Do you know which sales and marketing metrics you should be paying attention to, especially as they relate to your bottom line?
The best way for your sales and marketing teams to prove their worth is to automate their processes as much as possible. With marketing automation software like HubSpot, everything can be tracked and you can easily monitor the metrics that matter most to you as you look to achieve your sales goals.
It can be tough to navigate the numbers in a way that makes sense for you and gives you a clearcut idea of how your home builder business is performing. That's why we want to cut the confusion out of the data you look at.
Keep reading to learn why metrics matter to your bottom line and which ones you should be focusing on so you can work on increasing your profits.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Level: Intermediate
Key Takeaways:
- what you can do to increase the amount of traffic your website site gets each month
- the industry average for converting traffic into leads and how you can increase this metric with a proper content marketing plan
- key conversion rates to focus on if you want to sell more homes
- plus, a look at the important sales and marketing metrics as a whole with an example to show you how increasing one metric can help you exceed your goals!
Site Traffic
This is an obvious one, but tracking how much traffic your site gets each month is still very important. Having the right home builder SEO in place will help you grow your traffic count and then you can keep visitors converting with great CTAs.
Let's break down your traffic even further though. Which sources are they coming from? Are you getting the majority of your traffic from mobile devices? If this is the case, you'll want to test how your mobile site is performing. Track where people are clicking and how far down they go. Hotjar is a great tool for doing this.
Adjusting your site to make your user experience better means the traffic you do get knows where to go to get the information they're looking for. This also means your site visitors will be more likely to convert into a lead.
Another area of your site traffic you'll want to pay close attention to is the organic traffic count. If it's down or could use a boost, take a look at your content marketing strategy. What kinds of blog posts are you putting up and how are they performing?
The goal of your content isn't just to bring your home buyer personas to your site - you should also be focused on keeping them coming back. Increasing your organic traffic numbers will definitely have a positive impact on the amount of leads your site attracts.
Leads
Constantly capturing new leads and moving them through your marketing funnel is vital to the success of any home builder business.
Have you done a check-up on your leads lately?
Not all leads are created equal. It all depends on what stage of the home buying journey they are in.
Are they a new lead who converted on a Newsletter CTA, or have they been active on your site for months and have downloaded multiple content offers? Using the right context to market to them is important, otherwise in a sea of emails you'll be drowned out.
At the end of the day, your goal is to nurture your leads until they've reached the decision stage and convert into a customer. Knowing what do to at the Top, Middle, and Bottom of your home builder marketing funnel to move leads through each stage will help you generate more leads that impact your bottom line.
The industry standard rate for new leads you should be looking to meet or exceed is about 1% - this is called the visitors-to-leads conversion rate. Real estate tends to lower than most other industries. If you're not hitting this metric yet, take a closer look at your website and see where there are opportunities for more lead capture mechanisms.
Customers
Once your leads have reached the bottom of your marketing funnel, it's time to turn them into a happy homeowner! It's here where your marketing efforts and metrics count the most in terms of your bottom line.
The good news is if you've been following the best practices along the way and sending the right content at the right time, most of your work should be already done.
That being said, there are some things you can do to help increase your sales by converting more customers from your list of qualified leads.
While the home builder industry average visitor-to-lead conversion rate may only be half a percent, the lead-to-appointment conversion rate is at 20% and the same goes for the appointment-to-sales conversion rate.
What that means is if you don't have much of a lead nurturing strategy in place, an average of one in five leads will make an appointment or walk into a showhome. And of those successful appointments, one out of every five will buy a new home from you.
That's an exciting metric! Think of how high you can get those lead-to-appointment and appointment-to-sales metrics with the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software! With HubSpot, your marketing and sales teams can work much better together with automated processes for tracking and nurturing leads in each stage of the home buying journey.
If you don't already have an Online Sales Concierge (OSC) hooked up to your website and ready to reach out to leads after they've submitted a form, you should seriously consider adding one to your team. They will connect seamlessly into your CRM software, with their primary goal being to increase the amount of appointments booked.
Depending on the form submitted or the context of a lead reaching out, you can help answer their questions and provide helpful information that you already have on hand. This includes your blog posts, look books of home models, and other free content offers. When someone feels like you're really listening and taking the time to connect with them quickly, a successful appointment booking is much more likely.
Making Your Metrics Work Together To Achieve Your Sales And Marketing Goals
Now it's time to bring together each metric we've talked about so far to show how a small increase in conversion rates can have a very positive impact on your bottom line.
Let's say your average monthly website traffic is 10,000 visitors. You're a smaller but successful builder in your local market and have a goal to sell 50 homes this year. You're on track to sell only 25 homes and you want to take a look at how your leads are being generated, then handled by your sales and marketing teams. You wonder what you can do better to get your home sales back on track.
Using industry averages as a benchmark, here you can see how the numbers add up:
10,000 Website Visitors X 1% Visitors-to-Leads Conversion Rate = 100 Leads
100 Leads X 20% Leads-to-Appointments Conversion Rate = 20 Appointments Booked
14 Appointments Booked X 20% Appointments-to-Sales Conversion Rate = 4 Home Sales/month
This gives you 48 home sales for the year. Just under your goal...
But if you focus on just one aspect of converting - we're using the leads-to-appointments section...
10,000 Website Visitors X 1% Visitors-to-Leads Conversion Rate = 100 Leads
100 Leads X 40% Leads-to-Appointments Conversion Rate = 40 Appointments Booked
40 Appointments Booked X 20% Appointments-to-Sales Conversion Rate = 8 Home Sales/month
This gives you 96 home sales for the year!
If you can double just your leads-to-appointments conversion rate while keeping everything else the same, you're set! This is a realistic goal, especially if you don't yet have a dedicated Online Sales Concierge or automated CRM system in place and want to implement them.
With a simple change in focus on doubling the amount of appointments you book (AKA the conversion), you've in turn doubled your projected home sales and now you're in a great place to almost double your goal!
Remember, it's not always a case of "more traffic". Yes, more traffic is always good, but the idea here is to focus on better-targeted traffic, and higher conversions on the site traffic you're already getting.
If more new home sales and a bigger bottom line sounds like something you want to focus your efforts on, it's time to look at the metrics above and see what you can do to increase your conversion rates. A small change can have a big impact on your sales and marketing goals, and the end result means more business for you.
Want some help achieving your home builder business goals? Let's chat and see how we can grow your business.
