Email marketing is not a new tool to real estate agencies and developers. Email has been used for years to follow up on leads from buyers and sellers, and it’s been honed into a lead-generating machine by those who know how to do it well. It has continued to be a staple of digital marketing efforts for the real estate industry. Benchmark Email reports that 67% of real estate agents send marketing emails to their clients at least once a month, and 63% of real estate email marketing campaigns receive positive engagement.
The most successful email marketing approaches go beyond sending out regular lists of available properties. They provide real value and build trust with a buyer or seller. In this blog, we’ll explore why email marketing can be so successful in real estate and how you can craft your own strategy that will start generating meaningful leads.
Why Email Marketing Works
In general, email tends to bring the largest return on investment of all digital marketing efforts, generating $38 for every dollar spent. When it comes to the real estate industry, consistent marketing emails help keep your services and properties top-of-mind; they provide valuable advice to buyers and sellers; and they build excitement around a new investment, a new home, or a profitable sale.
It Offers Added Value to Potential Clients
Competition for clients is high in this industry, so when you go above and beyond to provide valuable tips and information to potential clients, you put yourself one step above the rest.
It’s Personalized
Unlike social media advertising, for example, you’re able to reach prospective customers directly, in their own inbox. It’s more personalized than a Facebook ad that addresses anyone and everyone who might scroll past it. You also have more control over the content you include, how you display it, and when you initiate contact.
It Nurtures Leads
In real estate marketing, the process of nurturing a lead is a relatively long one because it results in a large transaction – maybe the largest of a lifetime for many. Email marketing is ideal for nurturing these leads – those who might be interested in working with you or checking out a property but aren’t quite ready to commit yet. By communicating directly with your target audiences and sharing valuable content with them, potential customers will begin to recognize you, appreciate you, and even trust you, moving them closer to connecting with you.
Tips for Your Real Estate Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing is a great tool to have, but having a strategy and execution plan is key to making it work. Here are some tips for your email marketing strategy based on our experience doing it for real estate clients.
First, Generate Your List
To start email marketing, you need emails! Start with what you have, but ultimately you’ll want to build your list using some sort of information capture on your website. This way, you’ll have a list of contacts who have already shown interest in your company that you can nurture into a more qualified lead. Content offers like a “Guide to Selling for Top Dollar” or a guide to neighborhoods in your market make great ways to capture contact email addresses. You can build out landing pages on your website with forms where the visitor can input their contact info. Once they submit the form, they navigate to a page where this downloadable content offer lives and they can easily click a button to download. You are providing a fair value in exchange for their contact information.
Segment Your List
On your list, you’ll likely have potential buyers and sellers, and within that, people at varying stages of the decision-making process. By segmenting your list into smaller groups, you can tailor your message to meet potential clients where they’re at. For example, an email to brand new buyer contact might include information about the housing market in your area or what each neighborhood is like. An email to a seller, on the other hand, might offer a list of benefits to selling through a real estate agent. With segmentation, you can make sure your message is relevant to the audience receiving it.
Be Consistent
Successful email marketing requires consistency. Build a schedule so that you’re reaching out to your contacts on a regular basis and at opportune moments, like when they’ve interacted with specific content in your email or on your website. Consistent emails keep the lines of communication open, and help your brand to stay top-of-mind. This way, when they’re ready to make the next move, they’ll think of you.
Switch Up Your Email Content
Not every email should be a list of available properties. Sure, that’s valuable, but anyone can do it (and everyone does do it). What other kinds of valuable content can you offer? What insights do you have that potential clients can benefit from? Different types of content might include blogs, videos, quizzes or checklists. Everyone responds to different types of content differently, so switching it up can be helpful.
Use Automation
As you start seeing the benefits of email marketing and your strategy becomes more complex, automation becomes more important for efficiency. At PRIME, we use HubSpot for many of our clients. It’s a tool that allows us to automate the sending of emails when certain actions are taken. For example, if a person reaches out through a contact form on your website, they can automatically be sent a follow-up email so that no one on your team has to send it manually. With Hubspot, you can have a variety of different pre-created emails that can be triggered to send when a designated action is taken. Automation makes executing a complete strategy much more efficient and reduces the time and staff it would normally require.
Partner With a Real Estate Marketing Expert
At PRIME, we’ve been partnering with real estate agencies, builders and developers for more than 10 years to help them reach their sales goals. Email marketing is just one tool in our toolbox, and we’ve used it many times to successfully generate leads for our clients. If you’re looking for a partner to help you elevate your email marketing, reach out to us and start a conversation.
If you enjoyed this edition of PRIME Pulse, take a look at some of our other related articles:
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- The How-To on Facebook Marketing Campaigns