A cool new way to create customer loyalty online!

[Mitch]

Hey Everyone!

I hope you are all having a fun Saturday. I just wanted to share a new marketing program I am testing. This week will be our first educational webinar that we are marketing to our database. Per the last post I did about education, I am also leaning my marketing and sales toward education based marketing. Education based marketing is the art of educating the consumer so you become the expert in the Real Estate market in your area. It's one of the things I am working on for both myself and my members. Very exciting!

Anyway, I decided to run a webinar on Buying a Home in Brevard County Florida. Basically, it's a how to buy short sales and foreclosures and take advantage of what the media isn't telling them. We sent it out on Wednesday to our database and so far we have 215 people signed up for the webinar. I was going to be really happy if we had 50 people and figured we might get 25-30. I'm wicked excited (that's Boston language) about the results so far. On Monday we will be sending an email to the leads that came in from Wednesday to Monday.

Since we have done so well in attracting so many of our leads to this webinar, we are going to be doing others...probably one every two weeks. The next one will be how to buy a luxury home in this market. Another will be a first time home buyer webinar and so on.

I'll keep you posted on the results when we are done. All the webinars we do will be posted on our site and I might add an area to ask an Agent a questions on the same page. I'm still working this through.

Anyway, I thought I would share! Have a fun night!

[GregPDX]

Mitch, that's a pretty impressive number to register. I've never done a webinar, but was planning one with a mortgage broker for first time home buyers.

Seems like a good way to get leads and become more of an authority in your area.

Are you using Webex?

[Mitch]

Hi Greg! I'm very excited about the numbers...we are up to 222 as I write this. I use gotowebinar.com. Webex is very expensive and gotowebinar.com, which is the same as gotomeeting.com is very easy to use and only $99 a month. Webex was $500 a month if you are doing more than 25 people. Gotowebinar.com is only $50 a month if you do less than 25 people....I think.

I'm actually not doing this at the time to get leads, but to reinforce our expertise to our current leads. I am going to use this as another lead generation tool though once I get this first one under my belt. I think the best part of this is being able to record them and put them on the site so visitors to our site can become more educated in the buying process in our area.

[GregPDX]

Thanks for the tip on gotowebinar. I'm going to look them up.

I've got a few ideas for webinars and should really get this going. I'm thinking about doing one for newbie investors to go over investing basics. Maybe go on to more details on future webinars.

Good luck... sounds like you've already got this figured out.

[Mitch]

No problem. The cool thing is that you can educate anyone on anything with webinars. I can't believe it took me this long to figure out how to use it for my real estate brokerage.

[Chris_ORL]

I worked at Citrix for a while as a consultant. They have decent products, and I'll keep my opinions of management to myself. My company at the time used Cisco products. The group I worked with about blew a gasket when I invited them all to a webex meeting or how they could log on my network with Cisco VPN. At the time (quite a while back before they were so popular) I didn't know that was their biggest up and coming product or how they hated Webex.

Anyway, webinars are great for marketing or teaching. I imagine this could be even better if you deal with international buyers a lot. When I used Webex my company had its own node. It wasn't that expensive because you could by the hardware and host everything. I suggest looking at Dim-Dim. It's open-source and free for the basic version to try. If you want your own server and use it heavy it's not very expensive.

[rew valerie]

I'm assuming this is a free webinar - if so, this could really work to your advantage as far as back linking goes. Once you decide to branch out from your own data base, I bet you would get all kinds of local organizations to post an ad for this free service on their website. If it became a regular thing, maybe you could even get the local newspaper to run an article. Wow, the possibilities are endless here. Make sure you twitter and facebook it too.