#230 Mail-Right Show With Special Guest Jeffrey Brogger of Steezy Digital

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Main Interview Topic The Dos & Don’ts of Real Estate Follow-Up In 2020

More About Jeffrey Brogger

Real estate agents used to be the sole source of information for home buyers and sellers. As MLS became more popular and valuable, companies like Zillow and Redfin asked for access to the data and told the NAR that they would never become a brokerage. Fast forward to today and companies like Zillow and at least a dozen other iBuyer platforms are actively replacing the agent by purchasing homes and offering reduced commission listings.

RealNurture.io is a real estate technology company that helps agents generate and nurture leads 5x more effectively than traditional methods. STEEZY.Digital’s product, RealNurture.io, is a SaaS product for Realtors which increases their sales conversion percentage by nurturing leads with 97% open rates and instantly answering home buyer or seller questions with conversational AI.

RealNurture.io allows agents to quickly customize STEEZY.Digital’s Real Estate chatbot template to their brand, easily setup cutting edge sales funnels using proven one-click installation Facebook ads, and offers step-by-step video training with concierge support so Realtors can get the entire system set up in less than an hour. These agents also get access to STEEZY.Digital’s conversational AI knowledge base, which is specific to real estate and offers 24/7 follow up automatically. This system has a significant increase in the return from ad spend Realtors are already investing into their business through lead generation and client retention efforts, which makes it a no-brainer to implement into their business at once.

Jonathon: Welcome back folks to the Mail-Right show. This is episode 230. Got my great co-host with me Robert, but also, we’ve got a great guest. We’ve got Jeffrey Broga from Steezy Digital, and we’re going to be talking in this episode a number of really interesting subjects, but our starting mind subject is how to nurture your leads in 2020 in an effective way. I’m going to let Jeffrey quickly introduce himself and then Robert. Jeffrey, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

Jeffery: Yes, absolutely. And thank you for having me. My name is Jeffrey Broger. I’m the founder of two real estate companies. The first is steezy.digital as Jonathan mentioned, and the second is realnurture.io. They really both have the same mission. One of them is just geared more towards brokers and the other one is geared more towards agents.

Jonathon: All right, that’s great. And I’ve got my great co-host, Robert. Robert, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

Robert: I would. So I’m a 13 year veteran of the real estate marketing industry. I’ve worked for many of the main real estate marketing companies out there. And I’ve found my own about five years ago called inbound real estate marketing, which focuses on, you guessed it, inbound real estate marketing strategies, which you can find on inboundrem.com. John, take it away.

Jonathon: Yes, and I’m the founder of Mail-Right. It’s an all-in-one embracing platform to get you quality leads in 2020. If that sounds interesting, you can go to the Mail-Right website and you can also sign up. I’m doing a special offer of a free consultation where we work out marketing; a one-page marketing plan for you for 2020. And if that sounds interesting, just go to the Mai-Right website, click the button in the top navigation and you can choose a time and nurture your online leads; don’t matter, but how you got them? How do we start the conversation off Jeffery?

Jeffery: All right, well the first thing to know is that based on hundreds of thousands of online leads last year, the average one is about 11 months out. Now, we drive leads. Some of them are an escrow within a month, but as you both know, some it’s a two, three-year journey. And so I really think that agents going in understanding that it’s very important. So now that that’s been said, you want to make sure to initiate the conversation instantly; speed-sleep, right. Within five minutes of them coming in, you have to call. And even though our company in and of itself, we’re not an ISA team, we’re not the instant call team, we focus a lot more on conversation through text and the automation AI that way. But super important to when that lead has just come in while the experience is still fresh on their mind to just make that connection because this is going to be a journey. And really thinking of it that way I feel is very important.

Jonathon: Right. So what are some of the keen elements of you’ve now understood that the prospect might take up to 11 months before it might become actual– the possibility of becoming a commission check. So are there anything else, how do you guide the agent to actually realize practically in the practicality of what you’ve just said?

Robert: [Inaudible 04:12]

Jeffery: Yeah, I think he must have muted himself. So as far as the practicality and how it actually works, what we do is a little bit similar to Mail-Right, and that we focus mainly on Facebook advertising. The Facebook ad generates the lead and then it’s integrated with the agent’s CRM, right? So instantly it comes into the CRM. We prompt our agent, Hey, when that comes in, either have you or have your team give them a call right away. If you don’t, that’s somewhat okay because we will instantly deliver the item of value that we promised that lead a list of homes, an instant home evaluation, you know, whatever the campaign is promoting. And we’ll also allow them to interact with a very sophisticated real estate chatbot; its AI-enhanced. So even if they don’t click a certain button or do a certain action that we really want and they just text back, that’s cool.

We have conversational AI on the backend that helps to understand natural language processing, and how humans will specifically a real estate buyer lead or a real estate seller lead and how they will ask a question at the beginning, middle and end of their journey. And then we can do the auto-scheduling onto a calendar and all that stuff. But that’s the beginning of the journey is in that first five, 10, 15, 20 minutes and then the leads going to move on, and the lead’s going to move on with their life and go do whatever they were doing. Go back to work because they were on social media for a little bit, right? So at that point, we initiate lead nurture campaigns that I believe it’s very unique in how they’ve been created because number one, we focus on mobile-first marketing.

But the really big things to understand in 2020 are that communication has been changing for the last five years or so. It’s been shifting towards the mobile device, right? It’s been shifting away from everyone always being on the phone, everyone always leaving voicemails and calling each other back to now texting. And then pass that now people are focusing on text video one way where they’ll send a video and then the video is sent back but at a time that each person can consume it. So that’s where communications really going is sending a message and being able to consume it at any time a day. So that’s what we focus on. You know, we focus on channels like Facebook messenger, SMS texts and you know, coming soon, WhatsApp, Instagram messages and the areas where everyone is really focusing on today. And that’s how we deliver real estate lead nurture. Rather than going into an email inbox with thousands of unread emails. We need to branch out of that one channel of communication, and so we are very mobile-first centric on the journey after the lead is generated.

Jonathon: Oh, that was crossed over to Robert.

Robert: Okay. So you’re saying mobile-first and you’re staying– so first of all, let’s take it back a couple of steps because you said you had two companies. You had the more traditional company, which is working with the brokerage and you have real nurture.io and usually, anything with the IO suggests an NAASS as a service. So I’m assuming that the .IO is where the– like if you’re going to try to figure out where your products are, it’s going to be there that you’re going to go get the NASSA product, then nurturing that you’re talking about with the chatbot, the AI, is that correct?

Jeffery: Right.

Robert: Yes. So for this chatbot, this AI because depending on the environment that you’re installing an AI in such as a brokerage, a website; AI [inaudible 08:21] operate differently you probably wouldn’t know who is this AI [inaudible 08:29]? Is it a residence? Is it a real estate agent with a website? Do you have a landing page environment that you send somebody into that has an IDX connected to it. And, that’s how you’re AI is operating Google as an AI too, but it’s designed to operate within their very specific [inaudible 08:46] a little bit more detail on who is this design for and how does it really actually operate.

Jeffery: Sure. And thanks for asking that question, and also clarifying. So, this AI is geared towards working within an agency that has an IDX and we can really help to facilitate the conversation and schedule the call. I have a background in sales and sales management. I mean my first six years in business, that’s all I did was direct sales. And so I think I’m a little bit unique in the sense that I have an intimate understanding of the struggles and pain points of a sales representative. And when I got into real estate marketing and technology, I looked at the sales cycle as a whole and I thought realtors are wearing so many hats. What if we could help them to generate a qualified sales conversation, and let a quality agent talk to a quality prospect? And isn’t that the real goal? And so that’s where the AI was really born and created with that goal in mind.

It’s not going to sell the home and close escrow and do all of that stuff for you. That’s not the point. It’s not here to replace the agent. It’s here to help with all of the back and forth, the quick question and answer in the beginning and middle; the nurture phase so that we can then schedule that call. We can deliver value, we can create what’s called affinity with the lead and the agent or the lead and the brokerage by delivering value, and having them know, like, and trust this agent or broker prior to ever even having the call. So that’s the goal. And currently, we work within the agent’s IDX for MLS search.

However, within the next month, we actually are about to launch a native integration for both text and Facebook messenger follow-up, where I can’t say too much about it because we’ve signed NDAs and everything. But we’re partnering with an amazing company specifically for data and we’ll be able to do so amazing things like an elite could ask what school would my kid go to if we bought this house and it would say bam and get right back them. So, some of those quick questions and answers could actually be pulled from our side of it, not just relying on what’s available through the IDX and always sending a link. It could actually have more of a fluid conversation and be an assistant to the agent at the next meeting.

Robert: Okay. All right, so that got me halfway to the answer I was looking for and thank you for your answer. But let me ask the question a different way. If I buy your chatbot and I’m an agent like, if I’ve installed this and I’ve got a WordPress real estate website, I’ve got IDX broker on it. I install your software as a service. So somebody visits the website, is there a chatbot on it that kicks off the conversation? Is that what you’re hoping? Is that the initiation? Is it a landing page for the contact form? How are you hoping the conversation starts and where does your chatbot [inaudible 12:19] it?

Jeffery: Right, so great question. Thank you so much for clarifying that because I would have totally overlooked that and assumes that everyone knows. We help to generate leads as well, or we can tie into your main lead generation tools. To answer your question directly; the website widget that’s only going to capture about 0.5, maybe 1% of your website traffic, and depending on your website volume, that could be almost nothing. So that’s not what we fully rely on. And when we say real estate chatbot, we don’t only mean the little website widget; we really mean a more conversational experience. Messenger marketing; focusing on messenger and SMS as marketing channels, but, having AI and automation behind it to help you, so that’s really the focus, and honestly, our primary lead generator is Facebook ads.

We can run Facebook ads, we can run Google ads; we can do all kinds of custom lead generation campaigns. And then on the SAS product, we have templates and training that the agents can go through in order to set that up for themselves. But those are by far the primary lead generators. They don’t even have to touch your website and they can go straight from a Facebook lead form into the chatbot experience seamlessly. And by the way, integrate with your CRM along the way.

Robert: Got you. Well, that leads up to a whole bunch of other questions, but look, well I’ll stay away from those for the time being. But I will say this, that also means what you’ve just described would be a system that could, in theory, be a landing page, lead generation system such as Bold Leads. There are a lot of different lead generation methodologies that we as a show have talked about and that John and I have been exposed to. And for the sake of clarity for our audience, some of the people listening to us for years now, will be sophisticated and some of the new listeners who are brand new to real estate, we lost them long ago in terms of the conversation that we’re having because they don’t understand how AI is going to apply. I’m actually trying to break it down to a point that somebody understands how it would work.

So somebody who’s on a landing page starts a conversation inside, like let’s say they submit a contact form, but if you’re connected to Facebook in general, like you’re doing that on Facebook. What I think that people don’t understand is that the second you submit, you could get something inside your instant messenger chat and if somebody responds, that’s where the AI kicks. And they’re going to do this all on a mobile phone where they may not even been expecting it. And in the little lightning bolt kind of circle, there will be something that says, “Oh there’s a new conversation” and it’s going to be a follow-up question to the information that they submitted, such as, “when were you looking at buying this property on five, four, nine [inaudible 15:18] that you just liked or submitted? Am I right? Am I close–?

Jeffery: Yes.

Robert: –To that how that would work? Okay, so I guess my question for you then is, you’re all still breezing by like this massive amount of details such as you’re saying that the AI is the initial part of the sales conversation but not the latter half. To me as an experienced salesperson, what you’re saying is that [inaudible 15:46] takes the lead from Lookie Loo, which is a big problem with Facebook leads. They tend to be high volume, low quality. So the way I’m perceiving your AI might work, is you’re saying, “Hey, I can get rid of the people that really have a whole bunch of very not ready kind of conversations, like, can you rent that house on [inaudible16:09?” That is obviously not a question that a salesperson wants to answer because it has nothing to do with purchasing the house. So maybe the chatbot says, “Are you ready to buy or are you looking to rent whatever. I’m just making it up as I go. But it could take them from that all the way through, “Yes, I have financing to the point that it’s a semi-qualified lead, they have money or loan or they don’t; they’re interested in a particular property in a particular area. And then, he can kick that entire conversation over to somebody via a text message that then that person would pick up the phone. How close am I did the way that your service actually operates?

Jeffery: Yeah, you are pretty close. And the one differentiator that I would say based on how you’ve described it is that it’s not all front-end, right? It is doing a lot of what you described where it can help to qualify leads upfront. It can help to then schedule them and then let you drill down and really find out what that particular lead needs. But then it also supports along the way through the process. When they have a quick question and they shoot a message or they shoot a text. And how about the fact that so many leads, especially when they get closer to the actual purchase day or the sell date, they are competed for, right? They meet other agents, other people who are serving ads to them, they’re clicking other sites. Heaven forbid, they go on Zillow and they start clicking around and all of a sudden random agents are calling them that don’t even represent the property they’re looking for, and there are so many issues with that.

What we realized is that 72% of people work with the first realtor they meet. So we focus on really getting front-end top of funnel leads and then creating loyalty through the process, reminding them, “Hey, I’m your agent”. Sending a Facebook message branded to that agent; boom, “Just a little reminder, Hey, here are some value. Here’s [inaudible 18:10] in the buying process, here’s the next step in the selling process. Sending a little text reminder here and there sending homes, so we think it helps through the process of conversion in addition to the upfront qualification.

Jonathon: Well that’s great. We’re going to go for our break folks. When we come back, we’ll be talking some more about this fascinating relating world on messenger, Facebook adverts and communicating with your prospects in 2020 we read back in a few moments.

Announcer: Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers, right in your own neighborhood? Then you need Mail-Right. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30-day money-back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today; go to mail-right.com

Jonathon: We’re coming back. My guest is abroad, my co-host is roaming somewhere in the US, and I’m just stuck at home, but there we go. I am resilient; I am here for you listeners and viewers. There we go. I’m not jealous.

Robert: You can tell.

Jonathon: So Jeff, let’s talk about the Facebook advert side of it because this gets to the crux of the matter. You know, Facebook’s got some grief lightly from the popular press and from the media in general and their requirements say and restrictions around real estate advertisements have increased last year and probably will increase a little bit this year. So what are the kinds of adverts that you’ve found in general that you can give some tips and insights that generate some really good leads for your system?

Jeffery: Sure, so to dispel some of the myths out there prior to talking about a specific advert. Facebook, of course, they’re always ebbing and flowing based on the recent litigation that they have. Big companies always have multiple lawsuits going on, so they’re working with the public and making sure that data is, and their privacy is respected. However, the way that Facebook makes money is through selling ads; Mark Zuckerberg said it sitting in a courtroom chair. So do you think that they are going to restrict it to the level where they stopped delivering results for their clients? Absolutely not. So I’m a Facebook marketing partner. I’m a messenger marketing expert. I live in this world a lot. And the whole point is yes, Facebook has taken away some specific targeting. You can no longer target within a one-mile radius with hyper-targeting demographics in the wealthiest zip code in your city.

Can’t do that anymore, but, what you can do is a 15 mile minimum, really good advertising copy and let Facebook’s algorithm find those people anyway. So with that being said, yes, they took away some of the tools for marketers, however, they still have all that capability on the back-end. If your campaign is really well written, then the algorithm is going to do its absolute best to find those people for the lowest cost because that’s how the whole thing functions, and that’s how they get paid. So yeah, that being said, no need to fear as long as you’re being in compliance, that’s what we really help agents to do. At the end of the day, yes, we help with advertising, copywriting, testing campaigns; all that stuff. Yeah, we do it. But really I feel a big benefit is them not having to then stay up on the latest Facebook advertising compliance update or the latest messenger compliance update.

So we can then already have an update ready for them. Boom, “Here’s the new way to select your audience, right? Here’s the new to use campaign bid optimization, here’s the new way to blah, blah, blah, blah.” So with that being said, I’ll deliver a little nugget. One of the really classic I say classic because we’ve been using it for a while, but one of our bread and butter ads for buyers is to do a little bit of intent-based marketing even on Facebook. So you guys are familiar with intent in marketing. You guys are founders of real estate companies. So Google, they pitch that– when someone searches into a search bar with a question, it shows more intent than someone’s scrolling on social media and clicking an ad. And to a certain degree, I believe that. However, we live in the Facebook world of doing primarily, I mean, 80-90% of our lead generation is Facebook.

So I thought, how could we kind of combine the two? How could we create intent-based rather than interruption style marketing? And so what we started to do at around that same time, we were getting a lot of listing videos and a lot of agents that were saying, Hey, I want to help promote my listing. I want to help promote my listing. So we generated a two-step funnel. The first step is we’re going to help this agent promote that listing. They just paid to have a beautiful drone footage and professional video edit done. It looks amazing. Now the next step for a lot of agents, and I’ve seen this time and time again, they have this amazing video created because that’s what every single real estate conference has told them to do. Focus on video, right? So they have this video created, they put it out on Facebook and they rely on it to just organically be shared around the world and they get 57 views on this incredible video.

What we do is we run a video view campaign to it for 100 bucks, 200 bucks, and we can get 20-40,000 local views that are targeted. Now, from those views; that’s the first step. The second step is we will then retarget and send a buyer ad with the exact same price as that first listing video to only people that have watched more than 25% of the video. So it’s showing much more who are intent if someone’s watching a minute of a three-minute video, right? It’s showing that they’re interested in this type of video, which is a local home being positioned for sale. So that’s a nice two-step funnel that has worked well for us. It’s gotten a lot more quality leads than a lot more of the just generic standard buyer type templates. And yes, it’s a little bit more complicated in order to actually execute it because there are two steps and there are different campaigns involved. But, we found that it helps to create that intent-based marketing that Google has been so known for. And it’s on Facebook for a fraction of the cost.

Jonathon: So before bring Robert in. What about you know because most agents I’ve had conversations, its seller leads that they really want. So can you give one or two campaigns that you normally run that get some success in generating some reasonable results around seller leads?

Jeffery: Sure. So the first one, the easy answer is that the exact same campaign I just told you, except you don’t have to recreate it for seller. All you do is you show them the results. When you show up in your listing presentation, you say, “Hey, we have the most sophisticated digital marketing program in the city. And if you want to work with an agent and get your house sold, you have to go with me because look, we got 40,000 local people to watch this video”, sold this home at 21-days. So, you start to use that social proof. It’s so much different when your videos start to get that level of exposure and engagement online, then it becomes an asset. So that’s number one is you can actually start to now leverage all of this that you are building up over time. This listing video campaign, this listing video campaign, and you just have screenshots in your listing presentation, so that’s one.

And then a second one, which is definitely a tried and true is the free home evaluation of course, right? So you offer the free home evaluation and then what we do is we drop them in. Yes, they can get the instant free one, but then we also say “Hey” in the chatbot experience because we have it integrated in there. And we then say follow up one minute later after they click the button. “Did you know that a CMA from a realtor is far more accurate than the instant home evaluation?” And then we sell the call, so obviously making sure to follow up with that. I mean, there’s a million campaigns so I don’t want to just like go off on this geek out on Facebook advertising, but is that offering value? Do you think that’s– those are some–

Jonathon: Well I’m sure our listeners and viewers could geek out and make sense of it that they [inaudible 27:44], over to you Robert.

Robert: Well, first of all, I love the idea of a nice listing promotion video, promoting it for $100, getting those views and then doing retargeting. I would agree with you that for the most part, that two-level of Facebook marketing strategy is probably more complicated than the 90% of our listeners would feel comfortable tackling.

Jeffery: Sure.

Robert: I would say though that for those of you that are listening, that have hired Facebook marketing, quote-unquote experts, [inaudible 28:20]. Now, Jeffrey is striking me as a guy that probably knows what he’s talking about because, and here’s why I’m going to say that. Because in my experience, pretty much anybody that’s into Facebook marketing can throw on a nice listing onto Facebook. And in my experience, if you know how to write like even if you’re a somewhat novice marketer, you can write a reasonable call to action around like a good looking listing, which means they generate some low-quality contacts. And you can generate them usually for anywhere for 300 to 700% less and you could get a Google [inaudible 29:00].

The problem that I’ve run across as a marketer is that those leads are also comparatively far less qualified because of what Jeffrey was referring to, which he’s calling intent marketing and he’s very right. You have somebody that’s in a buying funnel and then like somewhere along with their level of interest. When you enter a search into Google that says I want to buy a $500,000 home on Fletcher drive, is there anything available such as like a very long-term, like, the long-tail search is what they would call it. That expresses a very high level of intent and if you happen to be the marketer that captures that person’s information somewhere along their journey looking at homes inside Fletcher, and most likely it’s going to be a Trulia or Zillow or a local realtor that’s going to get that. If you could get them on the phone, you’ve got a good chance of closing a deal, which also Jeffrey throughout a statistic 72%. I don’t disagree with that either.

Most of the time the challenge that I’ve found as a need generator is getting somebody to communicate with you at all, and if you can do that you’ve won half the battle like right there, and get them to talk to you. Pick up the phone for the ISA or anybody else or message you; text message you. So I just want to say that doing that second step strategy, demonstrates to me somebody who knows what they’re talking about and is willing to reveal that on a podcast because a lot of Facebook marketers don’t want to give out the secret sauce. How do you get a better than average result? And I’m not a big fan of Facebook marketing. I’m going to let you know right now Jeffrey because most of my exposure to it says that you got to do a lot more activity to get the same results out of doing Google. That’s my honest to God exposure. But I do know some high– so does John. We have run across some high-quality Facebook marketers who can probably beat the odds like they can, they know-how and [inaudible 30:59]

Jonathon: It does really rely on the lead magnet Robert, and what the copy in your advert, and what the lead magnet is. Is it focused at buyers, or is it focus at sellers? And it does need a lot of testing, and that’s what we do at Mail-Right, and that we’ve been doing for the past six months, Robert is testing a number of lead magnets with copy, with multiple sets of adverts and it’s really dependent on that. Well, we’ve run out of time because we like to keep it around 30 to 35 minutes. So Jeffery, how can people learn more about you, your company, and what you’re up to?

Jeffery: Sure. So you’re welcome to find me online, whether it’s Google or Facebook. You can look for Steezy Digital; that’s STEEZYY.digital, by the way, steezy means style with ease. San Diego born grew up around the extreme sports world, so that was something that I threw in there. And then Real Nurture is probably easier to search online. It’s realnurture.io. Super easy, that’s the website; there’s no .com or anything. Just type in real nurture.io on Facebook, Google and it’ll come right up, so we’d love to connect. We have both an agent’s model for an individual agent who wants to upgrade, as well as top broker model. We can do everything for them and install a system for their teams. Yeah, that’s the goal; we would like to empower 100,000 agents with technology, so I’d love to help out.

Jonathon: And you’re probably a bit puzzled, listeners and viewers because it might sound that Jeff has really got a competitive product to me, but not so much to Robert, but I’m pretty easy about having general discussions. It’s a big market, there are different products with different agents and it’s just great to get experts on the show that can share their knowledge, so I’m cool about everything. So Robert, how can people find out more about you and what you’re up to?

Robert: They can go to inboundrem.com and I suggest that they do. 2019 I was pretty quiet on the content producing front. John has me on the show because I’m pretty much one of the leading producers of real estate marketing content. There’s a few that are better than me, but not many; it’s the smallest. And I’ve done a number of articles that I think are really great, “How [inaudible 33:37] picking a real estate company name”. I just dropped one today about prospecting for real estate needs, and the show that John and I do have helped me a lot. It’s made my knowledge even better. I put that down in terms of doing a video for these. So if you’re looking for some real estate knowledge and you’re not necessarily getting everything that you need from off the podcast; then I strongly suggest you check out my website. I should be able to help you be a better real estate marketer.

Jonathon: And remember, if you’re looking for that one-page marketing plan for 2020, go to the Mail-Right website and book a free consultation with me, and we’ll knock-out a marketing plan. Like I say, one page so it’s not [inaudible 34:19] so there’s a good chance you’re going to do it. So if that sounds interesting, go over to the Mail-Right website. We’ll see you next week when we have another fantastic guest like Jeff. We’ll see you soon folks, bye.