Month: December 2022

I’ve looked at web design trends globally, and across multiple industries to look for what I’m predicting to be the cool new thing for 2023

#1 Animated Product Reveals

These are hover animations to keep users passively engaged. In layman’s terms, it’s what happens when you click on something that triggers cool animations before it takes you to where you want to go. It adds a bit of flare to the design. There is a growing trend to add it over thumbnails so that when you click, they create an animation to entertain you while loading the next page.

As it pertains to your real estate website I definitely see this adding a bit more luxury to your interface if someone is trying to navigate to view your properties for example.

That extra little bit of visual flare adds some additional class and snap to your website.

#2 Nostalgia And The Y2K Aesthetic

Think back to websites of the 2000s. They were very minimalistic. Since the internet just wasn’t as fast back then, websites tended to be more text-heavy with a lot of white space. A mixed-use of bold and regular fonts dictates where the eyes should go.

Another thing to look out for when we’re talking about old design is the pixelation of icons and elements. The simple shapes give a really retro look if executed correctly.

#3 Customizable Viewing Experiences

I’m sure you’ve noticed on your phone or laptop that either your screen changes color depending on the time of day or you have a toggle from light mode to dark mode on some apps like your Kindle. Well, this trend is catching on when it comes to website design.

In real estate, one of the big things when it comes to your website is ADA compliance to make sure your website is accessible for those with disabilities. Adding a mode to invert colors adds another layer to design, not only for accessibility to disabled website visitors but aesthetically as well.

#4 Scrapbook Aesthetic

Most real estate websites tend to look very templated because of a very boxy layout so this design trend tries its best to remove the template feel. It focuses more on adding background elements like doodles and hand lettering to make it look a little bit more like a scrapbook or journal. Now, this is pretty cool because it breaks the monotony of the traditional style of website and simple elements like images of torn paper are very easy to do and pay dividends in terms of making your website look different.

#5 Overlapping Text

In the same vein of trying to not look like a templated website, having elements overlapping with each other breaks the traditional frame of a website layout. It’s subtle but it also makes you look a lot different.

#6 Overstimulation

Think of this as a very in-your-face design. It’s the opposite of minimalist but just as simple if not simpler. This trend pretty much says down with white space and makes your website look like an Apple website. Imagine the opposite of having any white on your website, meaning full-screen video and oversized typography.

Now the strategy that I’m specifically referring to, is the act of reaching out to people that interact with us, often called outbounding the inbound. Now, the strategy can take many forms like outbound dials or outbound text messages for example, however let’s leverage social media for this strategy. 

When we’re talking about responses or inciting the response, there are only three main types that you need to be measuring. 

• Likes on a post
• Comments on a post
• Follower on your profile

Simply because you can at that point leverage any one of these three types of actions to start a conversation.

Let’s talk about the actual system, breaking this down to three main part; time, script, and knowing your limits. Looking at Instagram as our example, we all kind of know how it works and it’s going to be an easy social media platform to scale with and really just take everything and plug and play. All right, now let’s get into these three main parts, the first part I should say I thought I want to talk about is speed to lead. I’m sure you’ve heard speed to lead that term before. And the main thing that you have to understand with regards to social media and really outbounding the inbound is that you have less than 24 hours to get a response. 

When you get a new follower, you get a new like you get a new comment and you want to engage with somebody, if you wait till the following day, you will likely not be able to get a reply. The faster they engage with you, the faster you need to be replying to them. 

Let’s talk scripts. Very easy script you need to keep in mind in order to create new clients. You just need to be focused on starting a conversation. You can’t sound sleazy and salesy, you just have to be yourself and just talk as if you were talking to anybody else. 

We use a very simple script that we essentially just saved on a document and copy and paste this whenever we have the opportunity to start a new conversation. It goes like this. “Hey. First name” then send. “Thanks for doing a {thing}”, and when I put the brackets doing a thing that could be liking a post, commenting on something or maybe getting a follow. 

Then the next thing is we’re going to want to try to incite a conversation. And the easiest way to incite a conversation is to just keep it simple. Just pick two random things that you could essentially start a conversation with this thing or that thing and try to get a response from there. So are you currently owning a home? Are you renting or maybe so have you done all your Christmas shopping yet? Are you doing it on Amazon? You can go pretty broad strokes about this because remember, at the end of the day, the intent is to start a conversation and then from there, you just kind of carry it on. By the way, just a quick heads up. 

Moving on to part three of this, which is you got to know your limit. It’d be great if we can just send out a bunch of messages every single day, but there is a hard cap to the amount of new conversations that we can start. So you got to know your limit. Roughly from all of the testing and all of the advice that we’ve received, it’s roughly about 20 new chat starts or new conversation starts a day. That said, we definitely don’t want to be pushing that limit, so we always recommend keeping it about 15 a day to be safe. 

Now that you understand the importance of KPIs, what numbers do you need to know?

The easiest way to get and understand the figures is to reverse engineer the steps required to get a transaction. And this is what the process looks like:

Leads > Conversations > Appointments Booked > Appointments Taken > Strategy Sessions Booked > New client > Transaction 

You need to get the numbers of each step to be able to measure your KPIs. Appointments taken are a critical metric to track. If you have booked appointments that did not turn up, it indicates a leak in your funnel that needs to be addressed. The strategy sessions booked are indicative of a listing presentation. Lastly, every new client is not a “now” buyer or seller, but the more clients you add, the simpler it will be to anticipate your following transactions.

Once you have all these numbers, the next important thing is the percentage of conversion for each step. You do this by dividing what’s in front of you to what’s behind you, such as Conversations by Leads.

The next metric to track is how much each step costs. For instance, if you want to measure your cost per acquisition then you take the transaction number and divide it by the amount you spent on marketing. You can also do the same for each step of the process.

You need to measure these numbers daily, weekly, and monthly. If you see spikes or dips in percentages or costs, then you need to act on it. Whether that is changing the strategy or taking note of it for monitoring.