How Closed Loop Marketing Helps Sell Homes

Marketing and Sales Alignment for the Housing Markets

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A visual representation of the actions taken by a prospect within a closed loop marketing system

It can be hard for a business to know if it’s marketing efforts are having any effect on sales or where potential problems in the sales cycle are occurring. Therefore, small businesses should implement a system where they can monitor the four different stages of the sales lifecycle to see where conversions are happening and not being made. This type of monitoring allows recognize and eliminate marketing tactics that do not work from your overall sales and marketing strategy.

What is Closed Loop Marketing?

A closed loop marketing system allows businesses to ascertain where a sales/lead may not be converting as it should. There are four stages in the closed loop marketing system:

The visitor lands upon the business’ website – sometimes via the application of email drip marketing, Search Engines, Social Media, PPC, or referrals.

The visitor looks around the business’ website. They navigate through pages and are drawn to information that applies to their needs. They develop trust and become confident with your authority with the subject matter.

The visitor becomes a lead when they click upon a call to action button and find information that provides value. They complete a data capture form in exchange for the whitepaper, presentation or video. 

The lead becomes a customer – Once the email address is obtained, repeated contact over time allows your company to become a trusted source of information, provided your email marketing is of value to the recipient. Preplanned ongoing emails are known as drip marketing.

Once a prospect has completed the cycle, they start again with different campaign. Hence the term, Closed Loop Marketing.

Drip, or Automated Marketing

Drip marketing is an important aspect of the closed loop marketing strategy. The term derives from the idea that the business should send (or ‘drip’) a series of pre-written messages to a consumer or prospective consumer over a period. An example of this would be for a lead to sign up to a free whitepaper via the site (Stage 3 of the Closed Loop Marketing Cycle), and the prospect is sent a thank you e-mail. Then a couple of days afterward they are sent another e-mail asking them if they enjoyed the whitepaper, this process can continue almost indefinitely. Drip marketing is particularly useful for built environment organizations like homebuilders developers and realtors who have a long sales cycles and high values.

A Closed Loop Marketing Process

For the success of the closed loop marketing process, business’ must consider several aspects to help them track and monitor visitors and leads. Each stage has a practice in which the marketers can feed the loop and help in monitoring – these practices help perfect the closed loop marketing process and can help increase the efficiency of the process.

The Four Stages of a Closed Loop Marketing System

Stage one - The tactics are initiated by directing a visitor to your website from social media, e-mail marketing, search engines, paid searches, etc. Monitoring the referral source for each consumer illustrates which method is worth repeating and which method is not worth the effort. A cookie is used to determine what outreach originated the link back.

Stage two - IP-based cookies track what information the visitor has viewed on the site, how long they have stayed on the website and how long they stayed on individual pages. This information should then be linked to the origination so view the effectiveness of particular referral sites and optimize them later on.

Stage three - The website visitor can be converted into a quality lead by being directed to a landing page where a trade takes place. Asking for contact information in exchange for information on financing a home, or the materials used in construction as an example provides a reason to agree to your marketing.

Stage four - Use drip marketing to promote your firm's unique sales proposition and the properties you have to sell. Email marketing keeps your company and its properties top-of-mind on regular time-based intervals and is more likely to convert prospects into sales.