Don’t Settle: 3 tips for communicating with your contacts 

There’s no shortage of ways to communicate with people these days. You can post your weekend plans on Facebook for hundreds of people to see in seconds. Or easily text your colleague about a sketching question while you're out in the field.

It’s amazing that we have access to correspond with tens or even hundreds of thousands of people almost instantly. But of course, not all methods of communications are created equal. For business owners, one of the easiest and most strategic ways to stay in contact with your clients is via email.

Last time, we talked about strategies to get your contacts list built up. So now, we're going to go over how to connect with those contacts once you've got them. Time is money, and email is one of the fastest ways to bring cash straight to your business.

There are three major strategies to turn your email communications into orders:

1. Connect

First, you’ve got to establish a real connection. Your contacts are going to read information that's useful to them. If they think you're just trying to sell them something, they're probably not going to even open the email.

Once you've got your relevant content, it’s important to personalize it to let your customers know you care about their business. You can divide your contacts list into groups and send them different emails accordingly. For example, you might send a group of attorneys an email about your bail bond services, and send your homeowner contacts information about winter home maintenance. And be sure to be professional too. After all, you're making an impression on your potential clients.

It may seem small, but people love personalized messages and it strengthens your relationships. In fact, personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates.(Campaign Monitor)

2. Make Yourself Available

When a client is in the market for an appraisal, your chances of getting their business will go way up if you give them a way to contact you.

Make sure your emails have links to your website, a phone number at the bottom, and an invitation for them to ask you questions. This is called a Call to Action, and it prompts the reader to do something about the information you send them. (Namely, that they call on you for your services.)

3. Maintain Consistency

Lastly, the most important strategy is to keep it up. You can stay consistent effortlessly via email. You can plan out when to send emails on a schedule using a calendar or planner. Or even better, you can use a tool that lets you schedule all your emails at once and sends them for you. This will free up your plate for your typical workflow.

Here at a la mode, we have XSellerate to do the work for you. It’s a set-and-forget tool for email communication. Click here to learn how it'll make your client communication easy as pie.

Communicating with your contacts is essential. But it's just one piece of the marketing puzzle. As we've gone through this series, we've covered some key components for developing a good marketing strategy in 2018. Because at the end of the day, you shouldn't have to settle for low income, ridiculous deadlines, and an unpredictable flow of work.

If you ever have marketing questions, we'd love to help. Just email us at training@alamode.com and we'll get you on the right path.

And don't forget to catch up on all our previous Don't Settle blogs here:
1. Simple steps for making more money in 2018
2. Tackle your 2018 goals with a website
3. Stop lowering your fees
4. Build a stellar contacts database

So, ready to kick-start your communication? XSellerate is the tool you need. It's an all-in-one emailing platform. You’ll get pre-packaged email campaigns specific to the appraisal industry and a huge variety of pre-written stand-alone emails. All you have to do is schedule them and you're done. Click here to read more.

And of course, if you want the complete marketing toolkit that's tailored to the appraisal industry, get an XSite. It includes your website, plus your emailing tools. Click here to keep reading.