
Plenty of other backend automations exist, as well. For example, you can dynamically promote a new blog post on your social media channels as soon as you publish it on your website. Each of these efforts saves time that can be better spent on more strategic marketing tasks and planning.
6. Webchat and Chatbots
When potential homebuyers come to your website, they’ll have questions. Ideally, your content will be able to answer those questions. But it’s even better if you can have a mechanism in place through which they can ask any question they have immediately and to their satisfaction.
That sounds like a live chat. And it’s true that consumers love live chat when engaging with brands, thanks in large part to its ability to answer their questions immediately and without having to browse for the answers.
But live chat is also hard work. It requires constant availability, including and especially outside of regular business hours. Few homebuilders have the resources to support this type of mechanism on the backend.
That’s where AI-enabled chatbots enter the equation. For the user, they’ll look like a live chat option that can answer their question. But on the backend, those answers are automated, providing dynamic answers to the most common questions. Even better, they learn from their interactions, becoming better at answering a broader range of questions and even knowing when to pass off conversations to a human representative.
This type of automation can pay off big time. Our internal results show that chatbots can generate 7x more leads compared to live chat, while generating 46% more sales.
7. Text Automation and AI
Finally, don’t underestimate the power of automated texting. At its core, it’s a similar process to email marketing, enabling you to set up dynamic follow-ups to action triggers and engage your audience–prompting them to take the next steps.
But texting is unique because of how much potential homebuyers, and consumers in general, embrace the platform. Studies have found that:
- 91% of consumers are interested in signing up for texting alerts from businesses.
- The majority of people read texts, including texts from businesses, within five minutes of receiving them.
- 51% of consumers become more likely to make a purchase if they receive a text message with images or other visuals.
- Almost 40% of consumers want to hear from brands 2-3 times per week. Nearly 19% are okay with receiving daily texts.
- The average open rate for promotional text messages is 98%, compared to 20-30% for email marketing.
- The average click-through rate for text messages surpasses 19%, compared to 4% for email marketing.
The potential of this channel becomes even more powerful when adding AI to the equation. AI-enabled text messages add a conversational component to the equation, bringing many of the same benefits as the chatbots mentioned above. It’s why, according to our internal data, text-based follow-ups can reduce homebuilder sales cycles by nearly 50%.
Save Time and Resources With Homebuilder Marketing Automation
In today’s complex digital marketing environment, homebuilder marketing automation can make all the difference in increasing your marketing efficiencies. By automating repetitive tasks across channels and tactical efforts, you can spend your time on more strategic tasks, focusing on building and executing a plan designed to bring in new homeowners and grow your business.
Of course, you need the right tools to make that happen. For AI-enabled chatbots and texting, that might mean a solution like AtlasRTX. Our experience in the home building industry will serve you well as we help to automate your marketing efforts. Ready to get started? Request your demo today.
