Communicate to the masses with Real&a

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If the key to finding a good property is; location, location, location then the key to marketing a property is; communication, communication, communication. With a more challenging market comes an opportunity to hone your marketing and sales skills. Turn to your network to generate new leads and maximize every lead opportunity. Here are a few simple tips to help you outpace your competition.

Organize Prospect Clients into Groups
Is your contact list organized into groups? This is a key first step to segmenting your communications or other marketing activities. Groups can be static or dynamic; choose carefully to avoid putting prospects into multiple groups – you need to be able to control how many emails or newsletters you send them! A good rule of thumb is to setup dynamic groups according to area (zip code or city), which saves you time when you enter new prospects – they are assigned to the correct group automatically! Then, you can add other static groups that you would use only occasionally. For example, a group of prospects who favor golf properties, or a group of former buyers, or groups of close personal friends. Managing multiple communications then becomes easy.

To create a dynamic group, select New Group from the Groups menu. Type the name of the group into the Group field (for example, create a group named “Tempe”). Then click the “Add/Remove Contacts …” button. Since this is going to be a dynamic group, you will click on the Edit Criteria button in the Dynamic members area of the dialog box (see figure 1). A group criteria dialog box will pop up (this is the same dialog box as an advanced query, in case you’ve ever performed one of those before).

To setup the criteria for a dynamic group, click on the Field Name dropdown list and scroll down until you find “City” (or ZIP Code, if you want to do it that way. A hint: ZIP Code is the very last field in the list). Then click on the dropdown list for Operator, and select “Equal To” (There are some other operators you might use, but Equal To is probably the best one for this example). And finally, click in the box below Value and type in the city you want (or select it from the list, if it’s there). Then click the Add to list button to the right. If you want to see the list, click on the Preview button and the list of contacts in your new group will show up in the bottom pane. You can add other criteria as well, such as “ID/Status = prospect” to help qualify your group better, if you like. See figure 2 for a screenshot of a completed criteria. Click OK, and you will go back to the Add/Remove Contacts dialog. Click OK once more, and your group is finished. From now on, whenever you add a new contact into the database, if the city field is Tempe (and if they’re a prospect), then they will be automatically added to your Tempe group!

If you want to create your dynamic groups using zip codes, you have even greater flexibility. Thanks to the US Postal Service, most zip codes are numbered sequentially by area, so when you create your groups you can choose individual zip codes or “clumps” of zip codes. Your criteria for the group members could be set to the following:

Using the above criteria, your group would consist of any of the zip codes 85250, 85251, 85252, 85253, or 85254. You can design the groups however you think would be best for your territory. Experiment with the kinds of capabilities ACT! offers for criteria!

You can even have overlapping dynamic groups. For example, you can create groups for each city in your territory and for some of the most important zip codes in each city. ACT! will automatically sort them out, and some prospects will be part of multiple lists. Just be careful to design your communications carefully to avoid hitting them multiple times with the same email or newsletter!

Static groups are created using the same process, but instead of specifying criteria for them, you just select and add them from your contact list. Once you have a Group created, you can add more in the same way or highlight new contacts in your contact list and then from the Groups menu select Group membership | Add Selected to Group