Tom Flanagan

This case study was originally written by Zoe Eisenberg and published in RISMedia.

Tom Flanagan is the chief technology officer for Colorado-based brokerage The Group Inc., where he oversees marketing, technology and relocation. With over 15 years of experience in real estate innovation, Flanagan understands the vitality of smart email solutions.

“Email is a tried-and-true marketing tool, even for this day and age,” says Flanagan, noting that the majority of adults in the U.S. check their email at least once a day.

While there are many email automation services to choose from, Flanagan stresses that most of these platforms can be laborious for agents to manually load their property feeds and open houses into.

To combat this, Flanagan and his team began using ActivePipe, an email marketing solution built specifically for real estate, that focuses on easy, customizable automation, as well as access to the customer insights that agents and brokers can utilize to get ahead.

“ActivePipe marries email technology with property listings,” explains Flanagan. “They’re specialized; they’ve taken email automation to the next level.”

While Flanagan and his team began working with ActivePipe a year ago, they were immediately impressed with the user experience. “Everything is drag-and-drop, so it’s easy for any user to create these really beautiful, mobile-friendly email pieces that also come with sophisticated analytics, metrics and automation.”

Another area that impressed Flanagan? ActivePipe’s easy onboarding process.

“The company completely understands how important adoption is in real estate tech, and so onboarding was really easy,” he says. “Their team was quick to integrate the product into our tech stack, and they’re always willing to do different training sessions, both for our agents and our corporate services.”

In addition to live support, Flanagan and team also utilize ActivePipe’s training webinars, called ActivePipe Quick Starts, which allow users to access training info on-demand.

ActivePipe currently offers three product suites, all of which have property feed integration and can be integrated with a CRM. SEND allows users to easily build and send professional, mobile-responsive emails, while AUTO gives you the same functionality, but lets users build automated drip campaigns, send personalized reminders to contacts and receive intuitive data analytics to identify active buyers and sellers. Their largest suite, ENTERPRISE, automates the customer’s journey with triggered and scheduled recurring emails, while using sophisticated behavior-driven profiling to help predict the client’s next move.

Flanagan’s team is enjoying using the system and even contemplating upgrading to a higher tier. “I love the ability to easily create a rich, dynamic monthly newsletter, all drag-and-drop, that includes videos, open houses and listings.”

Another smart ActivePipe feature, according to Flanagan, is their location-based, geo-targeted technology. “Their system has the ability to cross-reference the locations of clients in an agent’s CRM, then deliver properties to them based on their location. That’s really intelligent.”

It’s this sort of intelligence that initially drew Flanagan into the world of real estate innovation. “What I love about real estate technology is that it’s so vast. Every day is different and exciting. If you’re a programmer at a tech company, you write code for 50 hours a week, and it’s nearly all the same. With real estate technology, I get to work in both art and science. It’s always fresh and new.”