How to Invest in Email Marketing as a Real Estate Agent?

Do you know 87% of real estate agents leave the industry within five years because they didn’t earn enough?

An appalling statistics, right?

Real estate is a competitive field. You have to be on top of your game at all times to stick through the challenges. Fortunately, with real estate marketing, you have a tool to stay on top of the mind of your target audience.

If you consistently market yourself via real estate email marketing, you can grow your network and establish loyal relationships with your target audience.

Curious to learn how? Keep reading this guide to learn how you can leverage email campaigns in your favor –

Here’s How to Set Up Your Real Estate Email Marketing

1. Start With Capturing Leads

The first step to kickstart your real estate marketing is to capture your audience’s email information. There are two ways to go about it – the classic, traditional one or the new-age, digital one.

The traditional way is to go old-fashioned and approach people at your next open house, networking event, or another social get-together. Ask them for their email addresses and be clear about how you’re gonna use them for marketing purposes. Another alternative is to use an iPad app to add people directly to your real estate email list.

If you want to go the digital way, reach out to people by using targeted paid ads (on Google or social media). Invest in the right SEO with relevant keywords and targeting methods. Once they click on the ad CTA, it will direct them to a landing page with a sign-up form. Get people to provide their contact information, including email addresses. Place the signup form smartly on your website at various spots, from the footer to the blog sidebar or appearing as a pop-up. Also, be vocal about what subscribers can expect from your real estate marketing emails. Explain how it will benefit them.

2. Brand Yourself

Gone are the days when you used marketing just for sales. Today, marketing is vital for relationship building. So don’t focus your email marketing on just sales. Not at least in the beginning.

You see, nobody gels best with a salesy email. If you want your subscribers to trust you, build credibility first. If you’re worried about how the answer is hidden in the branding.

Here’s what you should do –

• Start with a welcome email. Introduce yourself while stating your level of expertise, trustworthiness, experience, and professionalism. Remember, you shouldn’t boast. Talk about your USPs and add a CTA at the end. Again, CTA shouldn’t focus on sales but on the warm-up. A few examples are – check out our website or start to explore.
• Now, it’s time to break the ice, where entertaining emails can come in handy. These emails should show your brand’s human side, and talk about stuff like –
• Local charities you participate in
• Events happening in town
• Updates on interest rates on the market
• Shops and restaurants around town
• Holiday greetings
• Home improvement tips
• Mortgage news

3. Personalize! Personalize! Personalize!

Personalization is the secret key to marketing today. It’s no different for emails as well.

You see, no two buyers are the same. They have different intentions, motivations, interests, and pain points. If you wish to attract different kinds of buyers (from your target groups), you need to address each of them.

So find what your email newsletter subscribers are interested in so you can personalize your messaging and deliver value. While your emails should be targeted, your landing pages should be personalized too.

Let’s understand this better through an example. Your target audience broadly has buyers and sellers. You can promote the same property listings in emails to both groups.

4. Focus on Email Open Rates

No matter how good your email content is, if people don’t open it, it’s of no use. So work on the aspects that impact your email open rates directly – the subject line and preheader text.

Here are some tips –

• Keep your subject line direct. While using clever subject lines is a good idea, nothing’s worse than being vague.
• Don’t make your subject line longer than 41 characters. They are optimal for mobile devices too.
• If you have a lot to say in the subject line, use the preview text.
• You can use emojis, punctuation marks, and time-sensitive words in the subject line to stand out.

5. Targeted Emails for the Win

Now to chalk out an email marketing strategy, use a good mix of regular email marketing campaigns and automated workflows. For regular campaigns, information like recently sold properties, new or expired listings, events in town, and other updates is recommended.

You can include the following for automated workflows –

• Incentive email (e.g. when a subscriber signs up to receive a freebie)
• Relationship-building emails (a series of emails to introduce yourself, your service, and what you can offer the subscriber)
• Weekly/monthly round-up of what’s new on the market
• Follow-up email after a meeting, viewing, or sale
• Referral or testimonial email for happy buyers
• Drip campaigns (a series of emails to nurture customers, e.g. to get them from explorative to ready to buy)
• Win-back campaigns for readers that haven’t shown any engagement with your emails lately

Remember, automated all the email campaigns for boosting workflow and efficiency.

Email marketing can help you attain your yearly goals if you play your cards right. If you use the right email marketing software, plan strategically, and implement the techniques, you’ll have a head start on your competition.

If you are looking, ZipperAgent can help you with automating email marketing. Give us a call at 1-800-350-3695 to discuss your email campaign needs with our experts.