With much of the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts still
cleaning up from hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia and Rita, and reports
that the Fed may raise rates again, the housing industry may have some
unsteady times ahead.
Now may be
a good time to beef up your prospect base. That way, if the market
changes, your brokerage will remain healthy because you already have a
solid client base from which to do business.
This week we're introducing new lead capture tools on your XSite that
help you prepare your brokerage for market changes by allowing you to
obtain detailed information about your XSite visitors, which will help
you convert them into solid leads faster and better serve their needs.
How the lead capture forms work
Using your XSite Wizard, you can create forms that aim to get
specific data from your visitors, such as whether they're a first-time
buyer, a refi, previous client, etc. We've
given you several default forms such as "Got a Question?" or
"Basic
Pre-Approval" as well as your own custom forms. Then you can add the
forms to content pages that your target visitors are most likely to go
on your site. When a visitor completes a form, they can be assigned
to a contact group (e.g. "First time buyers") for marketing follow
up. If you use XSellerate with your XSite lead capture forms, an
e-mail drip campaign can be auto-assigned to a contact based on the
form they filled out.
The new lead capture tools also allow you to track which forms are
producing the most leads for you by checking the forms statistics.
The statistics will show you how many pages a particular form appears
and how many leads it's generated in a specified time — 30 days, 60
days, etc.
Doorway forms
Also new this week are the new "doorway" forms, which you can
activate so your visitors will see them before they can get to a
requested page (see an example
here), making them more likely to be filled out so you can
get detailed contact information on their first visit.
There are two types of doorway forms available on
your XSite. A
Page Specific Doorway Form allows you add a form to particular page on your XSite (e.g. your rate sheet).
A
Global Doorway Form allows you to establish site "triggers" that will automatically activate the
doorway form of your choice through the natural course of a visitor
browsing your site. For example, you can set the doorway form
"Looking to buy" to pop up after a visitor has clicked on three pages
on your XSite. Then your XSite will submit the leads that fill out
the forms to a contact group you've specified.
"These new lead capture tools were designed to
equip Mortgage XSite owners with tools that will help keep their
businesses thriving even if changes occur in the mortgage market,"
said Brad Eaton, our Vice President of Mortgage Products.
You can view these new tools by clicking on the
"Lead Capture Tools" icon in the My Office Area of your XSite.
More than $675,000
collected for Hurricane Katrina victims
In our last
newsletter, we asked you to help out Hurricane Katrina victims by
donating to the
American Red Cross through our site,
www.alamode.com/katrina, and our founder and Chairman, Dave
Biggers, would match your donations. You came through in a big way,
donating a total of $261,453.53, which Dave dutifully matched, dollar
for dollar.
When you add your
donations, Dave's matched donation and our $150,000 donation to the
REALTORS® Relief Fund, together we've provided a grand total of
$678,427.06 to bring aid, necessities and comfort to victims.
We have so many
valued customers in the areas hit by the massive storm and we're
doing whatever we can to help them out. We've offered corporate
housing to displaced families who may need it and deferred all fees
and payments due us under service contracts, annual subscriptions,
website renewals or anything else for our thousands of clients in
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. We're not patting ourselves
or even you on the back — we just want to let you know about the power
and goodwill of the real estate professionals we work for.
One of our Vice
Presidents, Adam Calvery, was able to see Katrina's aftermath first
hand when he traveled to Gulfport, Miss. with his Oklahoma Air Guard
unit. He described the scene as "like 100 miles of 9/11, or Hiroshima
without the fallout."
"There are people
there sifting through trees, sand, rubble, anything, looking for
anything salvageable. I see the water and the MREs [Meals Ready
to Eat] they have, and I know that some of that stuff was paid for by
donations like those from our customers, and I'm able to see where
that money is ending up, and that's really touching," Calvery said.
Calvery's unit was
responsible for getting planes on the ground, parked, unloaded and
back in the air. "On our side of the runway/parking ramp we unload the
planes, and on the other side the Army is loading up every kind of
helicopter known to man and flying directly to the neighborhoods and
aid stations and delivering the water and food," he said. "Since
[Sept. 3], your Oklahoma Air Guard has unloaded and delivered 1.7
million MREs that have fed 150,000 people. We unloaded 850,000 lbs of
water in one day, and that was about average for the week. We're
averaging about 20-30 airplanes a day, and have about 30 people to do
the unloading here. My point here is that the money that's being
donated is going right to work and feeding people and keeping them
‘healthy.'"
And those donations
are still needed! If you would still like to help out Hurricane
Katrina victims, we urge you to donate directly to the Red Cross site
by clicking
this link.
