Crafting a Strategic Response to an Email Inquiry
(00:01):
Welcome. In this short video what I want to do is talk about how you should ideally be responding to text or email inquiries on properties, maybe your listing or something coming from your website or from some of your advertising.
(00:21):
Okay, so, you get a email or you get perhaps a text message, but let’s focus on email for the moment, with an inquiry from your website or from an attitude place or whatnot, and you don’t have this person’s phone number and they ask you a question, could be anything. Is this property in a flood zone? Does this property have an HOA associated with it? How should you respond? I get asked this question often from especially newer agents, but I find even experienced agents sometimes kind of missing the boat on how they should really be effectively responding to these kinds of inquiries.
(00:53):
So, rule number one is you should always first answer the question. I like to always answer the question with more than they may expect. If I can get a screen capture of a map or something like that to show them information that would be a more complete than just a simple yes or no, then I like to include that in with the email message and the response.
(01:14):
The second thing and the strategic part in this response is that what you want to do is effectively do what’s called moving them up the pyramid of persuasion. And I’m going to show you this pyramid here in a moment, and then I’m going to take you through how you should craft your response to move them up to this pyramid of persuasion.
(01:31):
Okay, here is a simple diagram for you. This is coming from the book Success as a Real Estate Agent for Dummies, written by Dirk Zeller, who’s a national coach. Effectively, what this pyramid of persuasion lays out is how you move people from the lower side of the pyramid to the upper side of the pyramid. The higher you go in the pyramid in your engagement with that person, the more persuasive you are going to be in your conversation with them, the more likely you’re going to be able to convert them to be a client who is just making an inquiry on an ad, for example.
(02:06):
The example that we used was an email, and you can see down below in this pyramid, you see email is down near the bottom of the pyramid of persuasion and what he characterizes as information zone. What you really want to do is move your client up this pyramid of persuasion, ultimately to a face-to-face meeting. Going from a response from an email about whether a property has an HOA, for example, to a face-to-face meeting may be too big of a stretch in that one response. My suggestion is, is that you try to move them up this paramedic incrementally. I would try and move them from the email, for example, next to a phone call, which would be up here and then potentially from that phone call to a face-to-face meeting. How do you move them from an email to a phone call?
(02:52):
Well, in the example of the question that I’ve used is there an HOA in this property? I would probably answer the question and then I would probably give them some additional information about perhaps the HOA to create more questions and create a need for a more of an in-depth back and forth conversation. For example, I might say, “Yes, there is an HOA and it covers these three elements, but there are some important things that you should be aware of in this community. I’d be happy to chat with you on the phone about these things and give you some more insight. When would be a good time to reach you by the phone?” Or, “Could you please get me a number to call you at so we can further discuss these issues and how they may affect how you use the property?”
(03:43):
Going down this path with your prospect is going to give you a better chance of moving them up this pyramid, taking them from an email to a phone call, and then obviously from that phone call the next step would be to try and get a face-to-face with them. If you are not doing this and simply answering the question, you are losing opportunities every time you respond to an inquiry on one of your listings from one of your ads, from your website, et cetera.
(04:09):
This is a very quick hitting tip, I hope it’s helpful for you and please put it into practice and I think you’ll get good results from it.
(04:18):
Signing off. Thanks for watching.
