Sold Out, Your Offer Has Been Rejected—a few minutes in the shoes of weary home shoppers can make space for a little empathy. While many of us enjoyed the buying frenzy last year, many home shoppers are still missing out and feeling the frustration of an endless search. What can we do to bring hope and stamina back to home shoppers, while there may not be a silver bullet, we have a few suggestions.
Express Empathy
Being told no to your dream of owning a home over and over again can be frustrating. While we can’t control everything, there are some things we can—our tone, our messaging and our responses are within our power to craft and hone. Our frenzied excitement over a feast of sales can be a mismatch with frustrated buyers.
Tip: Have your team come up with ideas on how to convey empathy so that everyone can be challenged to work from a different perspective.
Build The Excitement
The thought of building a new home is enough to keep a buyer up at night dreaming and planning. Tools that facilitate dreaming like room visualizers and interactive floor plans can keep buyers engaged in the waiting period. Once a home shopper has a hand in designing their perfect home, they are less likely to easily jump on the first available home because they’ve already made a significant time investment in building their dream home with you.
Tip: Room visualizers and interactive floor plans give shoppers the ability to save their dream home once they have created an account. Use the email address you’ve been given wisely and make your follow-up appropriate for the stage of the buying cycle that they are in. What else can you do to throw fuel on the fire?
Take Them Down The Rabbit Hole
The deeper into the visualization journey you can take a buyer, the less likely they are to bail which will give you valuable time to launch a new community or build more specs. Offering an online design experience to buyers prior to contract is the ultimate marketing secret weapon. There’s a saying that if you get a shopper to pick out their faucets and refrigerator, they’re as good as sold. Well, I may have made that up, but isn’t it kind of true? Statistics show that 20—30% of leads that come from the Envision Online Design Center in pre-sales mode convert to a sale.
Tip: Make your interactive and visualization tools a seamless experience with a single sign-on.
If adding interactive elements to your customer journey sounds overwhelming—we get it. That’s why most of our solutions have an express option and our teams do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to. That’s what our customers say at least. Email us or visit us for more information.