By Susanne Dwyer
Technology is shaping the future of real estate, and in today’s dynamic landscape, fully leveraging technology is critical to success—for brands, brokers and agents.
Sir Arthur C. Clark, acclaimed science fiction writer and co-author of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” noted that any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic. Today, truly successful real estate professionals are leveraging technology tools to create magical experiences that amaze and delight their clients in a completely transparent way.
Zap—a network of brand, broker and agent websites with an integrated CRM being rolled out for all of Realogy’s brands—is just the starting point at ERA Real Estate. The brand, known for being the first to see the business applications of the fax machine back in the early 1970s, has continued to innovate with a forward-thinking approach. This approach is apparent in how ERA Real Estate has deployed Zap across its network.
As the first real estate brand to connect all of its affiliated brokers and agents on the same platform, we created a unique, competitive position for our brand,” says Chris Trick, chief marketing officer at ERA Real Estate.
In order to drive traffic to the new platform and maximize results for the entire ERA® system, the brand launched an aggressive digital media campaign, complemented by an innovative co-operative lead generation program called “Light It Up,” which matched broker commitments dollar for dollar.
“As a result, ERA.com site traffic has increased 70 percent year-over-year, in addition to a surge of organic traffic of more than 100 percent,” notes Trick. “More importantly, we’re starting to see positive shifts in lead source as we recapture a higher share of leads coming from ERA.com.”
Driving traffic to the site is just part of the strategy. Getting ERA-affiliated professionals to use the site is just as important. To that end, the ERA learning team created multiple touch points for gaining mastery of the Zap CRM platform. From live, in-market instructional workshops to virtual refresher courses, ERA taps into its own corporate team, as well as Zap specialists who have gone through a “train the trainer” course to become the go-to expert for their company.
Regional learning events devoted entirely to Zap bring together upwards of hundreds of ERA brokers and agents to learn, collaborate and share best practices.
The multi-faceted approach to increasing Zap engagement has produced results: those ERA-affiliated professionals who are most engaged in Zap are seeing high average increases in productivity—demonstrating a direct correlation between engagement and productivity.
“On average, companies that implemented Zap in 2015 are seeing a greater increase in year-to-date GCI growth,” says Trick. “This underscores the importance of focusing on adoption and engagement.”
To foster usage across the network and close out 2016 in a strong position, ERA amplified the brand’s incredible momentum with an enticing incentive called “Zap to the Future.” During the month of November, ERA companies that had 50 percent of their affiliated agents log into the Zap platform were entered into a drawing for a three-month SEM campaign. Additionally, each day in November, an ERA-affiliated sales associate who
From:: Real Estate News
