Which would you rather get: a lead or a client? Many real estate tech companies will generate leads. A real estate lead is an opportunity to be sure, but a client is just a few steps closer to a commission in your bank account. Real estate tech company Zurple is moving beyond simple lead generation, positioning itself as the industry’s first client generation company.
To determine if they live up to the hype, we did a deep-dive into Zurple to better understand what they’re doing differently than all the other players in the crowded real estate customer relationship management (CRM) space.
In this article, we’ll provide an unbiased look at how Zurple works, how much the platform costs to use, take a peek under the hood with an exclusive video walkthrough, and tell you whether we think Zurple is worth the price tag.
Zurple: How It Works, How Much It Costs & The Close Recommendation
Zurple’s initial lead generation strategy isn’t anything new; run ads to drive traffic to a landing page and capture information. This is what 90% of companies are offering. However, Zurple isn’t focused on getting leads—they’re focused on converting those leads to clients.
Zurple separates itself from the rest when it comes to the quality of its post-lead acquisition nurturing. Zurple’s “Auto Conversations” adjust their approach with individual leads based on their behavior and responses, creating better engagement and more clients, not just leads.
Zurple leads don’t land on generic catch-all websites either; they are driven to market-specific, highly optimized real estate splash pages designed to capture buyer and seller lead information.
Long-term Lead Nurturing: Tips & Scripts to Avoid Overtasking
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Once a lead is captured, the information gets transferred to the Zurple CRM, where “Zurple Auto Conversations” take over. This is a complex set of reactive nurturing campaigns that do the bulk of the lead nurturing for you, including email, SMS texting, MLS property alerts, and more.
These campaigns adjust their flow automatically depending on your lead’s response and website behavior, making their conversion rates and effectiveness very high. When a prospect’s “Lead Intelligence Score” rises to a certain level, Zurple notifies you to jump in, and you can continue the conversation with a now-active buyer or seller.
How Much Does Zurple Cost?
The Close Recommends
After careful consideration, I can confidently say that I do recommend Zurple as a real estate lead generation and nurturing platform. Zurple’s features are well worth their price, the CRM and lead system are intuitive and easy to navigate, and their integration with other lead sources like Market Leader, Zillow Premier Agent, and others is seamless.
Going Deeper: The Zurple Process Explained + The Close Analysis
Want to know a little more about how Zurple works? In this section, we’ll go into more detail on how Zurple works, what we like about it, and where we think it could improve.
Zurple is a big platform, so we don’t have room to touch on every bell and whistle offered. For that, make sure to check out our video walk-through below.
The Zurple process can be broken down into three stages:
Stage 1: Setup
Zurple agents start by setting up a market-specific website (or websites) for the areas they’re interested in targeting. These websites aren’t designed to replace your primary website—they are designed as multipart landing pages, all with the intent of providing specific buyer and seller value and capturing lead information.
Many Zurple agents run multiple websites, targeting different markets and communities in their region. This makes sense, as the more localized your real estate marketing approach is, the more effective it will be.
Your website (or websites) feeds lead information and client behavior on your website directly to the Zurple CRM.
What Zurple Gets Right: Many real estate lead generation companies try to get Realtors to use their websites because they make capturing and transferring leads easier. However, many companies don’t offer the website branding, content marketing options, and overall connectivity that your real estate website needs to be effective.
Zurple takes an entirely new approach—they see their real estate websites as nothing more than a necessary quick stop on the path to successfully turning a lead into a client. Lead capture is the whole point of a Zurple webpage—nothing more, nothing less. I, for one, find this strategy refreshing.
Where Zurple Misses the Mark: A website, and even the glorified landing pages that Zurple uses, require maintenance. Zurple has said that some users are running dozens of these sites—that’s a lot of time on the back-end that many agents don’t have to give.
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Stage 2: Acquisition & Nurturing
Once your market-specific websites are complete, you need to start driving traffic. You can do this yourself through your social media, your brand marketing, your own independent website, or paid ads, including those you run on places like Zillow, Realtor.com, and any other Zapier-connected platform. Zurple also offers the option to contract with them to do Google, Bing, and Yahoo ads to drive traffic, a logical strategy since their websites are so market-specific.
Once traffic starts arriving on your Zurple website, converting from prospects to leads, that lead information is automatically transferred to the Zurple CRM where the automated nurturing campaigns begin.
Make no mistake, we’re not talking about a basic welcome email drip sequence; these are complex automated outreach campaigns using email, text messages, MLS market updates, new listings, and more.
The game-changer here is that Zurple’s nurture campaigns automatically adjust as the behavior of your leads change on your Zurple webpages. So, for example, if you send your lead a property alert and they wind up opening that alert and visiting it 10 times in a day, the next step in the campaign progress will be different than if they only opened it once.
What Zurple Gets Right: Zurple calls the adjusted nurturing sequences “Zurple Auto Conversations,” and while I was hesitant to call these “conversations” when only one person is involved, their reactivity is pretty damn impressive. I love that this technology works based on your lead’s SMS text response behavior too.
Where Zurple Misses the Mark: I worry that an automated voice—which, to my consumers, is supposed to be mine—won’t actually sound like me. One of the dangers of over-automating is creating messages that don’t feel genuine. Zurple seems pretty confident that won’t happen, but I’m not completely convinced.
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Stage 3: Transfer & Conversion
Once your Zurple lead’s “Zurple Intelligence” score crosses a particular threshold (when a lead has demonstrated certain behaviors that Zurple has identified are signs they’re ready to activate as a client), agents are notified and advised to take over communication with the lead personally.
A Zurple agent would then remove said lead from the automated communication flow in the CRM, meaning the lead will no longer receive nurturing messages based on their website behavior.
What Zurple Gets Right: Zurple’s Lead Intelligence scoring is thoughtful and clearly data-tested. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of data points that give them insight into when a client is ready to activate. I’m impressed with this system for sure.
Where Zurple Misses the Mark: This is a delicate hand-off. You don’t want to be too early with taking over communication, lest you wind up having to continue to manually nurture a lead who isn’t yet ready. But, wait too long, and your motivated lead will convert with someone else. For busy agents with a lot on their plate, syncing your client outreach with the moment that a lead raises their hand is going to be tough, at least at first.
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Zurple Review Video Walk-through
Curious about what life is like as a Zurple agent? In this video walk-through, we get full, unfettered access to the entire Zurple platform so that we can show you exactly what you’ll see when you become a Zurple user.
Zurple Alternatives
If Zurple isn’t the right choice for you and your business, we’ll share some alternatives worth considering.
Looking for a lower price point? Consider REDX. The $400 to $500 per month price tag for Zurple may be out of reach for some agents. If that’s you, consider checking out prospecting platform REDX. With REDX, you get a prospecting platform that gives you lead data starting at less than $50 per month with no contract. Getting such a low price means doing a lot more work yourself, but if that makes better sense based on your resources, give REDX a try.
REDX Review: Why Smart Realtors Use REDX & Power Dialer
Looking for guaranteed lead volume? Consider Market Leader. If you need a certain number of leads every month in order to make your goals, Market Leader is a great option. They will analyze your market, determine how many leads they can comfortably produce each month, and guarantee that volume.
Market Leader Review +Video Walkthrough
Looking to level of your real estate farming? Consider Smartzip. Smartzip is a predictive analytics company that takes consumer data, market data, demographic data, and more and, using complex algorithms, predicts the most likely homebuyers and sellers in a given community. This is a powerful tool for anyone focusing their lead generation on specific geographic areas.
Is SmartZip the Future of Real Estate Prospecting?
Why Trust This Review
Chris Linsell (bottom right) as the Digital Strategist & Realtor in The Mitten Real Estate Group before joining The Close.
Let’s make one thing clear: not all reviews of real estate tech products are created equal.
Here at The Close, those on our editorial team have direct, personal experience working as real estate professionals. I personally have been a part of closing hundreds of transactions, as well as lead generation and digital strategy for my six-member team. I have personal, specific knowledge of what it takes to be successful in this space.
Also, The Close has a strict policy of editorial independence. Though we partner with providers of real estate tools, those partnerships have no effect on the content we create or the conclusions we draw. Much to the chagrin of our Business Development department, nobody can tell us what to write. You can trust that the observations, analysis, and conclusions of this piece are mine, and represent the position of the editorial team here at The Close.
Bottom Line
After an intensive look at Zurple and the benefits it offers real estate professionals, The Close is happy to offer this product our endorsement and recommend it to our readers.
The platform isn’t perfect; it is certainly a financial commitment, as well as a time commitment to maintain the different moving parts of the various websites and monitoring the status of the leads that Zurple is nurturing on your behalf. But, these drawbacks are well worth the benefit in potential commission income.
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