Ideas and Templates for Retention

While the focus tends to be on filling your pipeline with new recruits, Brokerkit’s Smart Campaigns are just as great at helping you retain your agents. They're a huge time saver for any event or recurring need among your staff, and easy way to build bonds with your agents.

Short Term Event Campaigns

A common but varied use for retention side campaigns is event reminders. We’d love to say agents are always responsive and RSVP after the first email, but more often than not your staff is losing time reminding and confirming that they're going to participate.

Often this is done by email, and when it's gotten down to the wire, a phone call. Setting up a campaign that includes simple reminder texts like "Hey FirstName - can I put you down for the Habitat for Humanity build on the 15th?" along with those emails means your message is ignored less often and your staff can focus on what is important.

Whether it’s headcounts for holiday parties, encouraging donations for charitable events or reminders to get involvement points and education credit with the local board, Smart Campaigns reduce the run around your staff has to go through.

Additionally, an agent will appear in Retention Reminders, as well as in your Daily Retention Agenda email, if there have been no contact attempts made yet OR if there has been no 1-on-1 contact in the last 30 days.

Sales-Focused Tips and Coaching

A simple way to add value with minimal effort is setting all your agents on a sales-focused campaign. Sending weekly links to helpful articles, coaching videos, or distributing internal guides on how to build their business is an easy way to work on your agent's skills when you can't do so personally.

While you could send these as a bulk email, building it as a campaign means you're creating something that can be set up in advance and applied to any new agent at any time, meaning you aren't constantly scrambling for new content.

This works even better when paired with a company-wide objective. If your focus is on increasing company listings, matching your sales meeting talking points with a campaign full of FSBO scripts, guides on overcoming commission objections, and winning pricing strategies work wonders.

Onboarding Checklist and New Agent Information

Joining a brokerage often means a barrage of new logins, vanity emails, and software for the agent. While some things will have to be done by hand (and can be made easier with email templates), the brunt of it can be handled by a Smart Campaign.

Subscribe all your newly signed agents to an onboarding campaign that delivers any non-personalized materials they’ll need to get started. If there’s a lot, break it up over the course of a week - they’re excited about real estate, so it’s best not to bury them from the get-go.

This is also a great way to encourage them to set up other aspects of their business - editing or creating their Facebook business page, ordering signs or marketing materials, and enrolling in classes that may be required by your local board.

What you need to send varies by office, but this is a great way to distribute PDFs of your new agent manuals, important links, and more. Whenever possible, use links to online training calendars rather than having to update specific dates and times periodically.

End the campaign with a text - “Hey FirstName, did you get everything you need to get started? Is there anything that doesn’t make sense?” - to ensure your new agent feels welcome and to detect issues early.

End of Year Insurance and Renewals

Every year, your office staff spends far too many man hours chasing down your agents to make sure they’ve paid their board dues, errors and omissions insurance, and any other recurring fees that exist in your market. You’ll always have stragglers that require a stern phone call, but a Smart Campaign can take the bulk of the work off them.

• Step 1 - Email - Announcement to all agents regarding how much is due, deadlines, links to information or payment, and who to contact to confirm they’ve completed everything.
• Step 2 - Text - “Hey FirstName, just wanted to follow up - did you get the deadlines for E&O and dues?”
• Step 3 - Email - Reminder with all past information.
• Step 4 - Text - “Hey FirstName, you paid your E&O and dues, right? Deadline is 12/31.”
• Step 5 - Email - Final notice, deadlines, and consequences for missing them.

You’ll want to update the dates, costs, and links yearly. Even if you have agents who are on the ball and get things taken care of after the first email, they’ll appreciate the staff reaching out to make sure they’re taken care off.

Automated Birthday, Anniversary, and Check-in Campaign

One handy feature of Smart Campaigns is the ability to set the send date for the initial touch. This allows you to build one campaign for the entire office that repeats yearly, and set it to fire reliably on an individual agent’s birthday or anniversary.

• Step 1 - Text - “Happy Birthday FirstName! Just wanted to say, from me and everybody at XYZ Realty, here’s to another healthy and prosperous year!”
• Step 2 - Email after waiting zero days - A simple happy birthday flier - balloons, cake, etc. The cheesier the better. Be sure to use variables to insert their first name in the message for maximum effect.
• Step 3- Create a trigger- To automate the birthday campaign in the future using this article.

As you onboard agents, subscribe them to the appropriate campaign to ensure you don’t miss anyone. This is especially handy if an important date falls on a weekend or vacation when you’re likely to forget.

While Brokerkit already has fields for birthdays and anniversaries and setting a follow-up for a call is always the best practice, there’s no harm in hedging your bet with a little automation.

Hopefully, you’re making regular follow up touches already, but this same concept works for quarterly check-ins. Simply set a text to fire every 90 days with something as simple as “Hey FirstName! Just wanted to reach out - any roadblocks you’re running into I can help clear?”

Just be careful - the more often the touchpoint, the more you’ll want to vary your language.