@Leah Bonner - I'm fairly new to wholesaling and real estate but my background is in digital marketing. Cornelius is correct. You need a way for them to give you their email address. Creating a free offer is the best way to do this.
First, narrow you're focus to the type of homeowner you're trying to attract. You want to determine their biggest pain points right now. What questions do they have about what they're going through? What questions SHOULD they be asking?
I read a book by Russell Brunson and he said their are 5 curiosity hooks that we can use to get people to opt in to our email campaigns. 3 of the 5 that could be used for capturing homeowner leads...
1. "Little-know, big difference" which shows homeowners something that they aren't aware of and how knowing it could make all the difference between a good selling experience and a bad one.
2. "Well-known, little-understood" is where you take something that every homeowner you're targeting (absentee owners, probates, pre-foreclosure, etc.) thinks they know, and show them how they're actually sabotaging themselves.
3. "This changes everything" is used when you can talk about something new/recently that happened in you area. It should be related to whatever problem the homeowner is trying to solve and letting them know about this change is saving them from a world of heartache.
You can create PDF's, guides, infographics, reports, video lessons, or e-books. In order to get your free offer that solves their problem, they have to give you their email address.
Once they do, they've qualified themselves and shown you that they are in a situation where they might sell their house at a discounted price.
Make sure you have an autoresponder set up with your email marketing provider so once a homeowner DOES opt in, they are followed up with automatically.
The purpose of your email autoresponder is to get the homeowners you're targeting to know, like, and trust you enough where they call or set a time for you to look at the property.
I recommend an email responder that sends emails for 5 consecutive days when someone opts in. I use what I call the know, like, trust, challenge and convert sequence. It gets the homeowner to know, like and trust the first 3 days, you challenge their traditional home-selling thinking (selling through a realtor) on the 4th email, and you have a hard call-to-action to get in contact with you in the fifth email.
Doing this 5 day sequence will identify highly motivated sellers. If they don't call you in the first 5 days, that's okay. Have your autoresponder send them two emails a week (Tuesday and Thursday have the highest open rates) for at least another 3 weeks.
You can do it longer if you want (2-3 months sending 2 emails a week). You want to stay in front of that homeowner for as long as possible until they're ready to sell. It normally take 5-12 follow ups before people take action. Yet most people don't even follow up once!
Email marketing is a great way follow up and get more deals without you having to do the work yourself (except for the initial set up of course)
