Even if you don’t have a large budget or an abundance of time, there are several very good reasons for developing a system of post-purchase touchpoints that enable you to keep in touch with past clients.

Here you’ll discover some of the many incentives for staying in touch with clients after you’ve finalized a transaction. As you read, you’ll also find some creative ways to keep in touch with clients and recommendations for how you can get help putting a plan into place.

But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page by talking a bit about customer touchpoints and post-purchase touchpoints in particular.

What are customer touchpoints?

While you may have heard the term most often associated with retail businesses, the concept of customer touchpoints is equally applicable to real estate agents whose success relies upon generating, nurturing, and converting leads.

Simply put, customer touchpoints (sometimes referred to as customer journey touchpoints or brand touchpoints) are any potential points of contact between a customer or client and a company. By this definition, touchpoints aren’t restricted to viewing your advertising, interacting with your website or chatbot, receiving a call from an office manager or ISA, or meeting with you. A touchpoint can be as incidental as seeing your company name on the back of a Little League T-shirt. However, this doesn’t mean you should confuse “incidental” with “insignificant” because every touchpoint has meaning.

Image by Andrea Hamilton from Pixabay

The importance of customer touchpoints

Whether it’s before, during, or after a transaction, each time someone encounters your brand, you have an opportunity to influence how they feel about who you are and what you do. For example, your sponsorship of a community sports team does more than advertise your services—it also creates goodwill and demonstrates you’re a business that cares about more than profit.

Click to listen to the story of Giveback Homes, a unique organization of real estate professionals that builds homes for families in need around the world.

Post-purchase touchpoints specifically are important because they’re a chance to turn a one-time client who’s hired you to assist with a home purchase or sale into a loyal client who will not only call upon you when they next need your services but also refer you to others with a similar need. In each situation, you both save and make money.

In a time of intense competition, coupled with the demand from consumers for highly personalized experiences, customer touchpoints (including post-purchase touchpoints) can separate you from rival agents. That’s why they need to be a carefully considered aspect of your marketing.

How to keep in touch with clients: touchpoint examples

According to the 2022 National Association of Realtors^® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 89% of buyers indicated they would use their agent again or recommend them to others, but a mere 12% used an agent they had worked with before and only 38% hired a referred agent. Similarly, 73% of home sellers reported they would “definitely” use the same agent again—but only 27% of sellers actually did.

Obviously, there is a meaningful difference between what buyers and sellers say they would do and what they actually do. A significant reason for this is the large number of agents who don’t stay in touch with their clients.

There’s nothing worse than seeing another real estate agent’s name on a “For Sale” sign in the yard of a house you previously sold. But this is all too common because many agents give clients a gift at closing and never connect with them again. The years between buying and selling a home give homeowners plenty of time to forget their agent’s name, which is a shame because those clients represent a lifetime of repeat business and referrals that agent will never receive.

Don’t be the agent that people forget. Below is a list of ideas you can use as post-purchase touchpoints to keep in touch and nurture relationships with your clients.

Conduct client pop-bys

Nothing beats face-to-face contact, and pop-bys are an easy way to get in front of your clients. They’re a chance to show some appreciation with a small gift, catch up, and let them know you are always grateful for their referrals. And as for the gift, it really is the thought that counts. The best pop-by gifts are inexpensive, can be purchased in bulk, and have a clever message attached to them. 

Visit our Resource Library to find ideas and free gift tags for your next client pop-by.

As a marketing strategy, pop-by gifts work because every time your clients use your gift, they’ll think of you. Such a gesture also triggers the principle of reciprocity—because you did something nice for them, they’ll want to do something nice for you. And the easiest way for them to reciprocate your kindness is to refer you to friends and family.

Send handwritten notes

If face-to-face contact is the premier way to stay in touch with clients, then handwritten notes come in a close second. All you need to do is think about how you feel when you receive a handwritten note in the mail to understand their impact.

Image by Andrew Lloyd Gordon from Pixabay

Beyond the obligatory holiday card, take the time to send a handwritten note for no reason other than to let a client know you were thinking about them. You can write a note to wish a client a happy birthday or anniversary, to invite them to a client appreciation event or thank them for attending, or to acknowledge a special occasion. (A robust client database can help you identify these opportunities to reach out.)

Mail a personally branded magazine

The best way to stay in touch with clients is to provide them with consistent value they can appreciate, use, and share. Filled with gorgeous images and engaging articles, our magazines can help achieve all three. Our clients enjoy the ease of automated delivery that puts their personal brand in front of recipients every six weeks. It’s marketing perceived as a gift of superior quality that your clients will actually look forward to receiving.

Request your free sample, and we’ll send a PDF copy of our most recent issue to your inbox.

You can also use the Inside Front Cover to write customized messages to your individual recipients at no additional cost. Use it to wish a client a happy move-in anniversary, congratulate them on an achievement, or share your own good news.

Each issue is branded with your image and contact information in six key places, including on two Tear Out cards of your choice featuring delicious recipes, fun crafts, easy DIY projects, and more. Or you can choose to customize them along with the Inside and Outside Back Covers.

Of course, the key to any post-purchase touchpoint is the follow-up, and these magazines make reaching out to your recipients easy. A call the week your magazine arrives to ask if they enjoy receiving it is all it takes. Working in conjunction, your magazine and call will trigger a feeling of reciprocity and keep you top of mind for when someone asks if they know a good agent they can refer.

Create a newsletter

Like our personally branded magazines, newsletters are also an opportunity to provide your clients with value they appreciate. However, the trouble with so many agents’ newsletters is that they’re all about real estate. Sure, it can be interesting and even helpful to know what’s going on in the market, but if all you ever share is industry information, you’re not going to be able to sustain your clients’ interest.

Many of our clients use our personally branded Local Events newsletter to engage their clients and nurture others in their sphere. We hand select popular, top-quality events in your local market and automatically send them to your list of recipients every two weeks. It’s one of the four tools included in our Digital Marketing Platform.

Post to social media

You can create ongoing post-purchase touchpoints by connecting with all your clients on social media. In addition to commenting on their posts, an easy way to stay in touch with clients is to share educational and entertaining content they’ll engage with and share with others.

I say “easy” because social media is convenient, but it can actually be a challenge for busy agents to find the time to create fresh content and share it consistently. It’s why we created Branded Posts as another one of the tools that make up our Digital Marketing Platform. From a library of thousands of articles, you can select the ones you want to share and use our Facebook and Instagram schedulers to set them up weeks or even months in advance (a real set-it-and-forget-it solution).

The key is consistency

While all the ideas discussed above can keep you in touch with your clients, the most important thing is to be consistent in your outreach. We help eliminate the stress of “too much to do and too little time to do it” by automating many of our products, but for customer touchpoints like pop-bys and handwritten notes, you need a system that will seamlessly integrate them into your marketing.

If you struggle with finding a way to be consistent when reaching out to your clients, then take a page from Garrett Maroon’s playbook.

Garrett is the founder of the Maroon Group Real Estate in Chesapeake, Virginia. From the beginning, he set out to build a 100% referral-based business, and he succeeded. In 2022, he closed 88 deals—all of them sourced from referrals. He’s done it by developing a system that allows him to reach out consistently to his clients and others in his sphere 36 times a year. Download this free e-book to discover his Perfect 36 Touch system and see how easy it is to implement.

A final thought

Whether you use one of our tools, someone else’s, or you have something else in mind, it’s important to stay in touch with your clients using a system of post-purchase touchpoints. Consistent contact with your clients will keep you top of mind—generating referrals and repeat business essential to long-term growth.