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Desktop Publishing First of all what the heck is it? It’s when you use a computer to create documents for printing. So, real estate flyers, newspaper ads, manuals and more are often designed by desktop publishers. What’s the difference between using a virtual assistant desktop publisher and creating your own designs with Publisher or similar program? Often, your real estate virtual assistant has the skills and experience to produce much more effective results. Your specialty is real estate, while the real estate virtual assistant has honed his/her skills over several years and has learned what works and what doesn’t.
Desktop Publishing First of all what the heck is it? It’s when you use a computer to create documents for printing. So, real estate flyers, newspaper ads, manuals and more are often designed by desktop publishers. What’s the difference between using a virtual assistant desktop publisher and creating your own designs with Publisher or similar program? Often, your real estate virtual assistant has the skills and experience to produce much more effective results. Your specialty is real estate, while the real estate virtual assistant has honed his/her skills over several years and has learned what works and what doesn’t. Do you know how to design a flyer that utilized the rule of thirds? Do you know how to compel your readers to read the key copy that will get them excited about your project? These are the types of skills that your real estate virtual assistant had cultivated and has practiced for many years. What are we getting at? Well if you didn’t pick it up WE CAN DO THIS FOR YOU!!! We know what we are doing what looks fabulous and what just looks down right…..well very, very ugly (think of yellow fluro paper with red font on it *blahhhh*) So now that you know we can do this how does it benefit you? Well apart from having some fabo flyer that looks professional and gets the response that you want we also make sure that you yourself have input to what it looks like, your ideas, colours etc. In the end we can hand off the beautiful bouncy new baby template to you so you can use it your own desktop publishing pleasure or we can keep it and handle new requests for new flyers whenever the mood strikes. I know what your saying to yourself now…..*Well sure you say all of this in a little newsletter without examples, but can you really do all that you say oh amazing Virtual Assistant?* So me being me has made a link for you to click on and take a peek at what we can do with examples!!! Pretty cool huh? Our Print Work Samples Impressed? Blown away? Dying to now have us create a little something for you that will woo all potential customers and destroy all competitors’ flyers? Great…..because we are happy to do all of the above for you. A Little Article About Drip Email (actually a big one, but shhhh don’t tell) Sounds a tad damp doesn’t it? Time to call a plumber? No just read ahead fine real estate peoples. A drip email campaign can help! It’s when you send a selection of email messages to your potential or existing customer base, over time. These messages "drip" out, perhaps one message each 7-10 days for 4 - 6 months. The purpose of a drip email campaign is to allow you to stay in touch with your prospects or clients in an automated fashion. This ensures you’re developing them without having the "hands-on" time of scheduling messages and sending them out on an individual basis. For example, you may have a buyer drip email campaign - when a new buyer prospect visits your website and views listings, they may leave their contact information to receive a free report, free listings sent to their email, or free buyer news tips. So, you would then put their email into the buyer campaign and they would then receive a new email from you every seven to ten days, over a period of six months. That prospect may not be ready to buy just yet - but when they are ready, they’ll be more familiar with your services and they’ll remember you! The best way to send drip email is to automate the process as fully as possible. This way, you’re not trying to manage the process manually with reminders, you don’t have to find the messages to send or losing which contact is supposed to receive which message when. This can be done several ways - you may already have drip services through a vendor such as House Values or through your own MLS service. However, the best way to automate the process is to have forms directly on your website that will populate the drip system. In other words, the contact fills out the form on your site and is immediately added to the campaign. This ensures a completely hands-free system. However, it is also possible to manually input leads to the system as they come in. What exactly should you send these contacts? Well, drip email is about marketing, so you should have compelling copy that will explain the benefits of using your services along with a strong call-to-action that will encourage these prospects to call you. You may already have a library of messages that you’re currently using, or you may need help creating them. What makes it work? When you take the time to craft very, very personalized messages. These drip emails shouldn’t be recognized as automated. It should "appear" like you wrote it personally, just for that individual person. How can you accomplish this? With personalized copy - and your drip email system should help with this. How? Well, if you have forms on your website that automatically populate your drip system database, your drip messages can "pull" some of that content into the messages you send. For example, if they leave a first name - the drip system should use that information in the messages. How? When you create your messages in the campaign, you can put in the code: !fname and when the email is sent, the system knows to put their first name in that spot. To personalize the message even further, you can craft a message such as this: Here is a good example of a great drip email: ( Ready to be stunned? ) Day 1 - Thank you for visiting my website Hello !fname, Thank you for visiting my website, www.yourdomain.com I hope you were able to find what you were looking for. You mentioned that you’re interested in finding a !hometype home in the !area area of Indianapolis. I’ve seen some great homes that match your criteria come on the market recently. I’d love to help you find the perfect !numberbedroom bedroom home. Perhaps we can talk in greater detail about what type of home you’re looking for? I’m available anytime, if you’d like to view any of the homes you find on the website. Also, you might like to check out the schools in the !area area at this link. Have a great day and let me know if you need anything… Regards,
Agent Name,
Office No other real estate drip email campaign service offers this level of customization. Our system allows us to use up to 10 custom fields in addition to the normal fields such as name, email, etc. Wouldn’t it be valuable to be able to automate this portion of your business?
Your Real Estate Virtual Assistant can handle the process from start to finish. When a new lead comes in via any means, your VA can ensure that it is: - Placed within your contact management system
- Set for a specific action plan
- Coordinate any necessary communication such as a market evaluation or CMA.
- Update you on the progress of your contacts
VirtuAllin offers FREE Drip Email Campaign services to all retainer clients. Most companies charge anywhere from $30 - $50 per month for drip email campaigns. We’re happy to offer you these services for free! What is included in this free offer? We offer the system itself at no cost to you. Basic setup of the program takes 2-3 hours; we can create and load your messages and your contacts, we can create an HTML stationery that will brand each message, and we can create the forms that will populate the campaign directly from your website. We manage the entire process for the length of your retainer. The messages can be sent out via any Pop3 email address you specify. You may wish to set the chosen email address so VirtuAllin will get a copy, that way we can deal with any replies and requests. So there you go, yet another great service we offer that really, really works and is actually pretty darn useful if you don’t mind me saying!!!! I Am Blogging This Right Now Our last article to for you to read on your lunch break (yes I know you are all very busy, but you do take lunch breaks right?) is all about blogs and having a blog component on your Joomla site. So What Is A Blog? (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) : A blog (a portmanteau made by contracting the phrase "web log") is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Like other media, blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some blogs function as online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Since its appearance in 1995, blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world.If you still need to get a better idea of what a blog is and how it’s used you can visit these links http://www.blogger.com http://www.livejournal.com http://www.xanga.com We can add a blog into your site that you already have so it lives as one with it and they never have to be apart….which is quite lovely really isn’t it?With a blog you can blab on about yourself and what the kids did last weekend (which is perfectly okay unless you don’t actually have any children and then you are just odd ) or as we have discovered here at VirtuAllin you can use it own your site and also post articles or write about the business you work in. Why do I want to do this you ask? Well lets put it this way….. SEO. That’s all I need to say really, but I’ll bog on about it a bit more so you can can catch my drift. Say if you have a blog on your site. Every time your blog you can also include links back to your site and if it’s a Joomla site it is part of you main website content (which is very cool!) Why? Because of keywords as well as links. The more keywords the better for search engines and for you. You can be found more easily by potential customers even accidental customers because the search engines will be able to see you a whole lot better. Ever stroke of the key will gain you more credibility as an authority in your field ( because you are blogging all these über interesting articles or thoughts about your real estate world ) The thing is, it’s just so darn easy to do and is a hip new way to add extra keywords and better SEO to your site just by being all bloggy! Of course if you don’t have a Joomla site we can still add a blog to your page, but Joomla has all the cool templates and the user friendly warm and fuzzies that we all have come to love and cherish. All you have to do is contact us to find out about this blog thingy and we can explain it further if you like!!! If you need some further jibe on Joomla we can also provide you with bountiful knowledge of it too. Do I have a blog you are wondering? Yes I do. Can we go and read it? No you can’t!!! It’s far to racy for all of you very serious real estate folk!!! (just kidding, I do actually have a blog, but it’s all terribly mundane…..about children that I don’t actually have and what they did on the weekend *grins*) Cheers & Chips - Keely Willoughby
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