Many agents use separate platforms for lead generation, customer outreach, and reputation management. With SmartZip, however, this becomes a thing of the past. Read on to learn how streamlining your efforts helps you save time and money.
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Jump to:
- What Is SmartZip?
- Best Features
- Customer Support
- Plans and Pricing
- Pros and Cons
- Alternatives
- Our Take
What Is SmartZip?
SmartZip is a real estate marketing platform that helps agents identify homeowners who are ready to sell. Then it targets likely sellers with automated multi-channel marketing campaigns to cultivate new listings.
The company was founded in 2009 and purchased by Constellation Real Estate Group in 2019. Constellation also purchased Offrs.com, another real estate predictive analytics company, just a month before it took over SmartZip.
Read on to learn about how this useful platform can help turbocharge your current prospecting efforts be incorporating AI technology into your platform.
SmartZip’s Best Features
The main features are those driven by Artificial-Intelligence. However, the platform is quite dynamic, and its robust functionality surprised us.
Instead of having separate platforms for lead generation, marketing, and customer follow up, SmartZip bundles these to offer an all-in-one solution.
SmartTargeting
SmartZip’s SmartTargeting product uses big data and predictive analytics to home in on people who might list their homes in the next six months. The company taps a long list of variables about individual properties and local markets to generate recommendations, including:
- Listing price trends
- Time in home
- Loan status
- Number of residents
- Owner savings
- Home equity
- Herd effect
- Kids in home
- Last selling date
- Delinquency
- LTV ratio
- Occupancy
- Consumer habits
- Year built
- Price appreciation
- Credit status
- Hobbies and interests
- Net worth
- Loan details
- Life stage
- Occupation and industry
- Income
- Move up/Move down
- Default
SmartTargeting runs these data points through its algorithms. Then it direct agents to the 20 percent of homeowners most likely to sell in the near future. And it makes it easy to kick off a coordinated marketing campaign to cultivate likely sellers and convert them to listings.
The campaigns include:
- Branded lead conversion web pages
- Online ads
- Social media ads
- Direct mail
SmartZip provides pre-designed landing pages as well as hundreds of direct mail postcards, email, and other marketing materials. Agents can kick off set-and-forget marketing campaigns with a few clicks.
Outreach
Outreach is SmartZip’s lead qualification and call service. The company has its own call center with inside sales agents. These call leads to filter out the less-qualified candidates.
The idea is to take the burden of qualifying leads off agents, freeing them to focus on the better-qualified leads. Using these vetted leads, agents can increase the rate at which they convert leads to new listings.
If a lead indicates they are ready to list, the SmartZip caller will immediately connect the agent to this hot new prospect. Homeowners who are thinking about selling will just be kept in touch with.
Reach150
Reach150 is SmartZip’s reputation management and referral marketing system. It automatically triggers reviews from clients when deals close, then distributes testimonials to generate referrals.
Reach150 is integrated with transaction management tools, including dotloop, PlanetRE, and DocuSign Rooms for Real Estate. When the transaction management system reports that a deal closes, Reach 150 asks homebuyers and sellers for a review.
Then Reach150 automatically publicizes the resulting testimonials onto branded SEO-optimized websites. Testimonials can also be turned into digital ads and delivered to specific prospects.
The Reach150 system ensures that agents continuously generate new testimonials. It saves time and keeps testimonials from getting buried or forgotten. It also helps boost reputation, grow an online presence, and create referral and word-of-mouth business.
CheckIn
SmartZip’s CheckIn is a smart CRM that can help agents speed the process of scheduling, performing, and logging follow-up activities.
The CRM can use any of several channels for follow-up, including:
- Calling
- Emailing
- Door knocking
- Door dropping
- Event hosting
The CRM allows agents to schedule future follow-up activities. It also prepares a daily action board with pre-scheduled actions targeting high-priority prospects. Follow-up activities automatically get logged and synced with SmartTargeting.
CheckIn helps agents review photos, videos, and notes from past calls with a given client. It shows which marketing campaigns the client responded to and shows the client’s declared and predicted selling intent.
The CRM uses interactive dashboards to keep agents informed of their progress, follow-up rates, response rates, and more.
Sphere
Sphere is SmartZip’s tool to help agents win listings and referrals from people they already know. Like SmartTargeting, it leverages predictive analytics and automated marketing.
SmartZip says it can use big data and its algorithms to figure out the selling intent of every one of an agent’s existing contacts. Then it can deliver targeted ads to sellers just when they are ready to start looking for a listing agent.
To use it, agents import their contacts into Sphere. The system will highlight the contacts that are closest to deciding to sell their homes.
SmartZip Support
SmartZip relies on in-person support, online coaching, and education to help customers make the most of its service.
If you sign up with SmartZip, you’ll get assigned an account management team. This group will offer ongoing guidance and assist with administrative tasks and deadline alerts.
SmartZip University is their online source for webinars on farming, follow-up, and related topics. The webinars are live and are also archived and searchable. That helps subscribers find relevant content for the issue they’re facing at the moment.
Peer-to-peer support is available through a Facebook hub. However, the SmartZip Facebook hub only sees a few posts per month. So in practice, users are going to have to rely on the company’s support.
Contact Information
Should you need to contact the company, you can do so via one of the below methods:
SmartZip
6200 Stoneridge Mall Rd., Suite 300
Pleasanton, CA 94588
Telephone: 855-661-1064
Email: info@smartzip.com
Web: https://smartzip.com/
Plans and Pricing
SmartZip doesn’t publish its pricing. Instead, interested agents are invited to call for a quote. Based on a sampling of online reviews, the company’s average monthly bill is approximately $1,000. The minimum is around $500.
The fee is based on a one-year contract. So the total commitment is approximately $6,000 to $12,000. Agents pay more to have SmartZip do the mailing and marketing. They can save money if they just pay to get the data and access to the platform.
The number of homes that will be targeted also influences the price. Approximately 2,000 homes is a typical number for targeting, according to other published estimates.
The pricing is also different for brokers and teams. And the company has packages for lenders as well.
Smartzip Pros and Cons
As with any objective review, both the pros and cons should be taken into consideration. Fortunately, we’ve done just that below.
Pros (what we like)
- SmartZip is a great way to set up an automated marketing campaign focused on the most likely sellers in an agent’s market area. Once it’s set up, most of the work is done by the platform.
- The use of predictive analytics to identify probably sellers means marketing efforts target just the people most likely to produce new listings. That helps limit the money and time spent marketing to people who aren’t likely to become clients.
Cons (what can be improved)
- The major drawback to SmartZip is the cost. A $12,000 annual commitment is a lot for the majority of real estate agents, not to mention that SmartZip requires a 3 year contract.
- Only agents who are prepared to dedicate significant resources of money and time to farming their markets for new listings should commit to SmartZip. Otherwise, it could be an expensive waste.
- SmartZip is also a long-term marketing program. It may take months to generate enough new listings to justify the expense.
SmartZip Competitors
Competitors to SmartZip include just about any lead generation service, as well as marketing automation and CRMs. Here are the main ones:
- Zillow Premier Agent identifies home shoppers when they make inquiries through Zillow or Trulia while viewing a listing. After contacting the shopper to qualify the lead, Zillow calls the agent and connects them to the new prospect. This is less expensive but does not include marketing features.
- BoldLeads is a lead generation platform that creates ads and delivers the resulting leads to an agent’s CRM. It’s not as focused on farming a particular market area as SmartZip.
Our Take
In a sampling of reviews from around the web, it appears that most reviewers like SmartZip. The company’s products get especially high marks for the volume of leads they produce. Lead quality is an issue with some users. This is typical of lead generation products, however, and may not mean much.
There’s no question that the service is expensive. There’s typcially a required 3 year contract and, at around $1,000 per month (plans are custom-tailored to each client), this means you’ll spend around $36,000 for the first three years.
At first glance, that seems steep. But first consider the functionality offered. If you were to price out each feature individually, you’d pay way more than $1,000 per month for the full functionality, not to mention that you’d be using separate platforms.
For agents with a robust marketing budget, SmartZip offers robust value for the pricing, and is well worth considering adding this platform to your war chest.
SmartZip Summary
SmartZip leverages big data and predictive analytics to help agents identify sellers who are likely to list their homes for sale. Then it automates follow-up and lead-nurturing so agents can focus on relationships instead of basic marketing tasks.
