The Essential Guide to Effective Real Estate Email Marketing

Real estate email marketing uses auto-responders, email newsletters, and behavior-triggered emails to encourage leads to make contact and hire you to buy or sell a property. In an age when most people use email to communicate, it’s necessary for agents to invest in some form of email marketing to increase your client base and dramatically grow sales.

However, real estate agent emails can often get caught in spam folders unless their emails stand out. To be sure you’re delivering unique, high-value content, consider using Constant Contact to get ideas and use beautiful templates. You can try it out with a 15-day free trial.

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Here are the six attributes of every successful email marketing campaign:

1. Makes a Good First Impression

Competition for buyer and seller leads is fierce, but you don’t want to appear desperate for business. Make sure you present yourself as personable, professional, and easy to work with. Show your unique value—your real estate expertise, knowledge about the community, or marketing savvy—quickly without appearing snobby.

One way to do so is by including testimonials from past clients or ratings on agent listing sites like Zillow. In doing so, you let your clients speak for you instead of self-promoting.

2. Calls Readers to Action

Like all good marketing messages, real estate marketing emails should end with a prominent call to action (CTA) that invites readers to do something. Your CTA can be an offer to schedule a phone call or in-person meeting, an invitation to connect on LinkedIn or other social media, a question to reply to, or an invitation to add you to their address book so that the rest of your newsletter emails don’t end up in their spam folder. Whatever your CTA, make it easy and interesting for your lead to do something at the end of each email.

3. Educates the Audience

Providing valuable information to your email list shows them your expertise and can help them learn more about buying and selling real estate. To help educate your lead, you could send:

• Infographics
• Market data
• Links to interesting news articles about the local market
• Home improvement tips
• Recent sales information
• New listings
• Open house invites
• Mortgage news and advice

You’ll find that open and engagement rates will be highest when you focus on the needs and interests of your leads instead of your own.

One easy way to educate your audience is via an infographic highlighting current market data or location perks. Even if you’re not graphically inclined, you can use the free plan of Canva to easily create engaging images. Create a free Canva account, then use the search bar to search on “infographic.” Choose a template, then just drag and drop your information. Finally, download the infographic to be added to your email.

Canva infographic template design process

4. Provides Entertainment

For people who don’t work in the real estate industry, a newsletter about interest rates and a median price per square foot can get dull pretty quickly, so be sure to spice up your newsletter with fun local events, holiday greetings, or reviews of new local restaurants. You can also include information about charities or local events you participate in. This is a great way to make a genuine connection with them and find common interests.

5. Focuses on Building Relationships, Not Sales

There is no quicker way to end up in someone’s trash than pushing for a sale constantly. No one likes to be thought of as a dollar sign. You should include invitations to open houses and promote new and recently sold listings, but try to keep the main focus of your emails on educating and entertaining first. Remember that you’re building a relationship.

6. Gets Personal

The last thing most people who have closed on a home want to read about is the real estate market, so avoid sending former clients your regular newsletter or buyer and seller emails. Instead, you can send them more personal emails spread much farther apart to stay top of mind. Reaching out on the anniversary of their move to see how things are working out or sending holiday or birthday greetings will remind your former clients that they were more than a paycheck.

There are many tools that make it easy to segment and automate your leads and clients this way. Constant Contact, for example, offers an automation feature to help you keep top of mind with former clients. You can pull first-sale or birthday dates from your online forms or your customer relationship manager (CRM) along with a predesigned template. Their drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to create and schedule a birthday email and input a personalized greeting and special offer for each contact automatically.

How Real Estate Email Marketing Works

Email is arguably one of the best, most efficient, and most effective real estate marketing ideas as it helps you increase brand awareness while also nurturing potential clients until you make a sale. Email marketing campaigns allow you to do this at a much larger scale by letting you send messages to multiple leads at once based on contact lists you specify.

That said, unlike regular email, which you can manually draft and send on the fly, most email marketing programs rely on the use of templates. However, these can and should be personalized based on fields from your contact list such as first name, last name, or preferred greeting.

Then, once you have created your email templates, the process works like this:

• Use organic or paid lead generation methods to grow your email list. For example, you might use a “contact us” form on your website, offer an e-book on how to increase your home’s value in return for an email address, or enroll in a program like Zillow Premier Agent, which can earn you leads.
• Segment your email list into different types of leads (buyers, sellers, leads from various sources, first time buyers, and so on).
• Create automated and behavior-triggered email campaigns.
• Keep your subscribers updated with consistent and interesting newsletters.

For more information about how email marketing works, and how it can benefit businesses in general, check out our ultimate guide to email marketing.

Ways Real Estate Professionals Use Email Marketing Campaigns

While email marketing campaigns are one of the most effective ways to reach new leads, there are a number of specific use cases that work especially well for those in the real estate industry.

The five main types of real estate email marketing campaigns are:

1. Drip Campaigns

Real estate drip campaigns are typically automated or triggered by lead behavior, including where they signed up on your website, their browsing behavior, and where they accessed your website from. Then, to keep leads engaged, drip emails gradually share valuable and interesting information such as new listings or neighborhood updates. As a result, these are the most common types of email marketing campaigns used to nurture leads until they are ready to buy.

If you’d like to incorporate this type of email marketing campaign into your lead nurturing strategy, but don’t know how to get started, check out our article on the subject which includes step-by-step instructions.

2. Targeted Campaigns

Targeted email marketing campaigns are aimed at a certain subset of your leads based on demographic information, location, or interest. These contacts usually come from lead generation ads and are often segmented according to age, gender, location, or income. For example, an agent may send an email campaign to leads older than 65, highlighting low-maintenance, single-level homes for retirement living.

3. Cold Campaigns

Cold campaigns are emails sent to potential leads who you’ve never spoken to or contacted before. That might mean sending introductory real estate emails to new buyer leads or niche leads like for sale by owner (FSBO) contacts.

These leads often take a longer time to convert in the buying process, so cold campaigns may take more emails to start a conversation or spark interest. Generally, these emails spend more time building up your brand as an agent before introducing listings.

4. Open House & Event Follow-up Campaigns

Open house campaigns encourage people to attend a particular open house and talk to agents about their interest in making a purchase. After an event, follow-up campaigns allow real estate agents to touch base about interest in the property and schedule another viewing. Check out our article on open house follow-up email templates.

5. Referral or Testimonial Request Campaigns

Unfortunately, many agents forget about their previous clients after making a sale. The reality, however, is that contacts are extremely valuable after closing a deal because they can offer valuable testimonials or referrals. An email campaign at this stage makes the most of an agent’s relationship with a lead by requesting positive reviews or a referral.

Tools for Managing Real Estate Email Marketing Campaigns

No matter which type of email marketing campaign you use, there are a number of tools on the market designed to help you manage communication with leads. Prices for these tools can vary depending on the services you’re using and the number of lead contacts you have, but are well worth the expense.

Here are the most commonly used tools used to build contact lists or manage real estate email marketing campaigns and their associated costs:

Dedicated Email Marketing Providers

Programs like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and GetResponse, which are made for email marketing, often include drag-and-drop templates and allow leads to opt in or out of correspondence with ease. Prices range from $15 to $50 per month depending on the number of contacts, types of services, and frequency of emails sent. However, these tools typically don’t have real estate-specific features, and so are best used integrated with other software.

Lead Generation Platforms

Buying leads generally means paying per lead or for a monthly subscription; if you use a lead generation solution like BoldLeads to get contacts, then lead generation will likely cost between $250 to $300 per month; alternatively, Zillow and Market Leader charge $20 to $60 per lead. That said, these tools can provide an increased level of confidence that your audience is made up of motivated buyers and sellers, and don’t require you maintain a separate contact list.

CRM Software

Customer relationship management (CRM) software allows real estate agents to track buyer leads, email campaigns, and follow-up messages all in the same place. Costs for general-use CRMs like Pipedrive can range between $12 and $29 a month, while some like Freshworks CRM even offer a forever-free plan, but do impose limits on the number of mass emails you can send each month.

However, there are also many real estate-specific CRMs with useful added functionality. For example, a real estate-specific CRM and marketing solution like Real Geeks includes an IDX website, designed to feature your listings, while also providing tools to stay in touch with your leads. While at $249 per month, it may seem to be a pricier option on the surface, it can still represent a cost savings by simplifying your processes.

You can learn more about other great options by visiting our article on the best real estate CRMs.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Does video increase email responses?

Some companies report a five-fold increase in email responses when using video in their emails. The real estate industry is prime for this kind of multimedia content as it gives readers an engaging visual representation of listings. Find out more about how agents are using real estate video marketing.

Does the spam law apply to real estate email marketing?

Real estate agents who use email addresses gained without the written approval of the recipient might be violating the Can-Spam Act. The best way to avoid violating the spam law is to never send any text or real estate email marketing to someone who has not given their written consent to receive your messages.

Should I consider a lead generation company as part of email marketing?

Lead generation companies like BoldLeads, Zillow, and Real Geeks can help real estate agents quickly and easily capture email data to grow their real estate email marketing list. Although it can be a significant investment, it will save you time and very likely maximize your return on investment (ROI). Learn more about the best real estate lead generation software.

Bottom Line

Real estate email marketing, as well as real estate text message marketing, can be an extremely effective way to engage and nurture buyers and sellers long term. By intentionally creating topic-specific campaigns, you’ll have a greater chance of securing clients and increasing sales and commissions. Given the success of email campaigns, all agents should consider it as part of their marketing.

You can achieve email marketing success by taking advantage of the email templates, segmentation, and automation options found in Constant Contact. Find out more about Constant Contact real estate email marketing by trying their 15-day free trial.

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