Top 5 Ways to Convert Digital Leads with Chris Smith

So a lot of it's trust. I call it your gut and your growth. Like, do you feel good about the work you're putting out there to the world? And are you growing? And if it's yes and yes, keep going, keep going, keep going. Because you could like analytics yourself to death. You know what I mean? You could question what's the cost per lead. What's the click-through rate? What's the conversion rate? What's the ROI going to be? None of those people win that ask those questions. They all cancel. They all give up because they don't understand that it's, it's not just this one lead that came in that said, I'll buy a house tomorrow. Let's go. That's not what marketing is. You know, maybe Zillow, a lead source is that, but marketing, branding, social video, email marketing, content marketing, all of that stuff is sort of priceless and hard to figure out if it has a price, which is ironic.

So a lot of people stay away from it because they can't calculate the ROI. Right. And yeah, I kind of look at it as, to me, as Zillow is more advertising, right? It's, it's designed to create that direct response immediately where social is, is that marketing. It's that branding. It's a, it's a long-term approach. It's the fact that Coca-Cola hasn't changed its logo in a hundred plus years. You know, it's that kind of marketing branding is the long lens where advertising is the, I need a response right now. And you should do both. I mean, to be clear, if you have the budget and resources, like companies do both, you know, they build funnels and they build, you know, fan pages, right? Like it's, it's sort of equally important. Absolutely. All right. So we're going to jump into the Top 5 tips, as it will probably shock nobody. We're going to talk about lead conversion because that's Chris's jam, right? Conversion code came out of, seriously, if you have not read this book, you need to read this book if you're in the real estate industry. And so we're going to talk about lead conversion, specifically when it comes to utilizing some tech and utilizing digital lead conversion. And, you know, I am of the belief and Verl Workman, who I've heard speak a bunch of times on this, talks about it all the time is in our industry, we have no shortage of opportunities for lead generation. And a lot of times you see agents, they get super distracted by all these fancy new types of trying to buy this service or do this or do that when it comes to lead gen, but they don't have the systems and processes in place in their business to actually convert the lead, which all you end up doing is setting money on fire if all you're doing is lead gen, but you don't have a way to convert, right? So I asked Chris to come on today and we're going to talk about some things when it comes to digital lead conversion.

Yeah, I'd love to. Awesome. All right. So the first one on our list is retargeting using dynamic listings. So before you explain what dynamic listings are, will you explain what retargeting is to people who may not know? Yeah. Just to keep it really simple. It's when, you know, people visit your website or engage with your marketing. And then that basically puts them into a new audience to see more of your marketing. So, you know, you go to Amazon, you look at an item, you go to read ESPN.com and there's an ad for that item. Right. It's, it's basically advertising that follows you around after you have visited a website or on social. It's like maybe you liked a post or followed a page. Like, so you take an action that triggers ads, uh, staying in front of you for a certain amount of time.

Okay. So we're talking about retargeting with dynamic, dynamic listings. What does that look like? Yeah. So this one is, you know, I hate, I kind of put this one at the front of the list here because you can't, there's no DIY for this one. Okay. The rest you can DIY. So, but for the first one, you would need a technology partner or vendor that offered this as a part of what their software and solutions does and the good companies do, you know, curator does chime does boomtown does commissions Inc does why Lopo does like for, for a really smart technology company, dynamic ad retargeting with listings is, is definitely part of the stack. What it does is it takes into account the places, prices, beds, bath amenities, basically when somebody is on your IDX and on your website, looking at listings, it then shows them more listings, just like the ones they're looking at.

But when they go back to social media, so it's like, I'm on your website for whatever reason, I look at seven different listings, the technology kind of looks at the commonalities in the listings I viewed. And then it goes in the MLS right then. And it pulls in, call it five listings, like the ones I looked at. And now when I'm on Facebook, I see listings, but they're in the price I was shopping in, like they're, they're super relevant. So there's a lot of sort of underlying technology that makes all of this possible, of course. But it, you know, the way I think of it, honestly, chances when you're on a listing details page, no matter what site you're on, there's always like listings like this. There's like always like a widget, right? Every site does that.

This is basically like taking that widget of like listings like this one and following them on Facebook and Instagram with it to get them to click back, to revisit, to come back to the site again, to continue their browsing using your site. And it works really well. The thing I'll say about retargeting too, is it's fairly inexpensive as far as the cost of the ads to do it, because you're only doing it for like kind of a small group of people that have already visited. So it's not like you're trying to reach the 30,000 people in your market, you're trying to reach the 300 or 3000 that have actually been to your website recently. So the cost makes it a no brainer, but some of the wires are a little complicated. Gotcha. Okay. All right. So the next piece of this is in the same vein, item number two is retargeting, but retargeting this time with branded ads. Yeah, this is the one I think like has one of the biggest upsides. And, you know, when you think about sort of, you talk about tech savvy agent, like, Hey, everybody, social media is important. Pay attention. Right. Hey, everybody, video is important. Hey, everybody, mobile is important. Right. Hey, everybody landing pages and generating leads is important. And right, right now that sort of, if you were to say, Chris, what's the next five to 10 years, what do I invest in? You know, you've, you've been pretty good of like figuring that stuff out. It's, it's building your personal brand. It's building your brand so that you have true inbound leads. You know, the right now, the status quo is run an ad, send them to your search, force them to register and bother the shit out of them for a while to try to get them to convert. Right.

Yeah. That's not the future. I just don't think that's the future because consumers don't like that approach. First of all, and anybody that wants to truly build their brand and become a household name would never push away 90% of their traffic. Like Zillow is a household name. They don't force anyone to register like ever. And they get a premium for their leads because the lead is actually saying contact me like Realtor face. This is who's going to contact you. And they hit submit. That's a good lead source because the people trust Zillow, they love the brand and they're opting in for real to be called. If there's any website that I go to that wants to paygate me, I'm out immediately. It's an automatic disqualifier for me, even if I want their stuff. Yeah. And by the way, I mean, I hate to say this, but sometimes I feel like the smarter you are, the more likely that would be. It's almost like you can kind of trick some people that don't care. They sort of fill their information out on any website. By the way, they use like their third email. They never check and you wonder why they never open your drips. So for me, like back to the branded retargeting, which anyone here can do this.

There's two ways to really do it would be the Google display network or through a company called ad roll. You know, those are sort of the platforms you load all the ads and that you basically say, show these when, when this happens. The thing about the Google display network is you can actually put those ads on people's computers all over town that didn't visit. So that's more of a pure, like billboard branding. I want to put my marketing, my branding, my face on every computer that I can in this area. That's like the display network that Google will go find that those spots for you. But then you can also trigger the retargeting based on the visit. I think that it is so hard to get traffic and attention and clicks and awareness for your brand that when you get it, like when you get a bite, you know, sometimes you have to reel in for a really long time before you have the fish, especially like these guys that are deep sea fishing that I see down the road here. I mean, they're out there for an hour and a half, like wheeling it in.

Right. So when, when you get that little nibble, let's call it, which is the website visitor, the Facebook, like the Instagram follower, you know, the blog reader, the email list joiner, whatever it is, right. When you get that little indication, you have to say, okay, great. Right now for this moment in time, I have this person's attention and they sort of know I exist. I need them to keep knowing that I exist now that they've shown intention. Now that there's a nibble, I need to reel them in. I'm going to do that by putting my brand in a beautiful way with great design, great copy, right? That's the curator part of it, just to be clear, because you could put the ad in front of people if it's ugly and it doesn't do anything and the copy is terrible. Like then it's sort of the opposite effect.

But you see that all the time. Most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I literally own an eight figure annual revenue business because real estate agents are so bad at marketing. Right. Like it, that's literally why curator was born and exists because it's like, I don't like doing it. I don't have time to do it. And you guys are way better at it than me anyway. Here's my money. Like that, that's sort of the pitch for curator. So yeah, we see the average and we see the excellent. And it is, it is a really big difference because you're staying in front of people, the goal is to get them to come back, but the ultimate goal is to get them to hit you up. Yeah. Right. Like you want your, think of like your contact me page or even your social media inbox. You want to think about that.

Them doing that is probably at the quality or higher of that Zillow contact me. Right. So it's the same concept. Contact me, hit me up. I want to talk to you. I'm interested. Let's set up a call, but it's coming through your own digital assets, not an advertising, you know, media company portal. That's what I would be trying to figure out. And that's what building your brand does. It creates people going, okay, these guys are obviously legit. I see their stuff everywhere. Like they're on the short list of who I'm going to call. Right. That's, that's where you want to be in the future. Right. Yeah. I have one of my best friends is thinking about selling his house in Austin. We have another friend who is a Realtor in Austin, but he is debating between calling that friend or calling the person whose brand he sees everywhere around his house. Right. And so that's important.

And then, you know, the other thing I would tell you on this from, from my standpoint is if you're getting that inbound lead, it's coming just to you, as opposed to a lot of these syndicated sites where they may be sending a lead when they click that button on Zillow, it might be going to three different people. Sure. You know, wherever this is just, yeah, it's like a lending tree. It's like, you know, and then they get bombarded and then they're even less likely to want to pick up. They regret doing it, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, you're right. It's a, it's a inbound lead and it's an exclusive lead. And it's a conversation because you have to remember now, like them actually showing up to the appointment that you set with them goes up and then them actually signing the contract goes up. You know what I mean? Like when you start up here with brand and really good marketing that there's a thing called the demand waterfall, which is people sort of falling off at all these steps of the process. Right. And it happens for real people, no show appointments and cancel them. People, you know, hear you out, but then don't sign with you. Right. This is how it works.

Yep. So when they're coming in and they're, they're sort of sold on your brand, they're sold on your marketing, they're sold on you. You don't have to jump through as many hoops, you know? Yeah, exactly. So can I not, I don't want to get off on a, on a too technical of a rabbit hole here, but out of curiosity, when we talk about retargeting, one of the things that we have seen kind of, you know, explode in popularity over the last couple of years due to internet security and privacy issues is the use of people, people using VPNs. Yeah. How does that screw with that Google display network? If their IP address is now in New York, but they're in Phoenix. Yeah. It screws with it. I mean, you know what I mean? It would be kind of like saying, how do I know when I mail postcards to a neighborhood that some of the folks aren't, you know, up North for the summer. Right. Okay. So, you know, there's always going to be a, not that high a percentage or anything. It shouldn't be. I mean, I mean, I, I mean, people are using VPNs, but I don't think everyone is that, you know, and then I think largely it's people for work that have to, but yeah, with the, with the sort of remote life, there's probably more than ever. There are people watching this and hitting pause right now and going, Googling what a VPN is. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, I used to have to do one when I worked for a publicly traded company and I wasn't in the same town as them, but I would say there's always going going to be spillage. Whether it's a Facebook ad or an email you send or a display ad you run, you know, there's always going to be like a spillage. Yep. That is, is sort of bad that you don't want to pay too much attention to, or else you would just pull out and quite honestly, never do anything.

Cause there's always going to be a few wasted dollars along the path, you know? Right. Absolutely. So moving on to our third of our five best practices, and this is one that I think, you know, there's a ton of opportunity in. And I also think there's probably a lot of friction from Realtors because they're control freaks by nature. Right. And so the idea of somebody, you know, it's the, it's the argument I have with my agents where they come to me and they say, well, I think I need to hire an assistant. I'm like, well, if you think you need to hire an assistant, you needed to hire one six months ago. Sure. Right. But they don't know how to train them. They don't know how, they don't want to give up control of this. They're afraid, you know, nobody loves your baby like you, like you do. And so we talk about artificial intelligence doing things in our business for us. Yeah. I look at it as enormous efficiency.

And a huge time saver. Um, and I'm starting to see it showing up in different CRMs and things like that, but specifically like chat bots, those kinds of things. Yeah. Thoughts on that. Yeah. It's a, it's such an interesting space because again, sort of conversion code, even just being a few years old, you know, the, the, that part of it. And a lot of the stuff we're talking about just, it isn't, it might not have existed, but it wasn't, you know, sort of executable for, for the regular person. So with AI and, and with, uh, a chat bot specifically, there's, there's good and bad ways to use those. And I think right now you're sort of in that middle phase where it's like, it kind of gets part of the job done, but it also kind of messes up a lot. Like, and what, when that happens, it's, it's for one simple reason. It's trying to pretend to be a human.

Okay. So when the, when the chat bot pretends it's a person, it can go off the rails. Right. When the chat bot makes it really clear, like, Hey, this is Chris. I'm, I'm an AI chat bot. I work with Judy. Like, you know what I mean? Like if you have questions, you can reply and then she'll hop in. Cool. Huh? You know what I mean? Like, I think you can do some of that stuff. And then obviously with like e-commerce or purchasing things on the internet, like, you know, customer support on a website, you know, what are you looking for today? Like everyone that comes looks for these three, choose one. Okay. Now that you chose that, like there's a place in the world for them, but they're not ready to replace people. So at the same time, if you've got leads coming in and you're not doing any follow-up at all, you know, something is definitely better than nothing.

So I've actually seen a lot of solo agents say, you know what? I want to do lead gen and I want to use the internet to grow my business, but I'm, I'm buried and there's no way I can call any of these leads. So I'm going to turn on the AI and see what happens. And it leads to some deals. Right. And, but I think the, the winner here currently is more of like the cyber which is there's technology of course, because you have to communicate with people really quickly in real time. But then it's almost like it's, it's, it's like, it's a drone, but there's a pilot in Vegas really flying it. See what I'm saying? Right. That I think is probably the best approach. Like there's a company that we work with called smart Alto and it's literally human beings that will reply to your leads in less than 90 seconds, 24 seven and have, you know, text message conversations.

And their goal is to set the appointment for you and qualify for you. So, and I can just tell you that when you, when you upgrade sort of to the human level costs a little bit more and it's more effective. So if you, you know, I would say that's a really good thing when it comes to conversion is that I can invest in leads. I can turn on my funnels, buy leads and go to one of these ISA services, these text message lead follow-up services. And I can, I can basically get the leads to get filtered and I can get appointments and I don't have to touch it. That's a, that's a very attractive idea. And then of course it's like graveyard of leads, right? You've got these people you haven't talked to or even reached out or put in your CRM. Nothing's happened to them for a year or two years, three years. I've got a buddy in Wisconsin who runs a great team. They've got really amazing systems, but they had a couple of thousand people who've been in their database forever. There'd not been any real interaction. And this was right at the time when sort of batch texting became a thing.

Yeah. And so they stuck all 2000 in this batch text vehicle, sent out a text. And I mean, he spent the next four days on the phone. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, in my book, it says SMS is greater than email. You know, that's actually something ironically that when I first started teaching that everybody was pushing back on that as well. Like they didn't think it was professional to text someone. And it's like, wake up. We see our highest response rates. I think it's not professional not to. Right. Like to not make text communication an option when you're helping me sell my house. Like get out of here. I mean, how many of us let this thing out of our, out of our sight for more than, you know, when our eyes are closed at night. Yeah. I mean, I put it face down for interviews like this, but besides that, you know, typically would, would know when it went off.

So yeah, like whether it's AI chatbot, a text messaging service, an ISA service, an ISA on your team, the, the sort of statement I would make about this to sum up that that part of conversion would be successful real estate agents should never call a lead. Like I also not really sold that it should be your buyer's agents that do the lead follow-up either because they're also not usually suited for that particular role, but that would be something that would, would, you know, if you take any of our clients that are successful and you go make them dial for dollars, like our clients didn't get into real estate to be telemarketers chance. It's not their goal. Like, you know, so, so I would just say, if you're watching this, like be okay punting that role. Like, like you were mentioning, I don't want to replace myself because I'm real good at this. You ain't real good at that. So don't feel bad.

Replace yourself on that one. Right. If you were really good at it, you wouldn't have all the dead leads that need to be talked to. Right. Well, part of it is time just to be clear. Like, you know, my book is STS speed, tenacity scripts. You got to call right away. You got to call several times. You got to know what to say when they pick up. Like there's a science to that component. And so it's not really like this thing where it's like, let me hop in every, you know, Tuesday at two and call my database for an hour. Like successful real estate is are busy working with clients. So they don't have the time to do lead follow-up nor should they, quite frankly, is sort of my point. And yeah, like five, six years ago, you had to hire an ISA. I'm sure you watched all the conversations, hire an ISA. And then now it's sort of like ISA or chat or human sort of hybrid. So there's, there's better and more options now, which I think is huge because if you don't turn leads into appointments, you're going to quit doing lead generation.

Yep. Yep. So you talked about something just, just a second ago that I want to hit on and it's the tenacity piece. So I think that there's a huge failure in our industry. And especially when it comes to lead conversion is we've all been preached speed to lead, speed to lead, speed to lead. And everybody does that, right? Everybody's got it built into their CRM or whatever that looks like. When you look at a follow-up campaign, what's the, what's the timeline? Cause you hear from like Zillow that, you know, it's 13 months before, between the time somebody hits a button on the website to the time they actually do. We preach that you need to be following up for 18 months to two years with the expectation that at some point they're going to call. But what are your thoughts on, on that timeframe?

Yeah. I mean, obviously it's different for every person. I think you can't go into it thinking that everything's 12 or 18 months off or, or no one will do it. Like people just don't think that long-term people think about their checking account more than their savings account. Right. Right. Check it every day, access it every day. Savings is, is sort of a weekly or a monthly thing that you look at. I think of it very simply as now and later, you know, the old candy. Yeah. Like there's a percentage of the leads that are going to do something now by now, I mean, in the next 30, 60, 90, 120 days. Right. So there's that sort of, there is the zero to three month, get a listing, get a buyer that pulls the trigger and buys those happen. Right. Those are probably five to 10% of all the conversions. If you do have the tenacity you're mentioning and you continue to call, you continue to follow up, you continue to check in, you continue to stay in front of them. So what happens, you have the now people and that's what everyone's looking for.

And then as soon as somebody is like a later person, it is hard, a lot harder. Like, you know, you have to wait, like, obviously they can get in touch with a lot of other agents during that process. You know, you log into your CRM and you're calling the person and it's like the ninth time you've called and they've never answered. Like how pumped are you going to be? So it's, it's tricky. This is why what I recommend for that type of stuff is what's called behavior-based follow-up. So like if I'm going to dial for dollars on the six, 12, 18 month leads, you just put one step in front of that, which is do some marketing so that some of those folks will identify, you know, kind of like your blast text, like do a mass email that says, uh, if you're still buying a home, look at like, check this one out. Right. And then if anyone opens it, you know, they basically kind of proved a little bit that they're more interested than most. Or like, if you haven't hold your, if you haven't sold your home yet, read this, like, and check through.

Yeah. And then anybody that opens that as a good prospecting opportunity, especially the ones that click through. So it's sort of like, don't think of it as how long the lead's been in the database. Think of it as when's the last touch with the lead. And if the last touch is today, treat it like the new lead. You know what I mean? And in fact, like some of those are better than new leads because they're six or 12 months. They have that Zillow seasoning that you're mentioning. Plus they're raising their hand because they're back searching again. They're opening a listing alert, et cetera. So I would just say, you know, have the enthusiasm that you would have when it's a new lead. If it's an old lead that did something recently because it's just as good, if not better.

Awesome. All right. Number four on our list, conversation starters using listings. So I think, you know, what we see a lot is I got a new listing. I copied the link address from the MLS and I throw it out on all my social media channels, or maybe I have a marketing automation software that auto posts stuff to my social channels. How can we make that better? Yeah. I mean, I always think like what's better than nothing, right? So, you know, if you have something that posts your listings automatically and, you know, the alternative is nothing, you know, I'd probably say go for it. Right. Right. But a listing is such an important asset. Like every listing you take has the opportunity to convert several of your old leads to, right? Yes. The difference is if I say, Hey, this is kind of the kind I get a lot from agents just listed description from the MLS, a few photos of the listing click through to read all the details, you know, something like that. And people will do that and they'll click through. But what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to say, you know, conversations create customers. So if I can take a listing and say, Hey, 24 hours from now, I've got a listing that I'm required to put in the MLS. But if you respond right now, because you're still interested in buying a home soon, this place is amazing. It's got these amenities, like you're going to love it. I can send you the pictures, the price, the location, and you can have access to that, you know, before people on Zillow and everywhere else start pouncing on it. Especially in the market we're in right now.

That's, you know, yeah. The messaging of the moment for sure. And so then all of a sudden you're not even really thinking about the open rate or the click through rate because you're just getting like a legit reply that says, Hey, Connie, thanks for thinking of us. We'd love to take a look at it. We are still in the market to do something. So, and then you could rinse and repeat. You could say, you know, there's an open house. I'm not sure if it's for you, but the place is really cool. You know, I'll be there too. It's probably going to have a line out the door. You know, if you're interested, tell me and then I'll send you the thing. So it's, it's sort of just putting a wedge between like, it's called creating an information gap.

So it's like, here's the information that I have, but I don't really want to waste your time and give you all of it. Unless you say, yes, I'm interested. Fundamentally a different way to promote a listing than the whole industry does. And it's amazing how often that leads to more conversions. Maybe not for that listing. They haven't even seen it. It might not even be in their wheelhouse, but it doesn't matter because now the conversation's going again. Hey, here it is. If you don't like that one, I'll send you a couple others. Like I see that you're looking in this area and this price range. Is that still correct? You know what I mean? So yeah, it's, it's pull versus push, like pull them into a conversation. Don't push out everything to them. And you can do a little bit of both. You know, you can send it out in all its glory with all the pictures and this and that, but how many people are replying to that when you do it now? You know, very, very few.

My guess is my guess is almost none. Yeah, probably zero. Yeah, exactly. All right. And then the last one on our list, number five is the double tap, which here in Texas means something totally different, but yeah, I love zombie land. Yeah, exactly. Huge fan. So let's talk about the double tap. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, this kind of goes back to a little bit of what we talked about earlier. We're just, you know, texting is so much more effective than email. If you look at the data, email open rates from our industry are between 18 and 20%. SMS open rates across the border, you know, 95% type statistics. So the double tap is basically saying when I kind of go from both angles, they both become more effective. So as an example, I'm creating CMAs and sending them out to a couple handful of past clients as a way to hopefully, you know, get a listing. So I would create the CMA CMA and I would send over the email with the CMA, right? Or the video with it, whatever it may be.

But then I would immediately go and text them, say, Hey, you know, Hey, John, I just emailed you a CMA. It's got this, this, and this in it. Let me know if you have any questions after you look at it. Because so you're basically saying, I know you're not paying attention to your inbox right now, but there's something that's actually really valuable that I spent some time on that I think you're going to love in there. Take a look at it. Right. Same thing with a listing. If you send a listing, you would can go and text the lead and say, Hey, I just sent you a listing. Let me know what you think about it. It's in your inbox, right? So it's sort of like you're tapping them on the shoulder through text to tell them that you tapped them on the shoulder with an email. And it is one of the most effective ways, you know, to a get them to go in and actually look at the email. But now that there's this text message now, like it's not an email back and forth. It's more of a text back and forth, which is clearly closer to a call and an appointment, stuff like that. So we actually did a a huge client event called the seller sprint where, you know, every curator client was pounding the phones and doing certain marketing and advertising and sales activities in an effort to get appointments. And what we found was that like, when you do text, email, and phone, we were at like, we were at like, about a 14% conversation rate. So about 14 out of every hundred, we would have a conversation with, when you did one of them, it would be like 3%. It was like crazy different. And then, you know, about 10% of the conversations led to appointments.

So it's like, okay, yeah, 1.4 appointments for every 100 dials, right? So it's like, I make 100 dials, 14 people answer, 1.4 set an appointment. If I do that daily, it's five appointments a week, it's 20 appointments a month. Or obviously, if the person that works for me does that daily, that's my other point. But yeah. So it was fascinating to see, like, basically, about 5x higher conversation rate when it's a call, a text, and an email versus the people that just pounded the phones or the people that just mass emailed. Kind of using them cohesively really was effective. Well, and I told you when we were kind of doing the prep for this call that I love this idea because it makes it seem personal as opposed to automated. I'll send out an email sometime from my CRM. And a buddy will respond and be like, is this real chance? Or is this robot chance? Like, which one is contacting me today? And so I think that when you even if it's automated, even if it's done in an automated fashion, you send the email out, and then you send the text out, and it's all coming from the same place. It just makes it seem like, I actually care about you. And I'm sending you this. And I really think it's important for you to take a look at it.

Yeah. And clearly, you don't want to be the boy who cries wolf on that either. Right. So it can't be like every email you send, you double tap, right? It's more, I would say doing it when it's more personalized, more high value. Like, if you actually email, you know, a ticket to a client event, because you rented out Topgolf, and it's open bar, and you know, you're going all out, like, that probably would be a good time to say, Hey, I wanted to make sure you don't miss what's in your inbox. We're doing this thing at Topgolf, I'd love you to be there. You know, so it's funny, there was a, when I did Kickstarter years ago, we crushed it on Kickstarter, you know, $73,000 for a book, right? Eight years ago, right? Like, it was crazy that that happened. I studied, it was a case study Tim Ferriss put out about this company that basically killed it on Kickstarter. And the email that they sent to their whole list that like, got like an 85% open rate, even though it went out to, you know, a massive email list. It was life changing announcement, all caps. Okay.

That gets your attention. I wonder, I already want to read it. You got to open that, right? But, man, what's in that message really matters. So like, I did use that one. Because for me, the idea that I was an author, like, it was a life changing announcement. Like, I have a book and Gary V wrote the foreword and like, so like, I'm an author. Like, thank you guys. This is like a life changing moment to become a published author. Yeah. You know, so it felt fair to make that claim. I have never sent another one like that chance.

You know what I'm saying? Like, Absolutely. Like, if maybe like, let's say curator is acquired, you know, for tons of money. And it's this sort of pop the champagne, like, holy shit, we put in 10 years and, you know, we had a really amazing outcome, kind of like dot loop, right? 108 million bucks from Zillow, you know? So if something like that happens, break it back out. That's life changing announcement. I just sold my company, right? And because there are these milestones where it really matters. Absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome. All right. So to recap, we have retargeting with dynamic listings. We have retargeting with branded ads. We've got using artificial intelligence and really just leveraging the power of other people doing your lead conversion, whether that's a chat bot or we talked about ISA companies, text companies, things like that. We started about how we use our listings to actually get conversations started, which I think is enormous because I say it all the time here at our brokerage. I say it when I talk to people and when I'm training that I think that the industry has set some very unrealistic expectations of what prospecting is. Yeah. And I think that because of that people automatically don't want to prospect because they feel like the only way they win is if they get an appointment or they get a referral and nothing else counts because that's kind of what the standard industry training has taught us. And so I'm a big fan of if you can just start that conversation up, that's the key, right? And then last but not least, we talked about the double tap, which is sending the message out in two separate ways. So that is our Top 5 with Chris on converting internet leads, digital leads. Yeah. Well, it's exciting. I mean, if we were to record this even six or seven years ago, it would be phone, text, email. Yeah. Totally different. The fact that there's retargeting and listing retargeting and chatbots and AI and services that'll follow up for you, like it is really exciting. That's why I wrote the article because it was kind of like, man, like I'm the conversion code guy. Right. There's some new stuff that's clearly making converting leads easier and more fun and better. So sort of a mini update to the book. I'm happy to share it.

Thank you very much. So I got to ask you our bonus question that we ask everybody that comes on the show. Great. What's your favorite business book? If you had to refer one and not one, not one that you've written, but if you had to refer one business book to somebody to read, what book would it be? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, I would, in an environment like this, I would never recommend my own, especially because I've already done a great job recommending it, which I appreciate. There's a couple that come to mind when you ask that, uh, that I, that I would say like a little bit of a caveat would depend on what are you, what are you trying to accomplish? Okay. So if you want to be the sort of hyper-local, famous personal brand, social media, selfie king, video marketing, tick tock in it, right? Like if your goal is to use your personal brand to build your business, I don't think there's really a better book than crush it from Gary V because and it's been updated, you know, several times. And now he has a sequel called crushing it, but the, the original crush it for me was sort of like, wow, there's other people that are like building a big business because of their personal brand. And, you know, I don't have the stats on everyone that's sort of gone from influencer to business owner, but I think I'm in a pretty high echelon of like turning a blog into a massive business.

Yeah, absolutely. Most people aren't able to turn that corner. They might become a consultant, an advisor, a speaker, an author, but they don't all sort of make the ink list by owning a SAS company. Right. So that for me was sort of like the Bible, uh, for that era of like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do it right. There's other people doing it. And he talks about platforms and strategies, but it's great. The other one I would mention is if, if you are trying to build more of what I would call a business business, like a business that's massive and successful and modern and well-known, but not sort of, you know, Gary V ink like Vayner media. So if you want to build a business business, which in many ways is what curator has become, it's not Chris and Jimmy consulting, right. You know, then I would read a book that I bet no one's read. That's listening called the method method.

And it's, it's a brilliant book. It's like seven strategies that we used to disrupt the consumer package goods industry. So method soap, which is everywhere now, the idea that you can sort of overtake Unilever and Procter and Gamble and like actually get on the shelf in every aisle of every store that sells, you know, hand soap, dish soap, that is a big, you know, challenge to do. And they did it. And, uh, and it, and I, the, the things that they used to accomplish that goal are basically sort of principles, ideologies, tactics that any business can apply. So it's like obsessing about design, right. Uh, and making design. Cause you think about the method soap, you think about the bottle, like it looks different. So like obsessed about design. They obsessed about like the customer in the sense that they actually care about the things that go into the soap, you know, like people care about the bleach or tested on animals and some of that stuff. So it was like community. Uh, there's, there's five others, but the method method is really good. I have not read that one. I'm gonna have to check that one out for sure. Awesome. Well, Chris, thank you, man. I know that your time is valuable. I appreciate you coming on the show today. This was amazing content. Uh, I hope that you are viewers watch and take some of this stuff and start plugging into your business to help you grow a successful real estate business. Uh, and I'm just, again, just want to say thank you for everything you've done for me over the last decade plus, uh, just by have, just by being free in all the sharing that you do. You know, I think that that's, uh, that's an extra special thing. It's one of the reasons why I do this show is because I'm not clever enough to come up with my own shit.

So I, you know, whether it was tech savvy agent or now I steal yours. Um, and so we want to give it, we want to give it back to the people who can use it and just elevate the industry because of that. So I appreciate you, man. Thank you so very much. Thank you. Thanks for having me.