A real estate website is useless if it doesn’t convert visitors into leads, right?
Many elements make a website conversion-friendly – chat boxes, email opt-ins, lead forms, and landing pages to name a few. And if your website is getting leads, you need to have a lead management system in place and put those leads through a marketing funnel.
For real estate investors and Realtors, who want to leverage digital marketing for leads, ensuring that all these elements are there on their website and functioning properly all the time can be a bit overwhelming.
However, the good news is some digital platforms make implementing these conversion-friendly elements extremely easier. InvestorCarrot is one of them.
As a real estate agent or investor, if you are planning to use Investor Carrot, you should be aware of all the pros and cons. Your website is going to represent the reputation of your business online, so it makes sense to give this a lot of consideration before choosing a platform.
In this detailed guide, I am going to review Carrot in detail and share with you why this platform can be a game-changer for your real estate business and help you market it online:
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A background check on Investor Carrot
What makes Carrot an effective platform for real estate investors and Realtors is the fact that it has been designed and developed by successful investors who have years of experience in the industry. Trevor, CEO of Investor Carrot – now known as Carrot – is the brain behind the company.
The founders built their first website way back in 2003 and since then they have been experimenting with how to leverage technology and digital marketing to generate real leads online. Using their own experience, they designed the platform to help real estate investors grow faster and get better results at a lower cost.
They claimed to have generated over 1 million leads for real estate professionals.
The company started out by providing website building and digital marketing platforms explosively to real estate investors. Now, they are providing the service to real estate agents also.
Should you use Carrot?
Carrot.com caters to real estate professionals only. If you are a
- real estate investor,
- wholesaler,
- real estate agent,
- broker,
- flipper,
Carrot is one of the best website building and leads management tools for you.
InvestorCarrot plans and pricing
An important thing to take into consideration is: Is Carrot cost-effective?
Carrot offers monthly as well as annual plans for investors and agents.
The plans begin at as low as $69/month for real estate investors and $99 for real estate agents.
Check out their plans by clicking the following link: Carrot for real estate investors and agents plans
What I love about Investor Carrot is the fact that they focus on SEO, apart from providing features that can help you run paid promotions on Facebook and Google Ads. While I will talk more about this feature in a while, you should know that their advanced plans – Content Pro and Advanced Marketer – are great for boosting your real estate website’s SEO in the long run.
InvestorCarrot pricing for investors
For real estate investors, InvestorCarrot offers three plans: Core, Content Pro, Advanced Marketer
Core Plan features and pricing
The Core plan costs you $69/month if you pay monthly. The monthly price will be reduced to $55 if you subscribe to the annual plan.
With the Core plan, you can build one InvestorCarrot website. You have access to InvestorCarrot’s highly effective Lead Management System which lets you filter leads by New, Follow-up, Pending, Won, and Dead and create a marketing funnel that is bested suited for leads based on how motivated they are. As soon as a lead signs up on your website, you will have access to the lead’s contact details and property details on the Lead Management System dashboard.
You can track the performance of up to two ad campaigns. This feature gives you great insights into which ads are performing the best and which ones are just a money pit. This saves you a lot of money and effort when it comes to optimizing your ads for ROI.
The Core plan also comes with an SMS Lead Notifications feature. You will be sent an instant notification to your phone as soon as a lead signs up.
Another great feature is the Visual Editor. You can simply drag and drop almost every element including content boxes, images, and testimonials.
In my opinion, the best advantage of building your real estate website with Carrot is that it makes creating landing pages very easy. If you want to run hyper-local Facebook and Google Ads campaigns, you can build a landing page within minutes and you are good to go!
Content Pro plan features and pricing
The Content Pro plan costs you $99/month if you pay monthly. For the annual subscription, you pay $79/month.
You can host three websites with the Content Pro plan. The Content Pro offers some advanced SEO features that are not available in the Core plan. You will get SEO suggestions for 3 keywords that you want your website to rank for in Google search results. You can improve the chances of your content ranking high by acting on these suggestions. This is one of the reasons for InvestorCarrot websites ranking so high in Google in almost every market in the U.S.
This plan provides you 13 campaign tracking links. It means instead of two, you can track the performance of 13 ad campaigns on Facebook and Google Ads.
This plan also takes care of content marketing. You will access to InvestorCarrot’s Advanced Content Library where new content is made available on a regular basis.
While InvestorCarrot offers a robust lead management system, you can integrate third-party CRMs such as Zapier, Mailchimp, Aweber, Zoho, and REIPro with the Content Pro plan.
Investor Carrot organizes group coaching calls every week where you can seek guidance on digital marketing. You can attend these group coaching calls only if you have Content Pro plan.
Advanced Marketing plan features and pricing
The Advanced Marketer plan costs you $199/month if you pay monthly. For the annual subscription, you pay $159/month.
If you are a real estate investor, also providing your services as an agent, you can consider subscribing to the Advanced Marketer plan. You get templates that work for both purposes. So you don’t have to run two different websites.
Besides, you get one-on-one marketing consultation from Carrot experts on a regular basis. You will also have access to more premium designs and templates that are not available to Core and Content Pro subscribers.
Note: You can add an additional site to any plan by paying $20/month.
All InvestorCarrot plans include hosting, so you need to pay 3rd party hosting services.
Read Also: Best hosting for real estate websites
Carrot (also known as AgentCarrot) pricing for real estate agents
AgentCarrot offers two plans: Content Pro and Advanced Pro. The Core plan available for investors is not available for agents.
AgentCarrot Content Pro plan features and pricing
The Content Pro plan costs you $99/month if you pay monthly. For the annual subscription, you pay $79/month.
Instead of three websites (which are available in the Content Pro plan for investors), you get one website in the AgentCarrot Content Pro plan. However, you can add an additional site by paying $30/month.
Other features are more or less the same including Carrot Lead Manager, SMS Lead Notifications, Visual Editor, Group Coaching Calls, VideoPost Automated Content Library, and CRM and Marketing Integrations.
With the Content Pro plan, you can track the performance of 15 Facebook and Google Ads campaigns.
AgentCarrot Advanced Marketer plan features and pricing
The Advanced Marketer plan costs you $199/month if you pay monthly. For the annual subscription, you pay $159/month.
You get unlimited campaign tracking links to monitor the performance of your ad campaigns on Facebook and Google Ads with the Advanced Marketer plan.
You can track SEO ranking for 20 keywords. You also have access to Premium Automated Content Library, Premium Site Designs, and 1:1 Marketing Strategy Reviews.
In the Advanced Marketer plan also, you get one website; however, you can add an additional site by paying $30/month.
IDX pricing for AgentCarrot websites
Want to display beautifully-designed property listing pages on your website? You can add IDX to your AgentCarrot website. The pricing for AgentCarrot IDX begins at $50/month. You can easily filter properties to display on any page of your choice.
Review: Why to Choose Carrot for your real estate website
Here are a few reasons why you should build your website on the Carrot platform:
An integrated approach to real estate marketing
There are almost 2 billion websites on the Web. It means that getting a website designed for your business is easy. You have thousands of templates, builders, and platforms to choose from.
But getting it noticed by your target audience is a completely different story.
I believe this is the most important thing you should take into consideration when choosing a website builder.
Well, what I love about Carrot is their integrated approach to real estate online marketing.
You will have not only a website but also all the features that make it conversion friendly. Their lead management system is quite advanced and has been designed based on real experiences.
You can set up an online marketing funnel on your own within a few minutes even if you don’t have advanced technical knowledge. You can drag and drop different elements such as lead forms, text widgets, lead buttons, etc. and get a landing page designed quickly. You can build a marketing funnel around that lead page for Facebook, Google Ads, or SEO.
A very few platforms provide this integrated approach. Even if they do, most provide generic digital marketing solutions, while Carrot has been designed specifically for capturing and nurturing real estate leads.
Built for SEO
Here at Realty Crux, SEO is our strong suit. We love optimizing real estate websites for search engines. For this reason, we will naturally be more inclined to give a positive review to a website builder which makes it easier for real estate professionals to get good rankings in Google search results.
While PPC advertising and other types of paid promotions will help you get leads right away, it has become extremely challenging to get a positive ROI due to the rising cost-per-click (CPC).
It takes a while to get leads with SEO, but if you manage to get it right, it can put lead generation on autopilot.
Carrot tracks the SEO ranking of your website and gives personalized recommendations to improve your content’s visibility in search engines.
Not only that, but the platform also proves ready-to-use blog posts with original content. Adding fresh content on a regular basis is extremely important.
Built on WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular platforms on the internet to build websites. Almost 25% of the websites use this open-source platform. It’s easy to get help whenever you need any technical assistance. There are plenty of free and premium tools and resources available online to help you add any functionality you want to scale your online presence.
Content marketing made easy
Creating content on a regular basis is one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks, but you still must do it because fresh content helps you rank higher in search engine results for your target keywords and makes it easier for your prospects to find you. You can repurpose the same content for different marketing channels such as your website’s blog section, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Carrot puts content marketing on autopilot to a great extent, saving you time and money. Carrot provides you pre-written blog posts at a regular interval. You can either publish these posts as-is or slightly edit them to make the content more unique.
Lead generation and management on autopilot
As a digital marketing professional, I know first-hand how painful and time-consuming it is to build a marketing funnel. Here are a few things you need to create for your funnel:
- Lead magnet: This can be an eBook or a collection of listings in your prospect’s target market. Writing an eBook is no easy feat. It will take you hours to do that. But Carrot provides you with pre-written guides on different topics related to real estate buying, selling, and investing.
- Landing page: The landing page is where your prospects will share with you their contact details in exchange for your lead magnet (downloadable guides). For this reason, your landing page should be effective and persuasive. It should be compelling enough. It’s extremely easy to build a landing page on Carrot. You can drag and drop different elements such as text boxes, images, CTA buttons, and headlines and sub-headlines and prepare a landing page within minutes. It means that you can easily customize different elements.
- Contact form: The leads will provide their contact details and other useful information on the landing to download or access the lead magnet. Your landing page will need to have a contact form for this. The biggest advantage of using Carrot is that you can create a multi-step contact form. On the landing page, you can have a contact form where the leads need to provide just their name and email address. They can then be led to an in-depth contact form where they are asked to fill out more information such as property details. This may help you to filter out motivated leads so that you can spend your energy and time on following up with them.
- Thank You page: This is where your leads will gain access to the lead magnet after filling out the contact form. Carrot provides customizable Thank You pages.
- Lead management tool: Capturing leads is only the first step towards building an effective sales funnel. You also need to nurture these leads with regular communication (calls, emails, and text messages). Carrot comes with a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) system. One of the best features is its ‘Text Messaging’ module. You can send out text messages automatically. You can also assign different statues to a lead. It makes sorting high-potential leads easy.
- Easy integration: Do you want to use a 3rd party CRM? You can easily integrate the Carrot platform with other popular CRMs such as Zoho, Zapier, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and Aweber.
Easy customization
Though Carrot provides plenty of pre-designed templates to choose from, you can easily customize a lot of elements such as theme color, icons, logo, buttons, images, layouts, hero banners, CTA buttons, social proof boxes, testimonials sections, and badges.
Free and premium training
Most real estate agents have little to no knowledge about digital marketing. Carrot experts hold webinars and training sessions on a regular basis to teach real estate investors and agents how to do SEO and market their services and properties through social media and other marketing channels. You will have access to training resources for free. These resources will otherwise cost thousands of dollars. Some premium courses are also available.
Prepare neighborhood or service-specific websites within minutes
If you already have a primary website for your company, you can use Carrot to build multiple smaller websites – specific to any neighborhood, city, or real estate-related service. For example, you can create two different websites – one for motivated sellers and another for cash buyers – which can work independently of your primary domain.
Excellent support
You can reach out to Carrot experts via live chat, email, or phone when you run into an issue that you can’t resolve on your own.
You can also go through the help section – full of written and video tutorials.
How is Carrot for Investors different from Carrot for real estate agents?
Carrot originally catered to real estate investors, but now both investors and agents can create websites with this platform.
In order to make Carrot suitable for real estate agents, the company has launched several features such as Carrot IDX (an additional amount of $50/month) is charged for the service) and premium website templates that specifically target property buyers and sellers.
While Carrot offers three pricing plans for investors (Core, Content Pro, and Advanced Marketer), it offers agents two pricing plans (Content Pro and Advanced Marketer).
Pricing for investor plans ranges from $69 to $199, while pricing for real estate agent plans ranges from $99 to $199.
Carrot also offers an investor/agent hybrid website in the Advanced Marketer plan.
A few considerations
- If you are planning to create more than one website, you should at least have a Content Pro plan.
- Phone support is available only for Advanced marketer plan subscribers.
- Tracking links that help you measure and track results for marketing campaigns are available only in Content Pro and Advanced Marketer plan.
- Core plan doesn’t offer VideoPost, CRM and Marketing Integrations, and group coaching calls.
- Content Library (where you get fresh content on a regular basis), premium designs, dedicated onboarding support, and one-on-one strategy reviews are available only in the Advanced Marketer plan.
Want technical assistance with your Carrot website?
While support is available via chat, email, and phone, we – here at RealtyCrux – can help you set up your website and customize it. We specialize in WordPress design and development (the platform used for building Carrot websites). Our real estate knowledge enables us to create high-converting websites for real estate agents and investors.
Get in touch with us to learn more!