When they were building Tiger Leads and Ylopo, founders Howard Tager and Juefeng Ge quickly learned that more is not always better.
Sure, tech savvy agents will talk your ear off about the latest IFTTT Applet that saves them .5 of a second on their Whatsapp response time, but at the end of the day, agents only want one thing.
Leads.
Your lead gen platform can have everything from mass texting to a built in coffee maker, but if you’re not delivering agents well qualified, top of the funnel leads at a good price then what’s the point?
What is Ylopo Exactly?
Ylopo is a marketing platform built for one purpose and one purpose only. To deliver agents well qualified buyer and seller leads who are just starting their hunt.
Since NAR statistics show that the vast majority of sellers only interview one agent, making contact before other agents do can mean more signed listings. On the buy side, it gives you the chance to build rapport with buyers before Zillow becomes their new obsession.
As Ylopo told us:
“Effective lead generation is not about who you’re acquiring, but when you’re acquiring them.”
Makes sense right? Imagine getting a call back from a $10 million seller lead but they texted you a day before they closed with 5 other offers on the table… What kind of ROI do you think you’ll get from that lead?
That Sounds Pretty Great, How do They do it?
We’ll get into the weeds on this a bit more below, but the elevator pitch is that Ylopo uses advanced industry leading techniques like targeting leads with demographics and psychographics, and integrating MLS feeds with dynamic Facebook ads to name a few.
They then give agents a custom lightning fast IDX website that is designed to be a sleeker, more user friendly version of Zillow.
Once they’re on your site, you can then track which homes they look at and when, how long they look at them, which homes they saved, and every time they log in to look. Having this kind of data is almost like being psychic. It means you can touch your lead at exactly the right time, with exactly the right message, every time…
On top of all that, they also offer a way for you to warm up all those dusty cold leads in your CRM. They do this by something called retargeting, which essentially means tracking someone online and exposing them to laser targeted messages on Facebook.
How Much Does Ylopo Cost?
The monthly cost for Ylopo depends on whether or not you want just the websites and lead nurturing backend, or if you want Ylopo to manage all your lead generation for you. Ylopo breaks this down into two pricing tiers, Without Leads, and With Leads.
Here’s a basic breakdown of Ylopo’s pricing:
| Without Leads: (includes ad tech, IDX Website, Branded Site, auto texting, & Facebook Remarketing) | With Leads: (Everything in first tier + Ylopo manages your digital marketing) |
| $295 per month | $495 per month + Ad spend & Remarketing spend (varies by zip code) |
| +$1,000 onboarding fee | +$1,000 onboarding fee |
Note that the fees for the With Leads package can vary depending on the zip code and the average price of the homes you’re targeting.
They have a helpful calculator on their site in order to get an idea of pricing for your area. To see what a typical spend might be, we plugged Kansas City in as our farm area, targeting homes in the $200,000—$350,000 range.
Ylopo’s calculator came back with a very attractive price of $6—$8 per new lead, based on generating 38-50 leads per month. It also included pricing for Facebook remarketing, as well as marketing to our sphere. Here’s a quick breakdown of those costs:
| Budget for Generating New Leads | $300 |
| Budget for Nurturing Your Database (Remarketing) | $75 |
| Budget for effectively marketing your sphere | $75 |
| Budget for Generating New Leads | $300 |
| Ylopo management fee | $495 |
| Monthly total | $945 |
This pricing, especially when broken down to cost per lead, is comparable to or more affordable than many lead services on the market. When you add in remarketing for both website visitors and your sphere, then it becomes even more attractive.
Okay, now that we’ve gone over the basics and pricing, let’s kick the tires a bit and see what you’re really getting for your money.
We’ll start with the IDX and branded websites.
IDX Home Search Websites Designed for Ease of Use & Conversion
The IDX custom IDX websites that Ylopo builds for agents are lightning fast, easy to use, and optimized for conversion and tracking leads. Let’s go over each of these quickly and see why they’re crucial to lead generation.
Speed
According to data from Google, a whopping 53% of users will abandon your site forever if it takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s right. Three seconds.
This is why building out a WordPress site and overloading it with clunky code, dozens of plugins, and fancy pants javascript sliders, can actually lose you a ton of potential business.
People coming to your site, especially from a Facebook ad, are extremely fickle. Sure, they might want what you’re offering, but the trust just isn’t there yet. This is what a fast loading site is so crucial for generating leads.
Ease of Use
Have you actually tried to search for a home in Zillow recently? It’s a bloated, convoluted mess. Pages take forever to load, the map is wonky, and you have to drill down into many menus in order to do anything. Worse, sometimes there is information missing from the MLS. ‘’
Ylopo’s sites are intuitively laid out and dead easy to use. There are no bells and whistles for the sake of bells and whistles. Instead, you get a minimal site with lots of gorgeous pictures a granular way to search the MLS.
Tracking Leads on Your Ylopo Site
After their integration of big data and cutting edge ad strategies, the most innovative feature Ylopo offers is the ability to track leads on your IDX website.
It’s one thing to know when people are on your website, but quite another to know that they just spent 15 minutes flipping between two properties, or that this is the 5th time in the last two days they looked at 123 Main Street.
Ylopo lets you do just that. If a hot lead is lingering on a hot listing… well, let’s just say you don’t have to be Barbara Corcoran to figure out what to do next.
Branded Websites
In addition to their IDX websites, Ylopo also offers sleek, lightning fast branded websites that make perfect homepages for Realtors. For an example of a Ylopo branded websites, check out Barry Jenkins’ site here.
Mission Control
One unique feature that Ylopo offers is their Mission Control page. The Mission Control page offers you a quick overview of how each of your ads are performing in granular detail. While this may seem like a no brainer, you might be shocked to learn that most digital advertising companies don’t do this. Instead, they just send you leads and you’re left guessing how or why they did what they did to get them.
Amazingly, Ylopo i so confident in their tech and marketing strategies that they actually show you everything they’re doing to promote your business online. Using the dashboard you can even decide if you want to participate or not.
Some agents (wisely) allow the experts to do their thing while they focus on showings and listing presentations. However, some agents are a little nosier, and may want to get their hands dirty. While Ylopo allows you to adjust many of their settings, this is bit like making decisions for your mechanic about which parts your car needs and the best tools to install them.
As you might imagine, Ylopo generally encourages agents to let them handle most of the work, but they still value your insight into the process. After all, you know the ins and outs of your market better than most marketers would.
Industry Leading Facebook Advertising
When agents first dip their toes into Facebook advertising, they invariably say the same thing after a week or so. Facebook’s advertising platform is complicated.
Actually we have first hand experience of this. While setting up and running simple ads may be easy, generating great leads for a reasonable price is not. Far from it actually.
There are just so many variables, features, and strategies that Facebook offers that running and optimizing (targeting them to more specific people and tailoring your message) them can be, and actually often is a full time job.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Even Firepoint, who makes a highly advanced team CRM with drop dead gorgeous IDX websites, outsources their Facebook lead generation to Ylopo. They’re just that good at it….
Combining Big Data, Years of Strategic Experience, and Dynamic Real Estate Ads = Great Leads
The reason that Ylopo is so effective at generating leads using Facebook ads is that they have come up with a winning formula both to target leads and make sure they click through to your site. No easy feat.
By partnering with big data companies, Ylopo is able to access demographic information generally not available to the public in order to really, really, laser target your audience. As anyone who has ever tried PPC advertising knows, this is a crucial first step.
Your MLS Feeds Right Into Your Dynamic Facebook Ads
Ylopo’s technology also allows them to automatically parse data from your MLS and match it to that of your target leads. For example, Ylopo can sort out the properties suitable for horses from your MLS and only show those properties when showing ads to Facebook users who have expressed interest in horse properties specifically.
By now you’re probably wondering if their system updates ads from the MLS automatically. The answer of course is yes. For example, that means that no sold properties end up in front of your leads on Facebook. It will also update price changes as well.
Remarketing: Advanced & Automated Lead Nurturing
Perhaps the most innovative and useful solution that Ylopo offers is called retargeting. Once again, the concept is simple, but the proper implementation can be extremely difficult.
Here’s how it works. After someone visits your website, or you have their contact information, Ylopo can install a tiny piece of code on their browsers which tracks them online and shows them highly targeted ads.
This is not only a great way to nurture newer leads, but is absolutely perfect for breathing life back into the old, stale leads clogging up your CRM.
While we could offer much more detail here, from our experience, most readers tune out once we start getting too nerdy so we’ll leave the nitty gritty tech details for another day.
Or, if you have a few minutes, here’s Ylopo Co Founder Juefeng Ge going a little bit more granular on how Ylopo manages to get such amazing leads on Facebook.
How Ylopo Generates & Nurtures Leads from Ylopo on Vimeo.
Remarketing to Your Sphere: Breathe Life into Cold Leads Without Picking up Your Phone
In addition to using Facebook remarketing for your website visitors, Ylopo can also use the same advanced targeting and demographic info to remarket to dead leads in your sphere. This is perfect for leads that have been tuning out your drip emails.
Drawbacks & Compromises
The only thing that’s really missing from Ylopo’s platform is a CRM. For some new Realtors, this may be seen as a drawback, but in reality, like every real estate software decision, it’s more of a compromise, and generally speaking, one that works in your favor. Here’s why:
You don’t have to give up the CRM you’re already using
This is a big one. Most agents who have been working in the industry for more than a year or so already have a CRM they’re comfortable using. I fact, many agents might be locked into a 6 month or year long contract with their CRM provider.
So that means either abandoning their current CRM and starting over with a brand new one, or simply not using the included CRM in other lead generation platforms. The only problem of course is that the cost of that CRM is baked into the price of your lead generation platform… Why pay for something you might not even use?
You Can Experiment With New CRMs & Still Keep Generating Leads With Ylopo
Even better, instead of feeling stuck using a new CRM you’re paying for anyway, if you use Ylopo you can experiment with dozens of CRMs until you find the one that’s perfect for you. While you’re trying out CRM’s you’re still going to be generating and nurturing leads with Ylopo.
Need a Great Real Estate CRM to Use With Ylopo?
If you’re looking for a new CRM to try out, check out our in-depth reviews of Firepoint, Wise Agent, LionDesk, and Follow Up Boss.
Over to You
Have you used Ylopo or other real estate marketing or lead generation platforms? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
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