Atlanta Real Estate Forum congratulates Karen Reichert of The Providence Group for being named Online Specialist of the Year. Presented by the Atlanta Sales and Marketing Council, the OBIE Awards are the premier awards awarded to new home builders and developers in the Atlanta new home construction industry.
Kelly Fink, Vice President of Marketing, Social Media and Digital Sales states, “Karen Reichert is the Online Home Advisor for The Providence Group and has exceeded all of the goals set for her in this role! In the last 12 months Karen has contributed to 48% to company net sales managing over 250 new leads a month and a database of over 21,000 leads! Karen continues to strive to improve her follow up process and response time, as well as, increase her scheduled appointments and sales. This past year was such a huge success with Karen scheduling over 400 VIP appointments which resulted in over $50 million in sales volume!”
Karen manages over 21,000 leads from The Providence Group website including managing VIP Interest Lists (web and phone inquiries) for 5+ coming soon communities. She proactively engages each lead through personal follow up that includes a phone call and texts offering her service of connecting leads with information on The Providence Group’s communities during their new home search. Karen spent time personally connecting with leads by placing over 470 phone calls and text to engage online leads in their new home search. In addition, to personal follow up, Karen sends each prospect a targeted message, relevant community information, answers customers and concerns, and sends direct email campaigns resulting in over 13,500 personal emails.
Recently, The Providence Group went through a rebrand campaign and Karen worked diligently to rebrand the drip campaign/personal follow up used with online leads. This rebranded follow up system uses community specific messaging that is heavy in images/photography/video to maximize click through rates. This drip campaign produced over 200 templates and feature marketing tools that The Providence Group procures including interactive site plans, 3D Virtual Tools, photo/video galleries, etc. This communication resulted in over 400 appointments scheduled with a 77.64% kept conversion rate.
The Providence Group’s Live Chat feature has been one of Karen’s greatest conversion successes therefore Karen has worked hard to dedicate time to continuing education and learning all aspects of effective online sales programs through reading and attending webinars. Karen has proactively worked with our Live Chat system support team to maximize use of this conversion tool. Over the past year, Karen has tested messaging to engage Live Chatters including adding personal invitations with compelling messaging with a professional headshot adding a personal touch. Karen also integrated SMS Messaging into our Live Chat tool. Through these efforts, Karen has conducted over 550 Live Chats and converted 41 kept appointments, 8 executed contracts equaling $3.9 million in sales volume.
In 2018 and 2019, Karen also took on an active role in directing/producing short video (between 15-30 seconds) of spec inventory, that highlighted the key features in each home and used the videos in follow up through our CRM and via text. Additionally, Karen has worked hard to use video messaging to reach out to new leads and follow up many months later. Additionally, Karen Reichert plays an active role in producing mass mail content and executes each campaign from template design, content, HTML coding, and targeted custom launch lists. Karen sent over 547,156 mass emails with an open rate of 22.93%.
Karen has also taken the initiative to become a superuser in The Providence Group’s CRM tool, Lasso, taking on the lead trainer role for our Community Sales Manager’s and new hires making them proficient in the tool so that the company maximizes each lead.
The Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association’s OBIE Awards celebrates its 39th anniversary in 2019. The awards began in 1980 and have grown throughout the years to include more than 100 building, remodeling, marketing and personal achievement categories. The OBIE Awards are named after the obelisk shape of the actual award given. See other OBIE award winners at www.AtlantaRealEstateForum.com/category/OBIEs. Make sure to like, share and comment on this story.