Building on success

Barfoot and Thompson Browns Bay stand out as one of the company's most established branches, renowned for its commitment to exceptional customer service. By utilising its in-house marketing team and advanced technology services, it strives to provide customers with the best possible experience. Browns Bay’s innovative approach to technology, particularly through automation with ActivePipe, a leading email automation software for real estate professionals, has enabled the company to efficiently grow its business behind the scenes.

Challenges

Many businesses face a common obstacle of cumbersome technology that fails to integrate or automate effectively with other tech providers. This often results in fragmented and time-consuming processes, leading to inefficiencies and errors. The Barfoot and Thompson Browns Bay team had achieved substantial success over the years but lost hours to manual processes that were neither scalable nor easy to measure.

To address this, the team adopted ActivePipe, eager to harness its capabilities. The primary goal was to help agents automatically maintain contact with their databases without bombarding contacts with spam. Initially, the idea of setting up automations on this new platform made some agents wary, fearing the emails might be perceived as spam. However, the Browns Bay marketing team was confident it could overcome this challenge. It needed to gain the team's trust by demonstrating that the approach was not spammy but targeted and strategic.

Approach

The Barfoot & Thompson Browns Bay team is committed to building lifelong client relationships. It utilises ActivePipe to establish automations and campaigns that ensure agents consistently engage with contacts at the most opportune moments effortlessly. ActivePipe's smart automations seamlessly facilitate this process

Wendy Smit, Browns Bay Marketing Specialist, shared they have implemented five automated campaigns for its 50+ salespeople. They achieved this by segmenting the office into five distinct groups and customising content for each. This strategy ensures that even if multiple agents share contacts, each email features a unique title, appearance, and delivery schedule.

Thanks to this meticulous approach, the company’s unsubscribe rate has stayed below 2% across all targeted campaigns.

The six campaigns include:

• Welcome email
• New listing alert
• Sold report
• Changed property report
• Data discovery
• Bespoke monthly newsletter

Beyond these campaigns, its marketing team diligently supports agents by crafting monthly personalized emails for all 50+ agents. They even include personal updates, like when an agent welcomes a new pet. Additionally, they generate reports to send settlement anniversary notifications at one and five years and extend an appraisal request.

Results & Lessons Learned