Communicating With the Second Home or Vacation Home Buyer

Here's Where You Can Lose a Very Valuable Future Client

If you're following our series on second home and vacation home Internet buyers, you've learned to this point:

Their extended time line from research to purchase.

What they want to find when they visit your site.

Building trust and capturing their contact information.

The successful implementation of a well-designed and content rich site, coupled with effective lead capture, will get you their email address. What you do then is critical. We know their time line is longer than most. We know that we want to be top of their minds when they're ready. So how do we work with them until they're ready? First, we DON'T:

Pester them with weekly emails about irrelevant topics.

Call them weekly to see how their purchase plans are going.

Become "drips" with drip email.

The trust built up to this point is easy to lose. These second home and vacation home buyers will gain trust in you the longer you maintain the right type of communication. What is that? It is regular contact with USEFUL information. It is also fast replies to their requests for information, without attached sales pitches.

Drip email is overused and generally garbage. Too many send out purchased or free canned emails in a series. They talk about virtually anything remotely related to real estate in general. However, they almost never serve up information that these prospects want or need. They end up "un-subscribing" and they're lost.

The best thing you can deliver via email to your prospects is a newsletter or blog that brings them fresh, frequently updated, and interesting content that covers information of interest to them. Or better yet, how about a newsletter automatically compiled from your blog?