Email marketing for real estate professionals includes the use of autoresponders, email newsletters and behaviorally triggered emails to build trust with prospects and stay in touch with past clients. Investing your time, energy and finances into real estate email marketing ideas will become a necessity for any agent or broker who wants to maintain their relationships and build their business.
As you delve into the best way to approach email marketing, you need the right platform to manage it. Unfortunately, your emails can get stuck in spam or junk folders if you don’t consistently provide value that compels your contacts to interact with your email content.
7 secrets to make your real estate email marketing a success
1- Send emails frequently
With normal emails, you usually write an individual email and send it to the recipient immediately. Real estate email marketing campaigns differ in that it is much more efficient and effective to plan emails in advance and establish consistency, but also to send emails in bulk quantities to save time.
For example, most successful real estate agents set up a “welcome sequence” that is sent automatically when new leads subscribe to their newsletter or opt-in for an incentive such as a free home appraisal or market report.
A welcome sequence can consist of any number of emails sent at regular intervals to build trust and introduce the new contact. It usually consists of sending more emails than usual over a short period of time, such as one email a day for four or five days. Having this automated sequence keeps you from having to scramble to reach new contacts at all hours of the day. In addition, welcome emails have an 86% open rate, which is four times more opens and 10 times more clicks than other emails.
Beyond the welcome email or sequence, you will need to determine the frequency of emails your audience prefers. Unlike social media, most of your contacts won’t want to receive a new email every day. In fact, studies show that those who send emails once a week receive the highest open and click-through rates.
To maintain consistency, plan an email strategy and schedule messages a few weeks in advance.
2- The call to action, a must-have element
Like all good real estate marketing ideas, your emails should end with a prominent call to action (CTA) that invites readers to take some kind of action. Even when the primary purpose of your email is not to make a sale, it’s an opportunity to engage with each of your contacts.
Your CTA can be an offer to schedule a phone call, a meeting, connect on LinkedIn or a simple question to answer. Whatever your CTA is, make sure it’s relevant to your email content and easy for your lead.
3- Make sure your emails are relevant
Reports about the real estate market can be very interesting and appealing to your potential clients who are considering buying or selling their home. However, those same people are likely to delete the same email after they have closed on their new forever home. One of the most important elements of a successful email marketing strategy is personalizing your emails for each type of reader you have, which is called segmentation.
By segmenting your email list, you designate which contacts will receive different types of email campaigns. This allows you to continually create emails that are relevant to each person on your contact list, including potential buyers, potential sellers, previous buyer customers, previous sellers and new owners.
In addition, you should use several types of email campaigns to generate real estate leads and nurture existing clientele. The six main types of real estate email marketing campaigns are:
- Drip campaigns– Drip campaigns are automated email sequences that are typically triggered by a user’s behavior, such as visiting your website, searching your listings, or clicking on a link in a blog post. This is the most common type of campaign because it can be deployed over a long period of time.
- Targeted Campaigns: Targeted email campaigns are very specific to a subset of your leads. This helps you send extremely relevant and personalized campaigns that maximize conversions. Send targeted campaigns to leads segmented by location, interest or even lead generation source. Because the customer who wants to buy a penthouse is not the same as the one who wants to invest in a hotel.
- Cold campaigns: Unlike the other types of campaigns, cold emails are sent to people who have not voluntarily joined your email list and have not even heard of your company before. This includes sending introductory emails to prospective customers of new buyers or other potential customers. Be sure to read spam laws before sending cold emails to avoid thousands in financial penalties.
- Follow-up campaigns for events and open houses: After hosting an open house or real estate event, take the opportunity to further connect with each attendee by sending a follow-up email. You can easily automate these emails, but be sure to write them carefully so that recipients feel remembered.
- Referral or testimonial solicitation campaigns: Your past clients are the most likely sources of referrals and repeat business, so don’t forget to keep in touch. Keep communicating with them via email and ask them for a testimonial or new referrals.
- Birthday and Anniversary Email Campaigns: Be sure to add each client’s real estate birthdays and anniversaries to your real estate customer relationship manager (CRM) and/or email management platform. Create an event campaign to automatically send an email to each potential client on their birthday and wish them a great day. This can help them feel remembered and build the relationship.
4- Create informative and educational content of interest
You’ll find that open rates and interaction will be higher when you focus on your leads’ needs and interests rather than your own. This means implementing different types of content at different times. For example, providing valuable information to your email list shows them your expertise and can help them learn more about buying and selling real estate.
To help educate your prospects, you could send:
- Infographics
- Market data
- Links to interesting news articles about the local market
- Home improvement tips
- Information on recent sales
- New listings
- Open house invitations
- Mortgage news and tips
An easy way to educate your audience without sending a lengthy report is to create an infographic that highlights current market data or location advantages. Even if you’re not graphically inclined, design platforms like Canva offer infographic templates that make it easy to introduce information.
Keep in mind that regular newsletters about interest rates and average price per square foot statistics will get boring very quickly. Liven up your newsletter with fun local events, funny real estate memes or reviews of new local restaurants. While you must maintain professionalism, using humor can be a powerful way to create genuine connections, find common interests and differentiate yourself from the competition.
5- Include testimonials from other customers
Since the main goal of email marketing is to build your business, it’s important to include testimonials from past customers in your emails from time to time.
88% of consumers trust online testimonials as much as recommendations from friends and family, so seeing the positive things others have to say about you can be the difference between converting a potential customer or losing one.
Do this from time to time but not too often. People want to know that your company is trustworthy but not get emails every other day about how great your business is and how happy your customers are with you.
6- Help, don’t sell
There is no quicker way to end up in someone’s spam folder than to constantly push for a sale. No one likes to be seen as nothing more than a number. While your emails should include invitations to open houses, as well as your listings, they should not be the main focus of your email strategy. Keep the focus of your emails on educating, entertaining and connecting, and your promotional emails will naturally be more successful.
7- Combine email marketing with other communication channels
While real estate email marketing can produce powerful results, it’s never ideal to put all your eggs in one basket. Instead, leveraging email marketing in conjunction with other marketing channels will broaden your reach and impact. Luckily, email is relatively easy to use in conjunction with other marketing channels, such as:
- SMS marketing– SMS marketing is an incredibly effective method of getting your name and message in front of your contacts’ eyes. However, only a small number of characters can be sent via text, making it a natural complement to email marketing.
- Social media: Like email, social media requires consistency for best results. A solid social media real estate marketing strategy can provide plenty of content that can be easily repurposed in your weekly email.
- Content marketing: One of the best ways to build your email list is by publishing engaging content on your website. From there, you can offer something enticing to potential leads in exchange for their email address, such as a home valuation, real estate meeting or market report.
Things you should not do with your Real Estate Agency email marketing
1- Spamming
Email marketing is an extremely effective marketing channel for thousands of real estate agents and brokers, and it’s relatively simple to get started. However, there are some mistakes that can prevent you from getting the best results:
Buying mailing lists or sending commercial emails to people who are not on your list can result in very high financial penalties because of the data protection laws that exist. The best practice is to send emails only to people who have voluntarily decided to subscribe to your list.
2- Send the same email to all your contacts
As powerful as email marketing can be, you must also remember that your contacts probably receive 10 or more commercial emails every day. If you send blanket emails that don’t provide any value to your recipients, they will quickly end up in the trash can.
To easily organize and segment contacts and create personalized campaigns, you need an email marketing platform with more features than those included in a personal email account.
Email marketing service providers allow you to easily personalize your content and track the results of each email. They also include filters for your contact lists, so you can separate buyers from sellers from investors, etc., to make sure your content reaches the intended audience.
3- Send emails irregularly
When you receive a new email subscriber, you should be prepared to send an email immediately. Even if you wait a few hours to send an email, your new lead may not recognize your name or may have already contacted your competition. Likewise, sending sporadic and irregular emails will not be enough to make your contacts remember you. For email marketing to be effective, contact needs to be consistent and effective.
Even monthly or bi-weekly newsletters should not be written just before they are sent, but should be planned in advance. By having a detailed plan, you will be able to map out a long-term strategy and produce higher quality email content.
4- Ignore your email statistics
Writing and sending emails to your audience is only half the job: you also need to pay attention to analytics to further improve and personalize your strategy. At the very least, track the open and click-through rates of your emails, and take note of email content that performs particularly well or poorly.
Knowing what works and what doesn’t will help you create higher quality, more interesting content for your audience and know what they like and don’t like. This will increase open rates and interaction.
