A real estate newsletter is an electronic or printed piece of mail that includes interesting content — such as self-generated or curated videos, blogs, and real estate news — to help agents stay engaged with potential buyers. Agents typically use real estate newsletter templates with editable designs to help organize their content.
If you’re looking for a well-designed real estate newsletter template, check out ProspectPlus! They offer 12 real estate-specific newsletter designs as well as 19 general newsletter designs. What’s more, you can even upload elements of your own design to their website for customization. Check them out today for more information.
Here are the 10 steps needed to create a real estate newsletter:
1. Define Your Newsletter Goal and Pick Your Platform
Real estate newsletter goals typically surround engaging prospects throughout the sales funnel. However, defining your goal is also the act of determining what type of content, real estate newsletter templates, and real estate newsletter service will best resonate with your target market and generate sales. Setting a goal early will also help determine your success metrics, allowing you to measure what works and tweak what isn’t working in your real estate newsletter.
Think About the Desired Outcome of Your Newsletter
Your real estate newsletter should have content that is aimed at buyers at all stages in the sales cycle. Of course, you want to immediately meet the needs of those in your real estate marketing funnel who are ready to buy, but your real estate newsletter is probably going to people who are also in the consideration and awareness phases of the funnel. Your content should address the needs in these stages as well.
For example, someone who is ready to buy might be interested in tips on how to prepare for a move in, mover contact information, or information on nearby restaurants they can visit before their kitchen is ready. Someone in the awareness phase, however, needs to know more basic information about the house and neighborhood — average home prices, local culture/events, school ratings, and proximity of grocery stores, for example.
Consider Your Audience
Take a good look at your audience and think about the content that matters to them. The more precise your content is in addressing the concerns and issues of your audience, the more successful your real estate newsletter will be in providing sales opportunities.
Your real estate newsletter can help you provide content for the young couple seeking to buy their first home, the family who needs a bigger house, and retired couples who want to downsize. Having an accurate picture of your audience will help you send targeted content that buyers will find useful and make them feel like you “know” them. For more guidance on how to best consider your audience, read our article on customer profiles with downloadable templates.
Pick Your Email or Print Platform
Most agents need to determine whether they will send an email or print newsletter. The best option for distribution of your real estate newsletter depends on your audience or contact list. For agents with a vast email contact list, digital distribution might be the best choice. If your newsletter list is full of addresses or your audience is not online savvy, then mail might be your best option.
Examine Print Newsletters
There is an advantage to sending your real estate newsletter in print directly to your target audience. There are a growing number of emails caught by spam filters, and they can be automatically deleted by email programs.
A direct mail piece delivered to a mailbox means consistent brand interaction that repeatedly lands in buyers’ hands. If you are thinking about a printed newsletter, then you will need crisper images of at least 300 dots per inch (DPI) with browsable content and a printing/mailing service like ProspectPlus! that is reliable and delivers on schedule.
Consider Electronic Delivery
While susceptible to spam filters, electronic real estate newsletter services have the benefit of clear tracking. While printed real estate newsletters can be tracked for delivery to a home, there is no way to tell how well it was received by your contact. Electronic newsletter reporting can show open rates, link clicks, and audience engagement. For real estate agents who would rather send electronically, you will need a real estate newsletter service like MailChimp or Constant Contact.
Many agents decide to send their real estate newsletter through electronic and print means to make sure that it is received by their leads. This mixed approach can increase exposure and sales opportunities by putting your real estate newsletter in the right hands using their preferred delivery method.
2. Gather the Right Content (Email & Print)
Collecting the right content for your newsletter means gathering different types of real estate marketing materials that will interest your audience. The selection of content depends on the type of material buyers would find useful in daily life and when trying to find their next home. When you think about your demographic, consider what they love — family, friends, pets, sports, vacation — and brainstorm creative types of materials that matter to them.
These are the five most popular types of content for a real estate newsletter:
- Real estate agent blogs & reports: Blogs and reports about neighborhood markets promote you as an expert in your field and location. Adding informational blogs and neighborhood reports to your real estate newsletter give buyers an impression of a knowledgeable, professional agent ready to help them buy a house.
- Videos of properties & experts: Video is the ultimate way to convey a message, in large part due to the combination of audio and visual elements. Video uses great visuals to show a property or share expertise that mimics the experience of being in the same room, so it converts higher and stands out from static content.
- Recipes & household tips: Attractive content that shares tips and recipes can warm up your real estate newsletter. Buying a house is a personal experience, and these types of tips make a real estate agent seem approachable as well as help users envision living in the home.
- How-tos & educational articles: Sharing experience and knowledge in the form of how-tos and educational pieces can help buyers move past uncertainty and keep your name in front of them with helpful ways to complete a task.
- Seasonal & holiday content: Holidays and seasons are the perfect time to share information about observances, decorating, and food in your real estate newsletter. Because most holidays bring families together with warm thoughts of home, this is the ideal place to add tips about gifts, special memories, or safety.
- Community information & events: It is vital for real estate agents to have their finger on the pulse of their community. Sharing community information like parades, charity events, and festivals in your newsletter can make it more valuable to home buyers. This type of information helps the buyer see the real estate agent as interested in and knowledgeable about the community. They’re also more likely to hold on to the newsletter as a reminder of what’s upcoming in their area.
One of the best ways to find out what real estate agents are doing with their newsletter is to sign up and find out. Just because you are also a real estate agent does not mean that you can’t research what others are doing and test out the best ideas on your own audience.
3. Pick a Real Estate Newsletter Template (Email & Print)
Most real estate newsletter templates are clear about the three main parts of a real estate newsletter: the header, the headlines, and the body text. Although these are the biggest parts of an effective real estate newsletter, there are many essential elements that fall under each.
The reason you collect your content before you pick a real estate newsletter template is to be sure the template can clearly represent your desired content. Think of your real estate newsletter templates like picture frames you buy at a department store; you can put anything you like inside, but not everything will have the same impact.
Start with a real estate newsletter template with an attractive design and customize the rest to meet your content. For example, stats suggest that video engages your audience at a higher rate and increases connection. If you want to feature a video in every real estate newsletter, then you should pick a real estate newsletter template with a spectacular feature for video layout.
For more information, check out our article on real estate newsletter templates.
4. Add Your Content (Email & Print)
Now that you have established your goals, audience, and delivery methods, your content should take center stage. You should evaluate the content that you need to create versus the content that you need to curate from other sources. Curated content gives you interesting material to share with your readers from outside sources in exchange for attribution.
As a general tip, don’t overload your newsletter with too much content. Five to seven pieces with two to three visuals is a good rule of thumb, though you can adjust this seasonally depending on interest in timely topics.
5. Personalize the Template (Email & Print)
The best way to take your real estate templates to the next level is to personalize the template so it speaks to your audience and contact list. Personalizing the experience with audience-specific sales content, tokens, and engagement, which increases sales opportunities. Ultimately, each person who opens your real estate newsletter should feel like it was created just for them.
Here are three great ways to personalize real estate newsletter templates:
- Address a specific audience: Separating the audience into lists by interests and where they are in the buying cycle is vital to helping each group receive tailored information that moves them through your sales funnel.
- Add personalized tokens: Most people add personalized tokens for greetings that auto-populate names like “Hi John” or “Welcome Jill” at the beginning of their real estate newsletter. By using those same personalized tokens in several places like the greeting and closing, the newsletter can make a general piece seem more personal.
- Include engagement opportunities – Ask questions, create a poll, or give users the ability to submit their own pictures on social media to win a prize. If you want people to engage with your real estate newsletter, offer buyers a reason to engage every single month to increase exposure.
6. Select an Interesting Subject Line (Email)
A boring subject line is one quick way to get your real estate newsletter deleted and increase the unsubscribe rate. Most agents leave the subject line until last or type in something like “Real Estate Volume 9.” Like an unattractive house with terrible curb appeal, headlines like these will not grab a buyer’s attention.
The best way to increase the open rate for your real estate newsletter is to make the subject line interesting and appealing to your readers. Emojis and emoticons in the subject line can make your real estate newsletter leap out to the buyer in the middle of all of the rest of their emails. You can A/B test to see if emojis and emoticons help your email subject line tip the scale an increase opens.
Here are some additional tips to keep in mind:
- Be personal: Readers want to know you’re talking to them, so try to use words like “you” or use shortcodes to input the reader’s first name.
- Offer a clear benefit: Everyone receives dozens of emails every day, so one way to stand out is to make it clear that you have something unique to offer.
- Never use all caps: You may be tempted to use all caps as emphasis, but this merely translates as shouting and can put readers off.
- Use time-sensitive language: Creating urgency by including time-based language (such as “Open before Tuesday…” or “The best thing you’ve read this Halloween”) will encourage people to open the newsletter quickly so that they don’t miss out on timely information.
7. Make Sure You are SPAM Compliant (Email)
To send your newsletter through a real estate newsletter service, you will have to confirm that you are not violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Some spam issues might include sending unsolicited email, failing to remove people who opt-out, and buying or farming email addresses.
The spam laws for electronic delivery cover everything from the subject line to who can get your real estate newsletter. You should make sure that your email recipients and your real estate newsletter do not violate any of these laws to avoid having your state newsletter service suspend your account.
8. Do a Browser Test (Email)
Many of the real estate newsletter services, like Mailchimp and Constant Contact, have built-in browser checks to make sure that your email real estate newsletter displays properly across all browsers and devices. Because browsers and email programs can vary widely, it is vital to know how the major platforms like Outlook and Gmail will display your newsletter. You can easily send yourself a test message to check.
Most real estate newsletter services include the built-in ability to test browser platforms and email clients. One easy way to know how your email newsletter looks online is to send a test email to a Gmail address and Outlook email address that you own. This allows you to see and tweak your emails depending on how they show up in your inbox.
9. Send & Analyze the Results (Email & Print)
Once that you are sure that all of the links are working, the subject line is engaging, and the content is aimed at the right audience, you are ready to click send. After the newsletter goes out, you need to schedule a time to follow-up in three days to look at the results of your real estate newsletter campaign.
Some of the most important metrics to note include opt-outs, opens, click-throughs, and spam reports. For printed and mailed newsletters, you want to track deliverability rates. When something works, repeat the effort. For negative results like opt-outs and spam reports, work to decrease the numbers over time.
Keep in mind that creating the perfect newsletter is a process. Results tracked over time will give you insight into the successful parts of your real estate newsletter and what you need to change in the next mailing.
10. Optimize & Repeat What Works (Email & Print)
Realize that one newsletter is not a trend, so testing different real estate newsletter templates and content types to get the right results will be an ongoing process. When you find analytics that shows a high click-through rate on a certain type of content or a high level of feedback for a mailed newsletter, repeat the formula and try it again.
Regular results give you the best overall picture of your real estate newsletter’s success. By analyzing the stats, you will know what should be changed because it did not work and what should stay because your readers love it.
How to create a popular real estate newsletter in 10 steps.
7 Pro Tips for Crafting High-performing Real Estate Newsletters
The web is full of information about how to create and distribute high-performing newsletters for clients. The proof of a successful real estate newsletter is in the way it converts readers into buyers or sellers over time.
Here are seven tips from experienced real estate agents about how to create a successful real estate newsletter:
”Mail your newsletter. Everyone is crowding the email space, and it is easy for your leads to delete an email without reading it. When your real estate newsletter lands in the mailbox of your buyer or seller, they have to read it to find out if they want it. A real estate agent can see a significant return on investment from the engagement and brand recognition of mailing a newsletter consistently every month to their farm area.”
— E. Allen Dietzschold, Executive Broker, Encore Realty Group brokered by eXp Realty
”Mail your newsletter. Everyone is crowding the email space, and it is easy for your leads to delete an email without reading it. When your real estate newsletter lands in the mailbox of your buyer or seller, they have to read it to find out if they want it. A real estate agent can see a significant return on investment from the engagement and brand recognition of mailing a newsletter consistently every month to their farm area.”
— Evan C. Stewart, Realtor, Compass
“One way to keep people interested is to always lead with value. Your newsletter content should touch on a few points: happenings around town, personal notes on the market that month, featured listings, and some actionable points of value. For example, in November, you might consider adding a list of fun cooking classes around town to ‘prepare’ for Thanksgiving.”
— Kelsey McKeon, Content Writer & Marketer, Clutch
“We decided to come up with a monthly polling question and offer prizes for people who submit responses. We announce the poll results and the winners in a Facebook live video, and we ask winners to share images of their prizes with us to promote on social media. The winners get branded coffee tumblers, and the Facebook live video presents another good opportunity to promote the newsletter and its contents.”
— Eric Sztanyo, Realtor, Keller Williams and Founder of We Buy NKY Houses
“Use video. Many real estate agents are afraid to get behind a camera, but the engagement levels are so much higher when they use it! Push through. You don’t need the best equipment or be too polished. Just start recording. Be yourself. You’ll get better over time. And you’ll see great results in opens and interactions from your newsletter audience.”
— Alberto Marinas, CEO & Founder, PadBlock.io
“Be the client. Professionals need to put themselves in the position of their client and ask themselves how to position their service so that it is best aligned with their clients. Do not push your service to your clients, but instead, pull them to you by offering value and being approachable.”
— Charlie Worrall, Digital Marketing Executive, Ogilvy & Sneyd
“Having a website, the CTA, or call to action, is your best friend. You need to be able to put the button or CTA on a place that it will be seen. It needs to be in an area that doesn’t force the CTA into the customer’s face. Utilize the ‘fear of missing out.’ This is an easy one to implement on your website. Add a line of text that says something like ‘never miss a thing’ or ‘stay in the loop.'”Places to Find Real Estate Newsletter Templates
One of the key determinants of a real estate newsletter’s success is its design. That’s why picking the right template is so important. Fortunately, there are many places online where you can find newsletter templates that fit your needs as an agent.
Here are a few places where real estate agents can find a real estate newsletter template online:
- Canva: This easy-to-use online tool is great for general graphic design, and offers onsite, customizable templates for real estate newsletters.
- Mailchimp: MailChimp is a very affordable email platform that comes with its own library of templates. Click-to-add editing makes it extremely easy to use.
- Constant Contact: Another top-notch email platform, Constant Contact also has its own library of templates, many of which are marked by very clean, crisp design.
- GetResponse: The templates offered by GetResponse are slightly more diverse than some of the other sites mentioned, and tend to be more text-heavy.
- Template.net: Template.net is great for newsletter templates that showcase properties.
While some of these sites require signing up for a service, you can often make use of free trials to test out both the functionality and the templates that are included in a subscription.
Examples of Real Estate Newsletter Templates
REDFIN real estate newsletter with class and event.
Why this real estate newsletter works: The mixture of expert content with offers for classes and events, like open houses, provide the audience with both general information and opportunities for action.
Smith & Berg real estate newsletter with local business highlight.
Why this real estate newsletter works: This real estate newsletter takes the opportunity to share information about a community business and invites the reader to imagine living in the neighborhood.
Trulia real estate newsletter with contests.
Why this real estate newsletter works: This real estate template engages readers by asking their opinion and provides different properties they might be interested in.
Why this real estate newsletter works: This Zillow newsletter focuses on the promotion of trending properties in a neighborhood and highlights the features of each property.
Ellen, Janis, and Josh real estate team newsletter invitation.
Why this real estate newsletter works: This newsletter is a personal invitation to enjoy an event that combines the holiday season with client appreciation.
Neil Kearney real estate quarterly report.
Why this real estate newsletter works: This print newsletter is a great source of market information and provides readers with clear graphs and charts to understand trends.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How Long Should a Real Estate Newsletter Be?
If you are sending your newsletter through a real estate newsletter service electronically, then only five to seven paragraphs of content with links is best because people do not want to wade through tons of material online. If you are sending a printed piece, then two to four pages with mailing space is an adequate length.
How Much Does an Email Newsletter Service Cost?
Services vary according to the size of your email list. MailChimp, Constant Contact, and GetResponse all offer a free trial so that you can try out features without risk or cost. If you have a real estate CRM like Freshsales and Real Geeks, then you might check to see if they offer email newsletter services.
How Often Should I Send a Real Estate Newsletter?
Sending a monthly real estate newsletter establishes a connection with the buyer and keeps your name in front of potential clients. It is better to send a great real estate newsletter that people love once a month rather than useless information every week. If you do not have the time or inclination to assemble your real estate newsletter, then a freelancer from Fiverr can help.
Can I Send a Real Estate Newsletter Electronically and in Print?
Yes. You can test out sending both types of real estate newsletter to your contact list and see which works the best for your audience.
What Are Emojis and Emoticons?
Emojis and emoticons are small symbolic expressions of faces and feelings that help you convey a message to your reader. You can access these at emojipedia.com.
Small sample of emojis and emoticons.
The Bottom Line
A real estate newsletter can keep your buyers engaged with your brand throughout the sales cycle with interesting content that is useful to their life. A real estate newsletter is right for agents who want to stay connected to their buyers and sellers with valuable information that builds a brand and promotes services. A successful newsletter can increase leads and, ultimately, sales.
Many agents don’t have the time to invest in newsletter design. Fortunately, ProspectPlus! is designed to help busy real estate agents with easy-to-edit real estate newsletter templates. For agents who would like to print and mail their newsletter using a real estate newsletter service with EDDM (every door direct mail) or targeted mailing lists, ProspectPlus! is the answer to engaging with your audience on a monthly basis.
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