You’ve heard it time and time again; if you want to be successful as a real estate agent, you need to consistently stay top of mind with your sphere of influence and always be looking for ways to generate new leads. That’s why you need to understand the importance of email marketing for real estate agents.
While social media can play a key part in helping you get your name out there, it doesn’t always help you fill your pipeline. A high follower count and engagement rate are great, but if those followers aren’t converting to leads and reaching out to you to represent them, it’s not helping you grow your business.
Your number goal when it comes to social media should be adding names to your email list. If you’re not actively trying to move your followers from your social profiles to your email list, you’re missing out on the opportunity to learn where they are in the real estate journey and what their timeline is for buying and/or selling.
Growing an engaged database should be a key strategy in your real estate marketing plan, but developing an email list doesn’t do any good if you’re not prepared to nurture them long-term.
In this blog post, we’re going to discuss how to get started with email marketing for real estate, how to create a strategy to grow your list, and the campaigns you need to help you get started.
Organizing Your Contacts
The first step in successfully using email marketing in real estate is to ensure you have an organized database. Take a look at your CRM. Does it allow you to group or segment your contacts? If not, you’ll want to find a system that does.
Grouping or segmenting your contacts allows you to send the right type of email to your contacts based on their needs and where they are in their real estate journey.
When you don’t segment your contacts, you run the risk of lower open rates and higher unsubscribe rates because no one wants to receive emails that don’t pertain to them.
A few key groups you’ll want to have set up include:
- New Leads
- Hot Leads – Buyers
- Hot Leads – Sellers
- Buyers – 12 Months or less Out
- Sellers – 12 Months or less out
- Past Clients
You can also create groups based on the areas that you service and vendors you work with.
How to Grow Email List
Finding ways to prospect and generate leads is a task that all agents should be doing on a daily basis. To be successful in email marketing, as a real estate agent, you need to have a strategy that helps you grow your database, drive up engagement, and understand how to make adjustments based on what your readers enjoy. Before you start spending too much time on the content that you’re going to share, have a plan in place to grow your subscriber list.
Real Estate Opt-Ins
The best way to grow your email list is through an opt-in, also known as a lead magnet. When deciding on which type of real estate lead magnet you should use, think about who you are trying to target. To be successful with email marketing, you need to grow your subscriber list with the type of people you enjoy working with, and lead magnets allow you to do that.
Promoting Your Opt-In
Once you know who you want to target, it’s time to promote your opt-in and start generating real estate leads and email subscribers.
There are a number of ways to promote your opt-in, including optimizing your social profiles, running paid ads, optimizing your real estate website, or creating social posts promoting the opt-in. You could also use your opt-in as a way to get people to sign-up for your list at an open house.
3 Types of Email Real Estate Agents Need
As you work to grow your database, you need to have campaigns to nurture the leads you’re generating. The right campaigns will help you convert more leads because you’ll know where your leads are in their home buying or selling journey. Often, when it comes to email marketing for real estate, much of the focus is on sharing listings, promoting open houses, and creating drip campaigns around buyers and sellers.
And while email marketing for buyers and sellers is important, let’s talk about the types of emails often overlooked.
Welcome Email Campaign for Real Estate Agents
The first email campaign any new subscriber receives should be a welcome series. When a new person signs up to your email list, they are letting you know that they want to hear from you, they’re interested in working with you – that’s a big deal.
The job of an email welcome series is to hook the reader by sharing with them who you are, how you can help them, what they can expect as a subscriber, how you’re different from other real estate agents, and to segment your readers into the right group.
Re-Engaging Your Database
The next type of email series you’re probably missing from your strategy is a re-engagement series. A re-engagement series tells you who you need to remove from your email list.
Yes, on occasion, you need to remove subscribers from your email list, and here’s why.
If you’re looking at your analytics and open rates and engagements are down, you may think that your efforts are going to waste, but it could be because you have a lot of people on your list that aren’t your ideal client.
One to two times per year, take a look at who hasn’t opened an email from you in the last 3-6 months and send them a series of emails to learn if they’re still interested in hearing from you. It’s recommended to send around three emails before removing someone from your list.
By actively keeping your database cleaned up, you’ll better understand what content is working for you and adjust your strategy based on who’s actually reading your emails.
Weekly Newsletter
To find success in email marketing for real estate, the key is to be consistent, and the once per month newsletter isn’t enough.
When it comes to building relationships online, you need to be starting conversations with your leads regularly, and what better way to do that than by starting a weekly newsletter.
Your weekly newsletter doesn’t have to be long; in fact, sometimes the shorter ones do better.
When we include email marketing for real estate agents that we service, the emails are typically around 5-10 sentences and focus on pushing the subscriber to a longer piece of content, such as a real estate blog.
By pushing your subscribers back to your website regularly, they will get used to going there for information – not just to look at houses, and you create a situation where they can share the content you’re promoting with their own followers.
The second reason the once-a-month newsletter doesn’t work is that it’s including too much content in one email. The first rule of email marketing for real estate is one email, one job. By including numerous links and multiple calls to action, your subscriber doesn’t know which piece of content is the most important. It’s your job to tell what action you want them to take.
Getting Started with Email Marketing for Real Estate
Email marketing is a tactic that many real estate agents are already using to generate more leads and close more deals. By having the right strategy in place and implementing the tips provided, you’ll be ahead of your competition. If you’re ready to start growing your email list and generating more leads, become a member of the Grow. Nurture. Sell. platform where you’ll get access to opt-ins to grow your list, a welcome series to jump-start engagement, and weekly emails to send your readers back to your website every week.