We Give you The Five Top Tools For 2020 Connected To Getting Better Leads

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Jonathan: Welcome back folks to the Mail- Right Show. This is episode 247. It is going to be an internal discussion between me and my great co-host, Robert Newman. We are going to be discussing tools, services, products that can help you get more quality leads, or just help you in your online marketing and make it effective. I am buzzed. I think we have had a pre-show discussion, where we have outlined our hosted tools, I think is going to be a great discussion. Robert, can you introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers.

Robert: Today I am going to do the opposite of what I have done in most of the shows. A lot of times, I barely introduce myself. Today, John, if you do not mind, I am going to do a longer preamble. I am a 13-year veteran of the Real Estate marketing industry. I am probably one of the better guys in the country that you could talk to, who is focused on SEO or what is commonly referred to as, Inbound Marketing for Real Estate, Residential Real Estate, specifically. Although, I have done a lot of Mortgage and a lot of other Real Estate as well.

To learn more about me, or how to do SEO services, I do many deep-dive reviews on people that make websites and have other marketing companies. Mostly just because I have the background. I started working for these companies and then started my own five years ago. I have more history than almost anybody I know. That is why I review other companies, so that you understand from the eyes of an expert, what I think about those services. You can find all that out at inboundram.com. Thank you very much for letting me have a longer preamble, John.

Jonathan: That is all right. I am the founder of Mail Right. We have been going for the past three years. We moved from a pure just email marketing company, with a focus on real estate, into a CRM. The generation company that uses the power of Facebook and a lot of internal technology. You can see the key things on the Mail – Right website. It is a fantastic product. If you are interested in coming on board, go to the Mail- Right website. You can book a free demo and I will show you the demo. How the system works. We are looking for agents right now to come on-board. Robert, let us start it off, let us get into the value. Which tool should we look at first?

Robert: Well, actually John, before we get started, I would just like to cover all the categories. For the people that are listening to the show today and are kind of curious, Tool is a broad category. So what are we going to be talking about specifically? We are going to be talking about a lead routing tool. Okay. If anybody has multiple lead sources and is having trouble, we are going to talk about a tool about how to help you. If anybody has a large number of leads and they are having a hard time calling them or keeping up with them, we are going to be talking about an ISA service that we have heard of. We have not experimented with it, but we think it might be good.

We are going to be talking about a mailer tool, which I am going to let John cover because he is more familiar with it. We are going to talk about not one, but two email tools today. Mine is on the AI front and his is more on the, you can do these really cool things with this email tool. Then we are going to talk about a tool that is called a Lead Magnet Tool, for those of you that own a WordPress website. That is the list of tools. It will deliver. It is something that I use all the time from my clients. It’s really cool. They allow you to do, what is called a Content Magnet. I will explain what that is, but just trust me at the start of the show- It’s cool!

Jonathan: I am probably going to have an interesting discussion about that because I will probably got some different views about that particular tool than Robert. Where are we going to start then?

Robert: Let us start with the emails because we have two email services to talk about. Everybody emails.

Jonathan: Well, I am going to start with a program that offers a fantastic free level. It is a product called MailerLite. Do not worry if you go, there will be full show notes on the Mail- Right website with all the links to these tools. So don’t scrap all your pen and paper. You just go to the Mail- Right website Episode 247 and it will be there listeners and viewers. Now MailerLite, I think I am right, that they are a French-based company, but do not hold that against them. What they offer is a fantastic email sending service.

The free service is that you can have 1000 subscribers and you can send out 12,000 emails per month. Unlike some other services like Mailchimp, which has a very drastic, cut-off from their free level to their paid level. If you go over a 1000 subscribers, the next level up, which covers over 2,500 subscribers still, would only cost you $15 a month. That would cover a lot of people for the first 18 months. Obviously, your biggest thing from the start to the first couple of years of your career is, to build up your database, your email list, as big as you can. Even up to 10,000 plus, it only goes up to $50, but for the first 18 months over the free plan or just the $15 plan, it will probably suffice. Not only does it offer the ability of Drip Campaigns: A drip campaign is when you get somebody coming to your website. They also offer a full plugin that works with WordPress, so it integrates with WordPress very easily.

There are other page building and other products that work with MailerLite easily. That is the other attraction. They go to your website and you showing them either an IDX page or Lead magnet. But you want to get their name and email into your database and then send them a series of drip emails over a period of time or put them on a monthly newsletter, or you can do both. The other thing is, it has a slick interface. They have been around a number of years and the main thing is they have not changed the parameters of their free program. They have kept it the same for over four years. I do not think they are going to change frames anytime soon. Which you cannot say about other email providers.

The other thing they also provide is a slick landing page functionality, so you have a lead magnet. You want to drive people to a specific page on your website by using Facebook or Google ad words, and you want them to go to the landing page. They provide a host of templates and some of those templates are specifically designed for the real estate industry. They are very nice ones as well, very well designed. However, the actual landing page builder is very slick and easy to use. It is much better than lead pages or clicks funnels or some of the very expensive, pre-level landing building products out there.

I actually think these people’s landing page editor, is actually easier and much slicker than many paid systems. It was about over a year ago when I was using MailChimp’s landing page editor, and it was still Beta. They might have moved on, but it was still very rough around the edges and very difficult to use. The help documentation was not that great. Where, if you are new to this, MailerLite provides a load of great help documentation and videos, and I think anybody that has any computer skills could have a go at this, Robert.

Robert: I am excited to check it out. I have never looked at it. I am actually going to add one unto the list that I did not actually talk to you about. It is a product that is done by the same company, and I just remembered it. So the one that I want to talk about today, is Robly, and I think that we are going to divide our advice into two categories. I think John just explained how MailerLite, is probably really great for those of you who are beginning and maybe are trying to figure out how to do landing pages. That is the way that it kind of felt to me. Now I have a recommendation for those of you that have an established list or already sending out a newsletter and are interested in more of your own lists, reading your current newsletter. Because that is my situation. I have 3,000 or 4,000 realtors that are subscribed to me and I send out emails. Now, typically speaking, my open rate for my emails has been about 20%, which is pretty good. That is 3% or 4% higher than what is average in my unit.

Jonathan: Do you want a quick tip to help you increase that?

Robert: I got it increased, but go ahead.

Jonathan: One factor that many people forget and it is almost bad, but I have been doing it more religiously is, people move companies, they move jobs and many of the emails that they give you, is work-related. So you are going to get bounced emails. What you must do is, keep the bounced email ratio as low as possible, because it is a key thing that Google looks at, as a key factor when it comes to your email actually ending up in the inbox. Rather than the ending up in the junk folder or the marketing folder. When you have what they call a temporary bounce email, and then you have an email that is consistently bouncing. What I would advise you to do is, any email that is bounced for 3 months, 90 days; remove it from your list. Just get rid of it and keep the bounce rate as low as possible on your emails that you are sending out.

Robert: For a long time, I have used most of the services that are out there. I have bounced from free email service search servers for a long time, and I have never seen anything new and I have never seen anything different. I have used constant contact, MailChimp. I have used Keap, which is a company that Neil Patel owns. Honestly, I would have thought that all those guys would be doing email better than anybody else would. It was on, and off- chance that I tried a product called ‘Get Emails’, which has turned into probably one of the best marketing decisions I have ever made.

There is another product, that the same team built and it is called Robly. Now Robly is an email delivery service. These guys are doing emails better than anybody I have ever even heard about, let alone worked with. What Robly does is, on the surface, it looks like any other email provider, but they have two clickable elements on the back-end of their email service. You send out an email, you build the template. It is probably not as easy as MailerLite, to build the templates. Though it is drag and drop, it is as easy as MailChimp for those of you who have used it. However, what they do have, that is very different, is they have two additional services called Robly AI and OpenGen.

Essentially, what they have done is, they somehow built an AI that, that relates to your particular IP address. You can calculate, when somebody on average opens an email, a signal is sent when somebody is opening their emails. They calculate that, inside their AI, and they analyse your IP address in your email inbox. Therefore, what they start to do, is deliver emails at the very moment that particular user is actually opening emails. What has happened for me, my case study, is that my open rate is up by, holy shit, double! It means the amount of extra opens that I’m getting is retarded. I’m sorry, but that’s a horrible word to use.

Jonathan: It is horrible isn’t it?

Robert: But it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous.

Jonathan: Do you think I am retarded, Robert?

Robert: I am

Jonathan: Do you think I am?

Robert: Oh God. No.

Jonathan: So there is still hope for me.

Robert: I would never call another human. Like considering the age we live in that that’s a generational thing. Where we used to say that when I was younger, and I stupidly put it in my language every now and again, but I shouldn’t. This Robly service has changed the results that I am getting in a very significant way. Another thing that it does, John, is it manages your list for you. It automatically takes out the bounces and some of the people that are not opening. They specifically tell you what you just said; they actually have in their notes. They said, “Hey, if somebody is inactive on your list, we’re going to send them emails for 90 days and then we’re going to automatically remove them.” When you upload your list, you have to understand that Robly is going to focus on the people that are actually, engaged. However, if you’re using OpenGen and AI, they’re doing a lot more to try to get to the people on your list, than any other email service that I have done, in a non-obnoxious way. It is not like one of their services, OpenGen.

Jonathan: So I do have some questions: First, How much is it? Secondly, at what stage do you think it is most suitable to use this service? And put the link into chat so I have got it available, Robert

Robert: Sure. I will put the link in and the pricing, which is one of my favorite things about Robly, is actually just about the same as everybody else. I will tell you what it is, so that everybody knows. It might be a little more expensive than some of the low price services, but not that much. The prices are as follows: 500 contacts is $19 a month, 501 – 2500 contacts is $35; 2,500 -5,000 contacts is $58 and 5,000 contacts and above is $92. I mean, if you have hundreds of thousands of contacts, which nobody that we’re doing business with does, it can get up to a $1,000 or $2,000 a month. The Robly AI, and the Robly Engage and OpenGen, all these tools that I am telling about, are included. There is no additional charge for any of it.

Jonathan: That sounds very reasonable to me.

Robert: Yeah. So all the things that I am mentioning, I might actually be spending less with Robly, than I was with MailChimp. I have not really done the math, and it is not that important to me, because they are delivering 200% or 300% better results. They could charge me 200% or 300% more if they wanted to, and I would be quite good with that, but they are not. Therefore, it turns into a hell of a deal. So I have gotten, just off this last send, I am looking at it right now. I had an additional 24% of my list open off Robly AI. See the initial open, John, has not changed. I still get a 20% average open rate on the first send. With the AI and OpenGen, I ended up getting; I think this time around, an additional 20%.

Literally, double the penetration on my last email. So, for me, that is amazing. I think it would be amazing for everybody else as well as the agent. To answer your question, I think that is who, I would be aiming this at. I think that maybe about one out of every 50 of you or so, are probably very established agents that have been sending emails to your clients for a long time. If that is you, this is the tool for you. If you already have an email list, you are already doing a newsletter, you occasionally even write it yourself and you are not using a service or some kind. This is what you want to be looking at, Robly, in my opinion.

Jonathan: I think I am going to go from a break in a second. I think we have two products that really you want to start with maybe something like MailerLite. Then when you start building up your list and you are getting some results, look at Robly. It is like most things, there are different products at different stages of your career or where you are business-wise. Is that right, Robert? We are going to go for a break. We have a number of other tools that should help you out. It is going to be a great show. We will be back in a few moments. Folks.

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Jonathan: We only have 2 Mail-Rights in so far, so unto the next category. What is that going to be?

Robert: One other thing that is email related. I rarely reveal any of my personal marketing secrets, like things that I actually use because sometimes it gets very competitive. I am going to give everybody one today. It is a free bonus. If you stay until after the break, you are in for treat. I have been test-marketing service called Get emails, and there is no other service like this. The same team that did Robly is doing something called Get emails. Now it is complicated and we could spend the whole show talking about it.

However, what I will tell you is that, legitimately, without breaking any rules, what they are doing is they are capturing email addresses of people that come and visit your website. In the very short amount of time that I have been doing business with them, I have managed to capture an additional 800 to 1000 subscribers, and I do not have to use those annoying popups in getting them to subscribe. They are basically, people that already came to my website and read my content. I add them to my normal mailing list, which for me does not sell anything. I then send out the emails, but I have already had results from it. I have already had people respond. They opted in.

There are certain big companies like Times, that when you opt in to them, you are giving them permission for them in their partners to email you, it says it clearly. That is how good Getemails operate. They can see all the IP addresses. They can connect it into people, who have opted in, then they grab that email address, and they send it off to you. I am getting 20 to 30 new subscribers every day, right now off my website. Getting emails, I am doing it for about a $100 a month. Which makes it one of the best deals of any marketing that I have ever done in my opinion, ever.

So Get emails, is something because it is cheap, I am capturing users. I mean, I have spent as much as $500 a month, capturing subscribers on my own website. This is a pittance, in comparison to that. So Getemails is that tip. I will probably be doing a blog post on it on my site, because I will probably be becoming an affiliate for them and literally remarketing their services. That is how good I think they are. That is how good the experience has been for me so far. Let us move on to other categories.

We are going to talk briefly about one of the cheapest tools on the list, except for MailerLite, which as John mentioned is a free tool. We have an inexpensive recommendation for a tool that could be a game-changer for a larger agent or a medium sized, personal agent. It is called FiveStreet. For some of you out there, you already know what FiveStreet is. is a lead routing service. It takes all the places that you might be getting leads, and then it creates a virtual lead pond. Which some of you would know from Sinc and other big tools like that, that you might have used, like kvCore. A lead pawn is just a fancy way of saying that, all your leads are dumped into a single database.

Normally a real estate agent can jump into that pond, and grab whatever leads are available and start to work them. That is how big brokerages work. For some of you, who are going to saying, “I have never heard of that, I wish I had that”. For others of you, who are like, “Oh yeah, I know lead pawns”. FiveStreet takes it a step further. What they do is, every time something hits the lead pond, they text all the agents on a Round Robin and say, this lead just got into the lead ponds and you should call it. They do that with every single agent and every single lead, every single time it comes in.

There are obviously rules and you can set up how the leads are being distributed or how the texts are going out. It is only $20 a month, and I have a few brokers that are using it and they are swearing by it, because it is a fast, cheap, easy way to get the message out to all of your agents, that there are leads. As a broker, you can log into FiveStreet and see what leads have been claimed. So actually, it simplifies the lead distribution process. Once again, it is super cheap. Its $20 a month, so there is that.

Jonathan: Sounds fantastic. Any kind of Power Couple, Powered Steam for agents with a system that is also supervising online marketing. Anything like that sounds like a superb product, doesn’t it?

Robert: I am certainly excited about it.

Jonathan: They have been established for quite a while, and they have a good reputation as well.

Robert: They do because they are partnered with Zillow and Trulia. So, FiveStreet, while you may not have heard of them, are partnered with the biggest marketing agencies out there. They immediately partnered with them because; they are a very necessary service. If you are doing over 30 or 40 leads from more than one source. At that point, FiveStreet, or something like it becomes a necessity. Another tool once again, in the same category, this is power team agent: like somebody who does have a small team. This is almost for sure going to be either; you are an individual agent who already has your marketing game dialed in.

I am not sure why you would be listening to our show, but it is possible that you would be. You want to take your business to the next level and stop chasing leads, and just deal with customers. This service is for you, it is called Agent Assistance. It is a strong ISA service that is also inexpensive for what they do. For about $10 a lead, that is rough, what they cost. They will chase down your leads for you. They will text them and they will call them and will get them on the phone for you.

Jonathan: I feel we have to clarify this word, ‘lead’. What we mean is, there is a big difference between what Mail Right, any of the online lead generation systems can generate. What we are showing you, Mail-Right, BoldLeads, Real Geeks, or any of those systems. They are showing you interest, that is all they can show. What these people are doing is they are going to those people that put their virtual hand up, saying, by going to your IDX website, going, going to one of Robert’s fantastic custom IDX websites, and in doing so, they are giving you their contact details. However, people were just putting their virtual hands up like in a classroom. What these people are doing, they had taken a lot of the donkeywork out, by then approaching these people, which put their hand up, and seeing if they could be an actual, real lead. That week, that month. Have I explained that quite well? Robert.

Robert: Yeah. Well enough, I suppose. It is simple guys. Look if you are using Lobo or, you have decided to do PPC into one of the websites that I built you, or you have used John’s service to do Facebook type leads, and then have a system managing them. In all three of those categories, you are going to get a different quality of lead, but regardless, any time you start getting over 10 names and numbers per month, it turns into, you have to set aside, two or so hours a day to call those leads. If you are getting 40 or 50, you now have to set aside three, four hours a day, every day to call the people.

John and I have talked about this incessantly. You have to have a CRM; you have to do this. You have to do that. Agent Assistance is a service that takes that away from you. You can just literally have the leads, come in. Have a service like FiveStreet distribute them to your agents. Then another service like Agent Assistance, get on top of that and then call the leads for you. Now your entire team is getting hot transfers every single day, or you are getting hot transfers every single day. No longer do you have to sit in the office. You can drive around and do what you love to do, which is sell real estate.

John and I have both heard this a thousand times. Every single agent we ever talked to says, “Oh God, I wish I didn’t have to deal with this digital marketing stuff so that I could just sell real estate. That’s all I really want to do.” Well, Agent’s Assistance is definitely one of the few recommendations as far as tools are concerned, beyond getting leads, where John and I could sit here and go, “You know what? I think that gets you a lot closer to that goal.” You might miss some stuff. It is probably not for a brand new agent. I would not say that Agent Assistance is something that somebody brand new wants to do because you want to maximize your opportunity.

Jonathan: How many houses per month, 3-4 houses a month. Then I think you can, with using something like Mail- Right or if you are buying into one of your custom websites. You then should be looking at this because it is just going to put the whole thing on steroids.

Robert: Yeah. I do not have a tone of recommendations from this, but I do have one of my top brokers who is using it and is swearing by it. He has been using it for a while. He says they do a good job. They obviously do not do quite as good of a job as he would do, if he was on the phone, but he is getting plenty of live transfers. Since he was not managing his current lead flow correctly in the first place, this is deeply impacting his productivity in a positive way. Therefore, if you have a team of agents and you know that they are missing calls, that they are not making calls. At the point that that you are there, then yes.

Get an ISA team that is going to call them, until they get them on the phone. Because that is going to serve you and your entire team much better, than trying to get everybody to be telemarketers and chase these leads down. Agent Assistant should be for some of you; this should be the recommendation you have been waiting for. Then last but not least, we are going to, probably wrap up the show and our recommendations with something that John opened up and said, “Hey, I think we’re going to have a different opinion about this”, which is ThriveThemes.

Thrive themes makes a ton of what are called plugins for WordPress. That is a piece of functionality, added on top of your website. Like the thing, that builds your website or the content management system. I like a couple of their plugins. I do not use all of the ThriveThemes packages. I only use one or two. The main one that I use is one called a Content Magnet. I use the Content Magnet plugin. You can find other plugins like from lead pages that do the same thing. I happen to like the ThriveThemes one because it is cheaper and it works just as well. So if you are a content marketer that is somebody who is getting people to your site with a blog.

What you want to do is capture a lead because you have a good blog post. However, in order to capture a lead, you know that you probably have to offer something to get people, to sign up with your site. At that point, you might offer a list of 500 things that somebody could do to improve their home as an example. What you want is you want that process to be automated. A tool that will send them the list automatically, once they sign up your pop-up form that says, I have this amazing list, sign up for the form. That is what a content magnet is. That is what ThriveThemes does. That is what I use it for. That is why I wanted to add it to today’s list. So hit me with what your thoughts are, John.

Jonathan: Well, I know Shane. I would not say he is a friend, but he has been on my other podcast a couple of times. Shane, the CEO of ThriveThemes. I actually always listen to him, always read his blog posts and he does a series of videos every month. So he really knows. The only thing I would say about ThriveThemes is that their page builder, which is called Architect, until recently, was folded behind some of the leading competition. Especially Elamites, it was really falling behind and another one called Breezy.

They have improved the situation when it comes to the actual lead magnet plugin. Yes. The only thing I would say is that some of the actual designs that they provide are a bit clunky, a bit old fashioned. I would say that with their websites, they provide a whole set of pages. With one click, you can literally build an outline of the website, and that is with Architect. The only problem is that I find the designs themselves a little bit out of date. The thing I use is a product that does a similar thing called ConvertKit. It comes from a company called Astra Themes and I will be using it on the Mail- Right site in the near future. I use it on my other website, WP tonic. It does the equivalent thing. The only thing you find with ThriveThemes is yes, it is built on WordPress.

They literally built their own ecosystem, where they make sure that their plugins and their themes work in their little side area. However, they do not integrate with other plugins in the WordPress ecosystem so easily, and some other products. What I would say is that Shane, as online marketer and as a CEO, is one of the most vulnerable people that I have interviewed. I would always listen to what he had to say. I think we have come to the end of this podcast. We will make sure that it is all in the show notes. We’re probably going to be having an internal discussion next week, but then hopefully I’ll be able to get some other great guests on, but I think it’s been a fantastic discussion anyway, Robert, what do you think?

Robert: No, I really do. I know that when we start talking about tools, we are only talking to a very small percentage of you, each time we make a recommendation. John and I took a lot of time today, 20 minutes, to try to come up with the list that would speak to all of you, in some way or another. I hope that we managed to do that. If you have, any questions especially about GetEmails set up an appointment with me. If you have questions about MailerLite, set up an appointment with John. We each have different levels of experience with each one of these services. I strongly recommend doing a little bit of research if you are in that email part of your career. If you are already emailing or you think you want to get email, either talk to John about getting started or talk to me about the deeper part of your career.

Jonathan: Just to finish off, there are two things, where you are going to find that the commission checks: building personal relationships and in your database. In your email list, the money is in the personal relationships that you make in your community and in your email list. If you want to be a successful Real Estate agent, you need to be building both. I think we are going to call it a day. We will be back next week, folks. See you soon. Bye.

Robert: Bye.

Here are Links That we discuss doing the show.

Email Services

MailerLite: https://www.mailerlite.com/

MailChimp: https://mailchimp.com/

Robly: https://www.robly.com/

GetEmail: https://getemail.io/

Lead Consolidation & Response Software

FiveStreet: https://www.fivestreet.com/

Lead Qualify Service

AgentAssistant: https://agentassistant.com/

WordPress