A 5-step guide to building a powerhouse real estate sales funnel

Customer retention is important. Businesses thrive when they have loyal, repeat customers. But when it comes to real estate, unless you're dealing with millionaire property moguls, repeat customers aren't always possible.

Most people (at least, the lowly non-millionaires amongst us) don't have the luxury to buy more than one house ever—let alone every five or ten years.

So as an estate agent you need to be constantly bringing in new leads, and turning those leads into clients. But how do you do this short of studying The Wolf of Wall Street and hoping for the best?

With a real estate sales funnel system. Don't know what that is? No worries. In this guide, we'll take you through everything you need to know and have you selling more houses than ever.

What is a real estate sales funnel anyway?

A real estate funnel is the system that guides visitors through your website or landing page. It turns visitors into leads, helps you nurture them into legitimate prospects, and eventually results in them becoming your clients.

Think of it as a giant digital water slide that winds around and leads customers into your splash pool of sales.

Many industries use different types of sales funnels to get more sales. This is just a term for the buying process customers are led through from first discovering your business to purchasing your products or services and (ideally) becoming repeat customers.

In real estate, it needs to look a little different from a traditional sales funnel. Your funnel should be a series of web pages that customers navigate through as they move from being first-time or unqualified visitors to your site, to qualified leads when they choose to either contact you or provide their contact information.

📚 Want a more interactive experience? Consider building a video landing page to boost engagement.

But first, create a web presence

Before even getting to creating a real estate funnel, you need to establish a good online presence. Essentially this means:

• Creating a website
• Getting on social media
• Making the most of ads
• Indirect marketing efforts

Once your website is up and running, invest some time in creating valuable content that can bring visitors to your site. By creating high-quality content, you establish your authority in the real estate space, making you a trustworthy expert in the eyes of your potential clients.

People buy houses from real estate agents they trust. Talk about the things you know, like neighbourhoods you buy and sell in, advice for first-time buyers, or commentary on your local market.

How to build a real estate sales funnel in 5 steps

Once you’ve laid all that groundwork, you’re ready to create an online real estate sales funnel that will work for you, generating valuable new leads that turn into clients who buy and sell homes.

Our five-step process will help you build that funnel and get the commissions coming in.

1. Create a landing page for each of your properties

First things first: you need a way to turn visitors into actual leads—or as they say in the business, turn eyeballs into handshakes.

Create a separate real estate landing page for each of the properties that you have listed, so people can quickly and easily request more information.

To boost your conversion rates, consider using a tool to create real estate videos that entice leads by giving them a closer look into the property.

With Paperform, you can create an all-in-one landing page and form that you can either link to on your website or social media, or embed directly within the listing page. This is even easier with our WordPress plugin.

The custom form and page builder lets you customize every aspect of the design to match your personal brand. Embed photos and videos, add a sign-up button and build a seamless experience that will help you capture emails and bring in leads.

Most importantly, with Paperform your landing page is automatically optimised for mobile—in real estate marketing as in every modern industry, mobile is everything.

2. Link or embed the landing page on your website

Once you have separate landing pages for all of your properties, it’s time to start generating leads.

While pictures and information about the property are great, you need a way to get actual leads into your funnel. (You’ve come so far, don’t screw this up now.)

Looking at the funnel outlined above, there are a number of different ways that you can use forms to capture leads from visitors to your website:

• Showing request
• General information request
• Newsletter subscription

Ideally, you should shoot for all three. That is, unless you’re trying specifically to shoot yourself in the foot and potentially lose out on ⅓ of the leads that you could be generating. (You aren’t, right?)

Showing requests and general information requests are straightforward. It’s just a way for your prospects to get in touch with you if they want to request a property showing or learn more about the listing.

Newsletter subscriptions are another tried and true method of generating leads. Not every buyer will be ready to make a purchase right now, but they may want to stay in touch and learn about future listings.

It’s also a great idea to use a lead magnet—an incentive you offer to encourage folks to sign up. A free, downloadable ebook related to the landing page (for example, an ebook filled with tips for home buyers on a property page) makes for a great lead magnet.

If you’re using Paperform, you can easily embed a landing page directly into your website. Or link out to the hosted version of the page with a custom link.

Otherwise, you’ll likely need to figure out the embed functionality of whatever marketing or form software and edit your site to include the necessary code snippets.

3. Send an initial follow-up email

When you’ve generated leads specific to properties by collecting information from your individual landing pages, it’s time to follow up with those potential clients.

If at all possible, use a marketing automation workflow (like Zapier) to handle this step for you and save yourself a lot of work. If you’re using Paperform, you’ve actually got two great built-in solutions here:

• Auto-send automated emails when a form is completed,
• Use 3,000+ integrations to send data where it's needed (e.g. a real estate CRM)

Once a lead has been generated from a property page, you want two emails to go out right away: a notification email (for you) and a follow-up and personal welcome (for your leads).

These two emails are the start of a relationship between you and this prospect. Take time to craft a message that speaks to their needs and helps position you as an agent they would like to work with.

4. Nurture your leads

Once you capture an email address, of course, your work’s not done. Follow up with periodic updates on new listings to keep them engaged and coming back to your site.

The newsletters and emails you create for this sales funnel should be sent to the specific segments of leads that sign up. Segmentation is extremely important in email marketing campaigns, especially in real estate.

Remember the first marketing commandment: Thou shalt not send spam. For those who subscribe via a lead magnet or a newsletter, keep them engaged with a mix of relevant content, visually-pleasing graphics (Canva or alternatives are great) and new listings.

Ideally, you could go so far as to track and segment the specific pages where they opted-in and segment them based on neighbourhood or housing type to show them the most relevant content—quiz funnels are a great way to do this.

5. Remarket to those leads over time

When a lead doesn’t convert into a client, that’s OK — there’s still room for you to follow up and keep trying. In this case, you should use social media and retargeting to drive those leads back to your site.

The final step of this 5-step funnel keeps you in front of your prospects, even if they don’t read your emails or come back to your site. Facebook, in particular, has a really strong retargeting platform that will let you build custom audiences and show them precision-targeted ads for new or existing leads.

Want to show that new three-bedroom Victorian to all of the folks who checked out the two similar listings you had last month? Create a custom audience. Want to reach apartment hunters with the hottest downtown lofts? Create a custom audience.

All of the moving parts here can seem overwhelming. Keep in mind that this funnel is meant to be repeatable. Once things are set up, you can use the same tools, tech, and strategies on each new listing and for each new lead.

This means you’ll become a pro, and it will get easier and faster in time. Of course, it’s all predicated on building the right web presence and having the right tech in place.

Paperform can handle the all-important conversion part of the funnel. Rather than wrestling with landing page builders, forms, and plugins, you can build and launch beautiful landing pages in minutes.

You can also use Papersign, our eSignature solution, to finalize your real estate transactions effortlessly. It's the seamless, secure and efficient way of getting all your important documents signed—from client agreements to final sale. Sign up free today.

Find yourself muttering "isn't this what experts are for?"

Connect with a workflow automation expert to plug the holes in your real estate sales funnel and cut down manual work. Our Paperform Certified Experts have a proven track record of crafting customised solutions, they'll take your sales funnel from merely functional to the stuff dreams are made of.