As real estate businesses, we are still making it so complex for the consumer to get a hold of us. Why? Because our marketing/sales funnel looks something like this:
The results of such a complicated funnel?
We tested out the response time of some of the top 50 real estate brokerages in US and found out that:
40% of the brokerages we contacted never replied. 48% took more than 5 minutes, with the majority between 1 hour to 3 days. Only 12% managed to reply within 5 minutes. Those 12% had one thing in common, a chat widget on their website.
The questions is why do we make hot leads fill out forms, get them to leave the website then beg them to reply and engage with us a second time using a barage of marketing emails? Why not engage with them in real-time right when they are on the website?
Like that:
That's exactly what we did with The Keyes Company.
The Keyes Company Adopts Conversational Marketing: Increases Opportunities by 86% & Gets 43% More Qualified Leads.
Wendi Iglesias is the Chief Information Officer at The Keyes Company, one of the leading real estate brokerages in the nation based out of Florida.
For Wendi, trying Roof AI was about enhancing the customer experience on the Keyes website. The Keyes team had already tried other live chat products to generate real estate leads.
But most had one major problem:
The impersonal and pushy approach resulted in low lead quality.
As Wendi explained:
“We have done both the manned chat services where we paid for the service to man the chat for us, as well as the presence aware chat where our chat was only displayed when we had call center staff available to assist. We found that much of it was on lower end sales and rentals.”
After several unsuccessful attempts with other third party ISA providers, The Keyes Company reverted to using a form to capture leads on their site.
This meant that Keyes were losing leads because some emails would go unanswered or prospects would move on after waiting a considerable amount of time for a reply.
The real estate industry is plagued by the slow response time problem. As shown in the study we did here at Roof AI.
While another study by InsideSales.com & HBR, proved that your chances of qualifying a lead decreases by 400% after the first 5 minutes of contact.
Slow response time is not the brokerage’s fault though. It is the outdated tools they use.
Only 12% of brokerages were able to respond within 5 minutes; all of them were using a chat feature.
Why Roof AI?
Why did Wendi decide to switch to Roof AI in the first place?
She gave us one simple but impactful reason:
Enhancing the consumer experience on their website.
Here’s what she said,
“For us, however, the strategy of moving to a BOT was not solely about lead generation. It was far more about consumer experience as our BOT has advantages we did not have with traditional chat.”
Bot generated 86% more opportunities & 43% more qualified leads.
Sunny, the Keyes Company’s real estate bot, acted as a second capturing net that - to date - has increased the potential number of opportunities by 86% and real estate qualified by 43%.
For The Keyes Company, lead generation was an added bonus, the main focus was still on the customer’s website experience.
Not only did Roof AI’s bot convert more people into qualified leads, but the quality of leads has also increased.
Wendi added that they are finding the leads from the bot to be of better quality.
Results Recap
Since switching to Roof AI, The Keyes Company has managed to:
- Increase potential opportunites by 86%
- Increase the number of qualified leads by 43%
- Capture better quality of leads
Final Thought: Conversational Marketing Enhances Customer Experience
By adopting a “consumer first” mindset and implementing a conversational marketing approach on their website, The Keyes Company has managed to elevate the customer experience which resulted in an increase in the quality of leads.
The Keyes Company also learned that many of their web traffic preferred having conversations on their website rather than filling out a form, which resulted in an increase in opportunities and qualified leads.