Real Estate Email Marketing Guide for 2022
Real estate is an intensely competitive field. Standing out from the crowd and successfully maintaining and growing your client base is a task that just about any real estate agent will find difficult.
Meeting new leads at a social event like an open house or a dinner party is one thing — making a good impression is a straightforward enough objective. However, you can’t just expect to close deals from a single introduction.
The true hallmark of a successful real estate marketing plan is the ability to nurture relationships with leads and guide them along their customer journey. While you can’t exactly meet with every one of your leads for a weekly chat over coffee, you do have access to an incredibly powerful marketing tool to help you expand your network and remain top-of-mind for all your leads — email marketing.
In this blog post, we’re breaking down the top real estate email marketing tips for 2022. We’ll show you how to use email to stay in touch with your network, cultivate relationships, and close more deals.
Read through every part carefully or make a beeline for the topics that pique your interest — whichever strategy helps you make the most of this article.
When you master the art of email marketing for real estate, you’ll be able to reach more people, grow your network, establish long-lasting relationships, close more deals, and even keep in contact with your satisfied clients. It may just be your most profitable year yet.
Why Real Estate Email Marketing is an Important Tool
Email marketing for real estate professionals involves consistently marketing yourself and cultivating both awareness and trust in those you connect with. With how stiff your competition is, it’s not enough to simply be visible — you need to actively engage with your audience.
Email is the perfect marketing tool for ensuring that your clients see the content you created for them. When you use it effectively, you guarantee that they will keep you in mind when they’re finally ready to commit to either buying or selling their next home. It can take months or even years before they finally reach that point, so you want to be sure that you nurture your relationship and establish yourself as a trusted expert in the meantime.
When you successfully nurture a relationship with your audience, not only will you be the first agent they reach out to when they’re ready to enter the market again, but you’ll be opening yourself up to more real estate business opportunities by generating referrals.
Here are five main reasons why having a real estate email strategy is such an important component to reaching your potential customers.
You have direct control over your audience. — Unlike other forms of digital marketing, such as social media, email marketing allows you to target a highly specific audience and increase the chances of them seeing your content.
What many real estate agents don’t understand, is when it comes to social media marketing, on average only 1-2 percent of your followers will see your marketing campaign, but with email, you’re more likely to get in front of 20-25 percent of your audience. While you still can’t guarantee they’ll open the email, at the very least you guarantee that your message reached their inbox safely without having to appease any search algorithms.
Emails feel more personal. — Even if you have an automation tool set up, using real estate emails as part of your content marketing plan, you’re giving the impression of a one-on-one connection. People respond favorably to feeling like the information you’re sharing was created just for them. This is why email marketing tools that allow you to easily personalize your email are essential for all real estate agents.
You want to nurture your cold leads into warm leads and your warm leads into hot leads, and creating closeness with by sending out a consistent real estate email is a good strategy to achieve just that.
Everyone uses email. — While social media is climbing steadily higher in terms of how many billions of people use it, every demographic has its preferred platform. Each of those platforms in turn has its own “best practices” on how to reach your ideal audience. It can get a bit labor-intensive.
With email, you can count on all kinds of demographics to use it similarly. Whether you’re focusing on a certain area or a certain type of home buyer or seller, you can reach them by email.
You have options for segmenting your audience. — When you make a post on social media, everyone who views it will get the same content. Email marketing, on the other hand, allows you to segment your audience and send personalized content to each segment.
If your mailing list has subscribers that signed up because they’re interested in working with you in the future, subscribers that are actively looking to sell their home, and subscribers that already bought a new home, they won’t benefit from the same types of content.
Email segmentation allows you to target all your subscribers with relevant and useful content depending on where they are in the real estate market.
You can establish yourself as a trustworthy expert. — Most home buyers or sellers will try to do their research before hiring a real estate agent. When it comes to email marketing for real estate, you have a chance to educate your audience and position yourself as a reliable source.
Unsure buyers or sellers that sign up for your mailing list are a great opportunity. By constantly supplying them with helpful information, you’re increasing the chances of them choosing you as an agent.
The beauty of modern-day real estate email marketing is that you don’t even have to spend hours personally writing out emails to reap the benefits. All you need is a solid real estate email marketing strategy and an email marketing automation tool that suits your needs.
Creating a Real Estate Email Marketing Strategy
According to a survey by The Close, 68% of real estate agents plan to use real estate email marketing as a way to grow their business in 2022. However, only 53% felt confident in their marketing skills. It’s understandable — everyone marches to the beat of their own drum and making genuine interpersonal connections is a delicate balancing act. That’s why planning out your marketing strategies before you take action is supremely important.
When you act without a plan, you might still be able to achieve your goals, but you’ll waste a significant amount of time, effort, and resources getting there.
Here are a few steps you need to take to develop a real estate email marketing strategy that will give you the structure and efficiency to succeed in your best real estate marketing efforts.
Identify Your Area of Expertise and Your Target Audience
Within the United States alone, there are over 3 million active real estate licensees, as estimated by the Association of Real Estate License Law Officials (ARELLO). That’s a lot of people to be competing against in the real estate industry. In this vast market, identifying your area of expertise and your ideal client is crucial.
Like with all your marketing strategies, knowing who you’re marketing to is crucial for your email campaigns. By keeping your audience in mind, you’ll be able to better develop an approach that aligns with their needs and preferences.
Carving out your niche also increases your chances of building a dedicated client base — if your target audience is “anyone that needs a real estate agent,” you’re competing against all the other agents in your area. When you narrow your focus as much as possible, you’ll only face competition from those in the same specialization. That’s a much more manageable hurdle.
Utilize your personal experiences and insight as much as possible. You need to figure out your unique selling points and area of expertise to effectively market to your audience.
Consider the following:
● Do you want to focus on residential or commercial property?
● What type of residential property? Single-family homes, condos, and duplexes, mobile homes and parks, vacation homes, waterfront property, smart homes — it’s a long list.
● What type of commercial property? It’s a similarly long list, including industrial property and office buildings, shopping centers and retail space, apartment buildings and complexes, hotels, medical complexes, business brokerage, and more.
● Do you want to handle property management?
● Do you want to focus on a client-based specialty instead? Examples include being a seller representative, buyer representative, investor representative, or focusing on certain demographics (e.g. baby boomers, millennials).
Create a Customer Journey Map
Now that you’ve defined who you’ll be targeting with your email campaigns, you should be able to look at your marketing efforts from your audience’s point of view. When you look at your strategies from their perspective, when it’s time to create your email campaign, deciding on the content they’ll most appreciate receiving is be a breeze.
To answer that question, you’ll have to pinpoint the stage of the customer journey they’re on. You can accomplish this by using analytic tools to monitor their behavior on your site (e.g. what link did they click to sign up), or by asking them in your welcome email campaign.
Remember, you have a direct line to potential and past clients. To make the most of it, try using short surveys or feedback forms that ask about the content that led them to your site, the content they want to see more of, their current needs, etc.
Depending on what stage they’re on in their customer journey, they’ll find different types of content useful. The main stages are:
- Awareness stage — When they first discover you, your company, your new listings, or service
- Consideration stage — When they take an interest in your services as potential clients
- Decision stage — When they decide to hire you to represent them as a buyer or seller.
Creating a customer journey map will help you plan out your customer’s experience from the beginning to the end of all three stages. From initial contact to building a relationship, to closing the deal — a customer journey map is akin to a flowchart that allows you to see how customers will progress through the journey. This will help you pinpoint opportunities for improving their experience.
For example, a first-time home buyer in the consideration stage will likely be looking for information on mortgages. You can take note of this in your customer journey map and ensure that you create an email campaign about different types of mortgages available (e.g. fixed-rate, adjustable-rate, FHA loans), current mortgage rates, and first-time buyer assistance programs whenever your customers reach that stage of the journey.
Knowing When To Send Emails
Knowing what content you need to send at a specific point in the customer journey is one thing, but you also need to be aware of the best time of the day to send emails.
According to a study by GetResponse, the best time to send an email is on Monday or Tuesday. These two days had the highest click-through rate, while Sunday had the lowest. Click-through rates are highest at 6 am and 3 am. The peak click-through rate range is between 7 am and 11 am.
In addition, you should ensure that you don’t want to send emails too often — if it starts feeling like spam, people will unsubscribe. At any rate, consistently providing valuable, high-quality content is going to be nigh impossible if you’re sending daily emails anyway. To get the highest average click-through rate, you should aim to create and send one email per week.
Get Creative With Your Real Estate Emails
Don’t restrict yourself to plain text emails — branding is crucial when you want to stay top-of-mind. Every email is a chance to show off your personality and convince your subscribers that you’re their best choice for a real estate agent.
Develop a header, footer, and a memorable color palette to ensure consistency across your emails. Include high-quality images that will catch readers’ attention.
Finally, don’t forget about your email signature. This is an important part of your branding and it should include links to your website and social media pages, as well as your contact information.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can even insert add videos to diversify your content. Video has quickly become the top format for digital marketing in 2022, so why not include video tours of homes or how-to guides for easy home improvements that sellers can carry out themselves.
Videos are engaging and easy to understand, so try using them as part of your marketing tools when it comes to creating your real estate email marketing campaigns.
Lastly, don’t forget to optimize your emails for mobile devices. Nowadays, around half of all emails are first opened on a mobile device. You want to ensure that anyone who opens your email has an excellent viewing experience, regardless of the device they’re using.
Types of Real Estate Email Marketing Campaigns
After you’ve determined what approach you’ll be taking for your real estate marketing, it’s time to tackle the question of “What kind of emails should I be sending?” Here are five must-have real estate email marketing campaigns.
Welcome Campaign
This is the most straightforward type of campaign. However, it’s overlooked by as many as 41% of businesses, as reported by Ciceron. Before you jump into promoting your services, you need to break the ice with an introduction.
To achieve the best results, use an automation tool to send an email immediately after someone signs up for your email list. If you don’t want to send it immediately, aim to send it within the first 48 hours at least, but the sooner the better.
Your welcome email is your first chance to introduce yourself, and it typically includes whatever you’re giving away on your landing page. The way you handle a welcome campaign will set customers’ expectations for your expertise and professionalism — you want them to feel good about their decision to sign up.
Ideally, you should include a short introduction, an explanation of how frequently they can expect to receive your emails, a preview of the quality content they’ll be receiving (e.g. share some of your insights into the real estate world and how it will benefit them), and a clear call-to-action (CTA).
This CTA can be anything from setting up a phone call, replying to the email, or checking out/downloading additional resources — anything that encourages them to interact with you.
Weekly Touches/Newsletters
Newsletters are rather simple to put together, but they’re an essential part of building rapport over time. Email newsletters are sent at a predetermined frequency, typically weekly. Some choose to send them monthly.
A newsletter provides high-quality content and expert insights that your subscribers can depend on. This helps you establish your trustworthiness and keeps you top-of-mind. The content you can include in a newsletter includes your latest listings, notable real estate trends in your area of specialization, upcoming local events (e.g. an open house or community event), or highlights and summaries of your recent real estate blog posts.
Follow Up Emails
Everyone wants to feel like others are paying attention to them. By sending follow-up emails, you demonstrate that you’re keeping your clients’ needs in mind. It makes them feel like you genuinely care. Some examples of good opportunities to send follow-up emails to a home buyer are:
- After a viewing — You can ask them about their thoughts on the property, any extra questions they want to ask, or additional details they want to know about.
- After they close on a house — A week after they move in, you can check in with them and ask how the move went and if they need any help with the transition.
- After a home they were interested in is sold to a different buyer — You can tactfully inform them that they missed their chance and offer up similar properties.
Referral Requests
According to a survey by The Close, referrals were the main way that real estate agents got new clients in 2021. 83% reported that they gained new clients through referrals. Emails are a great tool for keeping in touch with past clients and asking for referrals.
A few months after a successful deal, you can check up on how their experience with the sale has been thus far (e.g. if they’re enjoying the new home) and ask if they know anyone who is thinking about buying or selling. Most would be happy to oblige. If you need additional incentives, you can always offer small rewards, such as a gift card to a local restaurant or boutique.
New Listing Announcement
New listings are exciting news for prospective buyers and excellent content to include in your real estate email marketing campaigns. When you send out announcements, do your best to incite excitement — use a combination of vivid descriptions, high-quality photos, and engaging videos that highlight the best features of the properties on the list.
To further streamline the process, you can set up an automated trigger that sends out a viewing invitation whenever someone clicks on a specific house on the list.
Things To Keep In Mind for Successful Real Estate Email Marketing
You’re now equipped with the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of email marketing for real estate — all that’s left for you to learn is how to grow your email marketing list and keep it organized.
Use Landing Pages to Grow your List
You want to encourage visitors to your website and social profiles to give you their contact details, and using landing pages that have opt-in signup forms makes it easy for them to do so. On your website, you can add an opt-in form as a pop-up or give it space in the header, footer, or sidebar. On your social media profiles, you can add links to landing pages that include the sign-up form.
Aside from making it easy for people to sign up, your landing page should also give them an incentive to join your list. In exchange for their contact information, you can offer specialized reports, checklists, guides, and the like.
Even if you’re struggling with getting sign-ups, do not buy email lists. Not only are these typically low-quality leads that aren’t interested in what you have to say, the lists usually include outdated, incorrect, or non-existent email addresses, and you may lose access to your email marketing tool if you personally have not received permission to email those individuals.
Keep an Updated List
Your email list is the one marketing tool that is the lifeblood of your real estate business. Without a list, you have no one to market to. As mentioned, different segments of your audience will want to see different kinds of content.
Customers in different stages of their customer journey will also want to see different kinds of content. Your primary goal is to deliver content suited to your audience’s needs, so, you need to keep your list updated at all times.
What if an individual first subscribed to your emails months ago when they were an unsure buyer, but they’ve successfully bought a home with your help? The content you used to send them will no longer be relevant.
Using CRMs and other automation tools will help you keep track of all your customers and ensure that you’re always on top of your marketing game.
In addition to moving your contacts to the right marketing campaigns, you’ll want to remove cold real estate leads that aren’t engaging with your content.
When you have too many contacts on your list that aren’t opening your emails, your analytics won’t provide you with accurate data. In order to keep your email list healthy, use an engagement scoring system to rate leads on a scale of 1-10 according to how often they open or click through your emails. Remove anyone who has a score below 7 and continue sending content to those with a score above 7. Many email tools also allow you to run reports to learn who hasn’t engaged with your content in a particular timeframe.
Whichever works best for you, once a quarter reach out to those who aren’t engaged with your email campaigns and learn if they want to stay on your list. If they don’t simply delete them.
Run A/B Test for Subject Lines
A/B tests involve using two or more variations of a certain variable to test the audience’s response. For email marketing, one area you can run A/B tests is subject lines.
Using the same email body, send out several variations with different subject lines to figure out which one got the most click-throughs. This will help you understand your customers’ preferences and guide the direction of future email campaigns.
Don’t Forget Your Call to Action
With every email you send, don’t forget to include a call to action (CTA) in line with what you want that email to achieve. CTAs help your readers understand the course of action they should take. For example, if you’re advertising an open house, add a CTA for guests to RSVP. If you simply want to get to know your subscribers better, add a CTA for arranging a call.
Make sure the CTA is highly visible by using a large button and a color that stands out from the rest of the email.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one of the best tools you have at your disposal for collecting more real estate leads, building stronger relationships, and eventually closing more deals.
Always remember that the main goal of real estate email marketing isn’t to promote sales outright — it’s to provide educational real estate content for your subscribers while showcasing your unique personality and voice.
When your customers feel like you’re connecting with them, they’ll be much more open to doing business with you.