It’s the 30^th of the month.  Do you know where your leads came from?

Track Your Leads to Stop Wasting Your Marketing Dollars

As real estate investors trying to find our next deal we might do a lot of things to generate seller leads:

• An Email Campaign to Realtors
• Signs on the Side of our Vehicle
• Direct Mail to Two Different Lists
• SEO Marketing for our Website
• Google and Facebook Ads
• We might wear a Neon Yellow T-Shirt

At the end of the month, after all that effort and money spent, do you know which of your actions generated the most leads, the best leads, and the most profitable leads?

Three Ways to Determine Lead Source

You have a few options to find out the answer. 

Ask How They Found You

You can ask every lead that comes in how they found you. But that relies on your seller prospect to remember where they saw you and to tell you.  And what if they saw a big billboard for a competitor, googled that billboard, and ended up with you?  What do you do with that?

Despite never putting up a billboard ever, I have personally received numerous leads from my billboard . . .  just saying.

The other two options are much more accurate and can help you pinpoint exactly where the lead came from.  A landing page with a web form for each lead source or different phone numbers.

Landing Page with a Web Form

This entails creating a special page on your website or a single free-standing page that has a special form.  Then for each type of marketing, you send them to a different website link.  For me when I am marketing for motivated sellers I have one website:  www.kcmoHomeBuyer.com

I can then create specific pages with specific web forms for each source:

• kcmoHomeBuyer.com/Realtor
• kcmoHomeBuyer.com/Car
• kcmoHomeBuyer.com/OSS (for out-of-state sellers)
• kcmoHomeBuyer.com/PS (for probate sellers)
• kcmoHomeBuyer.com
• kcmoHomeBuyer.com/yellow

(Don’t go blowing up my website trying to find these pages. I said I could create them, not that I have.)

Then as a lead sees my marketing, they go to my link and fill out a form.  The form talks tells my contact management system a lot of information. Where it came from being the most important.

Different Phone Numbers

Now I suppose we could all have one phone number and when the sellers call make them press 1 for this, 2 for that, ect.  But come on, we all know that does not work. Given a bunch of work, everyone just hangs up.

But with a different phone number for each source of lead, we know exactly where they came from. 

They see the marketing, the call the phone number, which gets redirected to my call service.  The call service talks to them, fills in our call service form inside of my contact management system.  The system knows that the call from this specific number came through which tracking phone number.  And creates a record.  Then when the call service enters the information with that same called from phone number, it matches up.

Then I get an email.  You just got a call from this number, from this marketing campaign and this is who called and what they said. (I also get a text if I set it up that way or no email or text if I routed it to my sales manager who takes all those specific types of calls)

A Good System to Track Leads

Old School Lead Tracking

Back in the old days, tracking my seller leads was all pen and paper.  We talked to the seller and asked them how they found us. Then we filled out a paper form.  We kept all the forms in a stack. Once or twice a month, we worked our way through the stack with follow-up calls.  We didn’t have a lot of marketing channels or a lot of leads, so it worked great.

There is nothing wrong with Old School.  It works great.  But when you have more than 2 or 3 ways of generating leads and you have more than 10 to 15 leads a month, you might need something more robust.

REI Blackbook Tracking

As our business grew and we were working to generate more leads per month, we had multiple ways to generate seller leads.  But we couldn’t tell which methods were working the best.  And while I could figure out how to create different web forms and tracking links inside of my website, the majority of the leads came in by phone.

Old School Tracking

We tried asking.  We tried putting special codes on different direct mail pieces.  And still, it all came down to having a gut feeling to figure out where the houses we purchased came from.  But what about the hang-up calls or the marginal deals that we didn’t do, where did they come from? We didn’t know.

And a lot of the time when we asked, they said they came from our billboard, which we did not have or from our TV commercial that we didn’t have either.

Researching the Best Tracking

We could switch to a different website platform that would help us with the special webforms, at a cost of $99 a month.  (Today that would cost me about $150 a month with all the tools I want)

We could pay for a call tracking service that would give us 10 phone numbers to utilize, for another $99 a month. (That looks like $40 a month right now for 5 numbers and additional fees to bring me up to 10)

We were already using a contact management system that would send a sequence of emails and texts to our sellers and remind us to make manual phone calls.  This was also at $99 a month.  (Today this service is $199 a month)

Enter REI Blackbook

Then there was this tool from some real estate investor guy in St Louis.  I had heard about it 10 years earlier but it was not quite as packed with features back then.  But in 2014, it would:

1.  Be My Website with Landing Pages and Webforms
2. Give Me Tracking Phone Numbers
3. Forward the Tracking Phone Number to My Call Service
4. Tell Me about All New Leads by Text and Email or route to someone else based on lead source
5. Workflows that would Email, Text, Send Ringless Voice Mails and Remind me to Call

What was this tool:  REI Blackbook

For what would cost me $99 each for website, contact management, and tracking phone numbers, I could get all of that for just $99 a month in one tool.  So we switched. 

If I were to calculate that in today’s dollars we would have been paying $399 a month separately and I can use REI Blackbooks for between $197 a month and $297 a month depending on the package of tools, numbers, emails and minutes I decide to go with.

I Know Where My Leads Come From

Now when I log into REI Blackbook and pull up my contact list.  I can sort it and separate out my sellers from all my other contacts as they get tagged as sellers when they come in from one of my trackable lead sources. 

The first thing this tool did was save me money. At the time one of our lead sources was pay per click ads on Google. What we found when we tracked them was that we were getting a LOT of leads from PPC. We knew they took up quite a bit of time talking to them, chasing them, and for the most part ultimately deciding we didn’t want the deal. Because we were tracking we figured out we were spending about $1500 a month to generate a lot of work that resulted in no deals. Ultimately saving us $1500 a month. We either needed to improve our PPC efforts or spend that time and money on some other source that was generating better leads.

Now REIBlackbooks does a ton of stuff, some of which I don’t even know what it is or how it works.  I will dig into some of the other features at a future date. My initial reason for switching then, was so I could know where my leads come from. Want to see REIBlackbook in Action?

Well I am an affiliate partner with REI Blackbook. They figure their customers are their best form of marketing, that we will tell our friends, and they will want to try it out. I have to affiliate links for you, should you decide to become a customer, they will pay me an affiliate fee for my efforts in sharing REI Blackbook with you.

Two Ways to See REI Blackbook in Action

FREE Options:  https://marei.org/reibb

Paid Option with a bunch of bonuses: https://www.REIBlackbook.com/MAREI

(Keep in mind the Paid Option starts you out on their Professional pricing tier and you get to test drive it and get all the bonus items.  You can change to a Basic or Growth pricing tier at any time if you find you don’t need all the buzzers and bells of the Professional.  Personally, I have a 2014 pricing tier that is somewhere between Growth and Professional.