Buyer's Guide: E-marketing

BUYER'S GUIDE: E-marketing

BY MICHAEL ANTONIAK

Pulling them in

You need a two-pronged strategy to ensure Web marketing success: First, make buyers and sellers aware you’re online. Second, give them a reason to return to your Web site. Two increasingly popular tools can help you achieve both objectives. An e-mail newsletter for clients, customers, and willing prospects keeps your name top of mind and entices people to your site through helpful links. Virtual tours let buyers preview properties and demonstrate to sellers how you’ll showcase their listing.

Today you can farm out your virtual tours to specialists or create them yourself. Outsourcing makes sense if you’re so busy you can’t devote the hour or so needed to take the pictures and build the tour. Turnkey services start around $100 per tour.

There’s more than savings in the self-service approach. With creative control, your tour is done and posted as soon as you want, not on the provider’s schedule. All that’s required is a digital camera, a lens attachment if you want 360-degree images, and virtual tour software.

Most vendors host your tours on their server, providing a URL link to a directory of your tours or each individual tour. Some also distribute tours to major real estate portals, such as REALTOR.com, where they’ll be exposed to the widest audience.

E-newsletters—starting at $30 a month—can ferry your listings, virtual tours, and Web site URLs directly to everyone in your e-mail address book. Just make sure your e-mail complies with the new federal anti-spam law, the CAN SPAM Act.

Publishers let you personalize the e-newsletter with your contact information. Content varies from general interest information to articles focused on real estate and finance.

With the push-and-pull strategy of an e-newsletter and tours, your Web site will be a sure draw for consumers—and the penultimate step in turning prospects into your buyers and sellers.

Questions to help you select the right newsletter:

Whom are you trying to reach? Define your audience to help you outline the content. You may need different newsletters for different audiences.
What do you need to say? You have only a few seconds to catch readers’ attention. Make your newsletter attractive and informative at a glance.
How much work is involved? Writing articles for a customized newsletter, managing a large e-mail list, and distributing the newsletter takes time.
What’s in it for you? The newsletter must encourage people to contact you and make it as easy as possible to do so. E-mail links, links to your Web site and tours, electronic forms—all make it a more valuable, effective vehicle.
How will you know it works? Invite response as much as possible, and include tracking features to let you know if recipients open the newsletter and what links they use.

Voice of experience:

Ray Wells, CRB, Salesperson, Dilbeck, REALTORS®, GMAC Real Estate/Christie’s Great Estates, Pasadena, Calif. For Wells, electronic newsletters “are a way to stay in touch, so that when people are buying or selling, they think of me,” he says. Consequently, he wants some control over content. Using a customized newsletter from Inman ClientDirect, he chooses articles from the Inman archive and drops them into a template.

Newsletters

Capitol Assets $30 per month
plus initial setup fee Capitol Assets, CapitolAssets@att.net, 800/700-6175. Monthly newsletter. PDF version of the company’s print newsletter can be distributed as an e-mail attachment or featured on a Web site. Includes general information about the housing market, pricing trends, and financing. If you use print newsletter, you receive $10 off the PDF version.

Community Update $149 per month
NewsRoute, www.newsroute.com, 800/707-3240. Monthly. Fee includes distribution and database management for up to 10,000 e-mail addresses. Features synopses of articles with links to full text, tips of interest to homeowners, and personalized greeting for each recipient. Tracking services include reports indicating which recipients open the newsletter and respond and what links they use.

The E Real Estate Newsletter $75 one-time setup fee, $50 per issue; minimum six-month subscription Touchpoint Communications, www.touchpointcom.com, 800/659-3244. Monthly. Distributed as a PDF file for posting to your Web site or sending as e-mail attachment. Includes articles of general interest to homeowners, buyers, and sellers.

Inman ClientDirect $99 per year with enrollment in Inman services program
Inman News, www.inman.com, 510/658-9252. Monthly. Distribute it yourself by e-mail, post link to newsletter on your Web site, or have company e-mail it for you. Content fully customizable from password-protected control panel. Compose articles, add photos of current listings, and draw additional content from company’s article archive. Includes tips for homeowners, buyers, and sellers.

Marketing Advantage $60 one-time setup fee, $50 per issue
TMA FarmNet Inc., www.tmafarmnet.com, 800/655-6611. Monthly. PDF newsletter for printing, posting to your Web site, or distributing as an e-mail attachment. Up to one-third of each issue can be filled with customized content. Includes articles on housing trends, homeownership, and finance, and a contest or sweepstakes in each issue.

Real Estate Update $299 per year
Realty Times, www.realtytimes.com, 214/353-6980. Monthly. Optional automatic e-mail distribution. Includes current market conditions report; consumer-oriented content on homeownership, real estate; featured link of the month, such as a mortgage calculator; and bylined article you write. Users can complete electronic form to submit property interests to you. Newsletter also available as part of $999 Agent Marketing Package bundle.

Questions to help you select a virtual tour solution:

Do you have time to do it yourself? Budget an hour per listing for taking pictures and building and posting a tour.
What do you want to include? Standard pictures are a must. Extras, such as 360-degree images, audio, and video, aren’t included with all options.
Your server or theirs? Many providers will host your tours. If you host them yourself, make sure you have enough space on your server.
How long to load? Many prospective buyers lack a broadband connection. Sample your tours from a dial-up connection.
What else can you do with the tour? Some providers let you format tours for printing or include tools for viewing tours distributed on disk or CD.
Where will consumers find it? If the vendor can distribute your tours (such as forwarding them to REALTOR.com), it will increase viewings.

Voice of experience:

Mike Parker, ABR®, CRS®, Huff Realty, Florence, Ky. Some residential specialists prefer to build their own virtual tours for the time savings and creative control. Parker and his team have used Web-based TourFactory to create between 400 and 500 virtual tours over the past year. “It’s only $600 for an unlimited number of tours, so it’s pretty cost-effective,” he says. And it’s so user-friendly that he’s using it to create tours of area schools, stores, shopping malls, parks, and places of worship—anything that might interest someone considering a move to the area. “A virtual tour always helps bring in business,” he says.

Do-it-yourself virtual tours

HomeTour360 $595 starter kit (lens attachments and software); $1,550 camera/adapters/software bundle Homestore.com, www.hometour360.com, 866/483-4749. Image-capture and tour-building solution for creating 360-degree panoramic images using IPIX imaging technology. Includes map and up to six additional images of property. Tours can be formatted for printing as a brochure. Company hosts tours and distributes them to REALTOR.com Virtual Tour Distribution Network. Turnkey tour-creation services also available.

RealTourVision Builder Kit $799
Real Tour Vision, www.realtourvision.com, 866/947-8687. Lens attachment, special rotator head, and software bundle for creating 360-degree panoramic images. Service includes user-tracking reports and Web page with links to tours. Company hosts tours. Also offers tour-creation services.

TourFactory $600 annual subscription or $39.95 per tour
Home Debut Inc., www.tourfactory.com, 888/458-3943. Web-based tour-building solution with hosting. Users upload images to password-protected site and build tours. Unlimited number and type of images (i.e., regular or panoramic pictures) per tour; custom branding with company colors; tab directory for each room, feature, or other area of the tour; distribution to REALTOR.com Virtual Tour Distribution Network.

VisualTour $199.95 setup plus $29.95 monthly subscription fee
TRF Systems, www.visualtour.com, 800/873-0700. Tour-building software and hosting service “talks” you through building process. Unlimited number and types of images for each tour. Automatically resizes images to best size for quick downloads; lets users include streaming audio narration with tours; generates link to directory of your tours. Includes viewer for opening tours distributed on disk or CD. Distribution to REALTOR.com Virtual Tour Distribution Network.

Voyager 360 $1,979 for 360 Single Shot System; $40 a month subscription thereafter
Voyager Communications Group, www.voyager360.com, 866/246-5483. Turnkey virtual tour-building/hosting solution. Kit includes 5 megapixel digital camera, 360-degree lens attachment, case, and software. Shoot images and upload them to company Web server; company handles image editing and uploads to RealAdvantage Express listing-management control panel. Once there, you can link to completed tour from any Web site.

Prices are the manufacturers’ suggested retail prices and are subject to change. This list isn’t comprehensive; NAR doesn’t evaluate or endorse these products and isn’t responsible for changes in company info.

MORE ONLINE

For information on the CAN SPAM Act of 2003, click Current Links at REALTOR.org/realtormag.

FACTOID

Ninety-three percent of California buyers preview homes online to narrow their search.
—2003 Internet Versus Traditional Buyers Study, CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®