Y.I.M.S Blog

Online Marketing Lesson Learned from the Flower Shop by David Yim

Visiting flower shops is the equivalent of going to the dentist for me. I only go when I absolutely have to. I seldom enjoy the experience of purchasing plants wrapped in cellophane at ridiculous mark ups, especially when I know how fast they will end up with the empty egg carton and last night’s take-out…The only solace I find is the anticipation of joy to be had from the recipient, usually my lovely wife who has a genuine appreciation of flowers.

However, I can recount one particular trip to a florist that taught me an invaluable marketing lesson that I will expound on in this post.

It was the night that my then-girlfriend, now wife, was returning from an out of town conference for work. Being the charming knight in shining armor that I am, I decided to pick her up at the airport donning a nice bouquet to sweep her off her feet per usual. I went to a florist down the street from the cell phone store that I owned in a past life, and forked over $30 for what I expected to be a piece of biological art. What I got was a so-so arrangement that was as plain as oatmeal, but I didn’t have the bravado or the floral aptitude to express my dissatisfaction in an intelligible manner. So I drove home trying to silence the dissonance of discontent brooding in my head, but no amount of talk radio would drown it out.

Eventually I stopped suppressing the inescapable need for new flowers and emotionally prepped myself to purchase a whole new set. I reluctantly pulled in to Ashby Flower Shop in Berkeley, and as soon as I walked in the door, I was welcomed by a gentleman who greeted me with a strange look of sympathy. It was as if he knew the state of anguish gripping my mind. I guess it is a dead give-away when you walk into a shop with flowers… I explained to him the quandary I was in and he calmly took my lifeless bouquet to his floral station. With nothing more than a few bunches of floral filler and a couple of square inches of decorative paper, this maestro transformed my bouquet into an arrangement worth of a woman’s adoration . I instinctively reached into my pocket to grab the plastic, and what transpired next was absolute marketing perfection…

“Don’t worry man. You paid good money for these flowers. It’s on the house, just remember us the next time you need flowers…”

This seemingly insignificant act of pro bono goodwill had just won him a customer and evangelist for as long as I lived in the bay area. He forsook immediate monetary gain for the possibility of winning multiple future opportunities to provide floral service. What does this have to do with Real Estate online marketing you ask? I’m glad you asked that question.

Have you ever received a “lead” only to discover that the consumer had the audacity to ask for information or services from you that do not directly correlate to instant dollars in your pocket? Let’s be honest here. How many of you trash that request or call your lead generation company immediately and give them a piece of your less than friendly mind? I’ve been on the other side of the phone for my fair share of frustrated rants as many of my clients complain about consumers wanting free information from one of our programs called Agent View.

With this marketing platform, we provide agents opportunities to engage exclusively with online consumers who are looking for real estate information such as home values, featured listings, blog articles, and home seller tips in their particular zip code. One of the features that agents have a qualm about is the home valuation tool, which provides a consumer with an estimated price value range. For consumers who want a more detailed valuation, we can provide a custom home valuation performed by a professional realtor who covers that zip code.

Now, if you’ve been in the industry for a bit, you know that a Comparative Market Analysis request does not equal a signed 6 month exclusive listing agreement. A CMA request is just that- a request for a comparative market analysis. Online marketing companies do not screen for the internal motivations of people requesting this information.

Until we learn how to incorporate Honda’s mind-reading technology into our Home Valuation platform, the reasons for home valuation requests will continue to vary from “I want to sell my house” to the often-maligned “I want to check if my current realtor’s price for my home is valid!”.With that said, there are two main complaints that I’ve heard about regarding the Cost Market Analysis requests produced by our Agent View platform:

1) They just want to know their value to refinance

2) They are already working with a realtor and just want to know if he/she is pricing it competitively.

Are these valid reasons to trash what I’m arguing is an “opportunity to engage with a homeowner?” In both cases stated above, a homeowner is involved, right? If you are a realtor, any homeowner requesting information from you is WORTH following up with, because every homeowner will at some time need the services of a real estate professional. So what if I contacted you because I wanted to know my home value to refinance my home? Is that an opportunity? So what if I’m working with a realtor and just want to make sure he is not shortchanging me? Is that not an even better opportunity? What I’m suggesting is that we take a page out of the florist’s marketing book and treat every single request, whether it be pro bono in nature or the proverbial “low hanging fruit”, as what it is: an opportunity to present your expertise and professional services.

The florist took my situation and “bloomed” it (pun-intended) into an opportunity to showcase his skills and planted a nagging seed in my head – “man, if he did this for me when I didn’t pay him, just think what he would do for me if I did pay him!” When you invest the 10 minutes into putting together a CMA (if it takes you more than 10 mins, you’re using the wrong online tools), and send it to Mr. “I want to refi” or Mr. “I don’t quite trust my realtor”, you just engaged with that homeowner and left some sort of impression that may or may not pan out into commission dollars. But that is what marketing is all about right?

Whether you like it or not, we are entering into, if not already immersed in, a marketplace where consumers are hungry for information and gathering it at a torrid pace through alternative mediums (i.e. blogs, emails, text messages, tweets, etc.). This means that the realtors who harness the power of web 2.0 tools to get to these consumers need to redefine their understanding of leads to have sustained success. Trashing every request from a consumer that doesn’t meet your immediate monetary concern is thinking way too short term. Imagine if that florist just sold me another bouquet. As nice as it may have been, it would not have come close to the impact that he had when he forsook immediate compensation for multiple future opportunities. Next time you get a home valuation request from someone who just wants to refi, think twice before trashing it or yelling at your poor HomeGain rep =)