Your real estate website can be an excellent source of leads, but the challenge is always to get your visitors to “raise their hands,” letting you know that they are interested in using your website, getting answers to their questions or talking to you about representing them. You can meet that challenge when you use real estate calls to action effectively.
Website Calls to Action
The online Business Dictionary defines Call to Action as: “Words that urge the reader, listener, or viewer of a sales promotion message to take an immediate action.” You’ve probably heard about the importance of real estate calls to action. It’s the same for any type of website.
For example, visit the Macy’s department store home page. Their home page is just a series of calls to action. They start with sitewide sales, then highlight sales in particular departments such as furniture or jewelry. Calls to action are easy for an e-commerce website. Macy’s already knows that people come to their website to shop. Their calls to action don’t necessarily need to follow best practices.
Set Up the Best Real Estate Calls to Action on Your Website
On a real estate website, people visit with many different objectives. Therefore, you need to make the most of your calls to action. Here’s how.
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Create Special Offers that will Motivate Visitors to Take Action
Develop offers that are worthy of a call to action. Real estate websites are notoriously devoid of these types of offers. Any modern website has a customer-facing home search. You can make the most of yours by coming up with an effective call to action. But, after that, what do you have?
Get creative and think of other offers that your visitors would want badly enough to fill out a form or give you a call. While you’re doing that, consider whether people in your market area are more likely to pick up the phone, or would prefer content marketing offers. Here are a couple examples:
- Market information: If your prospects are sophisticated enough to want to know about things like the current DOM, average selling price and list to sales ratio, you’re in a perfect position to provide them with information they can’t get easily on their own.
- Sale prices in their neighborhood: Some online sites say that they show actual sale prices, but you can convince visitors that getting information right from the MLS is always accurate.
- E-books: They don’t need to be fancy. Write a page or three on a topic of interest, put a cover page on it with your contact information, and save it as a PDF. Topics could include managing multiple offers in a hot market, how to choose the right neighborhood – the list is endless.
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Create an Effective CTA
A good call to action usually starts with an action verb or asks a question. For example:
- Get all the market information you need to make an informed decision. Download a free report
- Want to know what the homes in your neighborhood sold for? Get a free report
- Wondering how to manage multiple offers? Find out now
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Display Real Estate Calls to Action to Grab Attention
Some CTAs make sense as linked text in the content on a page or blog post. Another alternative is to create an attention-grabbing graphic and place it for maximum effect. You might also want to consider popup or slide-in windows for your CTAs. Use them carefully to avoid alienating your visitors.
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Do Something When a Visitor Shows Interest!
If someone signs up on your home search, call or email to start developing a relationship. If they request information, get it to them immediately. And, of course, always be available by phone.
Internet visitors are usually conservative when it comes to leaving their contact information or calling. But, if you don’t make a great offer, you’ll never know what they’ll do. It’s a process. Keep testing and refining to find the best CTAs to use in your market.
