Real Estate Email Marketing: Templates & Tips From the Pros

Real estate email marketing uses auto responders, email newsletters, and behavior-triggered emails to encourage a buyer or seller lead to become an agent’s client. In an age when most people use email to communicate, all agents should invest in some form of email marketing. Doing so can increase a client base and grow sales dramatically.

Real estate agent emails can often get caught in spam folders, however, unless their emails stand out. To be sure you’re delivering unique, high-value content, consider creating videos for your email using BombBomb. Learn more about this easy-to-use video creation platform and get a free demo.

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How Real Estate Email Marketing Works

Agents need warm leads like prospective clients before they can conduct email marketing. To collect these leads, you can employ both organic and paid lead generation methods, including social media advertising, networking, and referral nurturing. Once these leads are collected, agents use a series of auto responder sequences, newsletters, and behavior-triggered emails to market to each lead until they become a client.

Before emails are sent, however, it’s recommended that agents choose a customer relationship manager (CRM) with email capability—or a CRM and an email program like Mailchimp—to manage their email marketing. This is critical to tracking the success of individual campaigns and ensuring that no lead nurturing opportunity falls through the cracks. It also automates much of the email marketing process, saving agents time.

Real estate email marketing is typically done with a series of drip emails. The initial email includes an introduction to the agent and their unique services. This is the first email in the auto responder sequence is sent after a lead submits their contact information on the agent’s website. Subsequent emails in this sequence are sent at set intervals—typically a few days apart—and include information about new listings, neighborhood information, marketing analyses, and other information of interest to the lead.

In conjunction with the auto responder sequence—also referred to as drip real estate marketing—agents often send monthly newsletters with listing highlights, fun event details for their farm area, educational information about the real estate industry, and more background about their brand. These newsletters are primarily designed to keep the agent top-of-mind for all leads.

Finally, real estate email marketing often employs behavior-triggered emails that are sent whenever a lead takes a certain action on an agent’s website. The most common behavior that triggers an automatic email is viewing a specific listing on the agent’s website; the follow-up email immediately reaches out, offering further details about the property with a suggestion to set up a showing or attend an open house. This moves a lead closer to a purchase or sale.

Real Estate Email Marketing Costs

Real estate email marketing prices vary depending on the services you’re using and the number of lead contacts you have, but agents can generally expect to pay less than $50 per month for email services like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. Additional expenses for things like lead generation tools and CRMs vary widely depending on advertising budgets and CRM features.

Here are the basic costs for real estate email marketing:

• Email marketing services: Email marketing programs like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, BombBomb, or GetResponse range from $15 to $50 per month depending on the number of contacts, types of services, and frequency of emails sent
• Lead generation platforms: Buying leads generally means paying per lead or for a monthly subscription; if you use a lead generation solution like BoldLeads or Real Geeks to get contacts, then lead generation will likely cost between $199 to $299 per month; alternatively, Zillow and Market Leader charge $30 to $60 per lead
• CRM: Real estate agents should take the time to set up a CRM like Freshsales or Pipedrive to track buyer leads, email campaigns, and follow-up messages; cost is minimal at $15 to $25 month, but many real estate CRMs have free trials to test drive features

While the total cost for email marketing can be high, it’s recommended that you simplify your process by selecting a CRM with lead nurturing capabilities, lead tracking functionality, and email marketing tools. Read our article on the best real estate CRMs for more information.

Types of Real Estate Email Marketing Campaigns

Real estate email campaign types vary based on the interest of a lead and where they are in the sales funnel. Five primary campaign types accommodate leads in all stages, including things like targeted campaigns, cold campaigns, real estate drip campaigns, open house follow-up campaigns, and referral campaigns.

These are the five main types of real estate email marketing campaigns.

1. 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.

2. Cold Campaigns

Cold campaigns are emails sent to potential leads with whom you’ve had no contact. 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.

3. Drip Campaigns

Drip real estate email marketing 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 new listings, neighborhood updates, and interesting information over time and in correspondence to insights derived from that behavior. It might take weeks or months for buyer leads to convert to a sale, so keeping them interested with a drip campaign is key.

4. Open House & Event Follow-up Campaigns

Open house campaigns encourage people to attend open houses 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

Most agents forget about a lead after making a sale. The reality, however, is that contacts are as 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 and/or a referral.

6 Rules of Real Estate Email Marketing

To be successful, a real estate marketing email needs to invite the reader to engage with the agent and take action. We have included templates below this section that help you achieve exactly that, but it’s important to understand the rules of email marketing first. Begin by making a good first impression, then request an action, educate your audience, and keep your emails fun—not sales-y.

Here are the six rules for email marketing success.

1. Make 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. Make your unique value—your real estate knowledge, industry experience, and marketing savvy—known 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. Call Readers to Action

Like all good marketing messages, real estate marketing emails should end with a prominent call to action (CTA). 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, or an invitation to add you to their address book so that further newsletter emails don’t end up in their spam folder. Whatever your CTA, give your lead something to do at the end of each email.

3. Educate Your Audience

To help educate your lead, you can post content like infographics highlighting market data—links to interesting news articles about your local market, home improvement tips, recent sales information or new listings, open house invites, or mortgage news and advice. Always focus on their needs and interests—not your own.

Pro tip: One easy way to educate your audience is via an infographic highlighting current market data or location perks. You may not be graphically inclined, but there are plenty of tools that can make you seem so. Use a free service like Canva. Create a free Canva account, then use the search bar to search “infographic.” Choose an infographic template, then click, type, and drag, to input your data and tweak design features and copy. Finally, download your infographic to be added to your email.

Canva infographic template design process

4. Make Your Emails Entertaining

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 warm them up by showing what you’re passionate about — the human side of you as an agent.

5. Don’t Sell Your Services

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. Get Personal After the Sale

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 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.

Many tools can help you do this. 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 business management software. Then, use a predesigned template and their drag-and-drop builder to create a birthday email and input a personalized greeting and special offer for each contact automatically. Finally, schedule it to go out automatically on special dates.

5 Real Estate Email Marketing Templates

Real estate email templates help you make the most of your time and effort by giving you an outline for emails that fit into the campaigns above. These templates can be edited easily to include your information and personalized information about your leads.

Here are five real estate email templates agents need to get buyer and seller leads.

1. The Welcome Email―Introduce Yourself

The first email any lead should receive is a welcome email. This a short, friendly, and professional message meant to thank them for signing up for your email list. You should also tell them what to expect from future emails—and you as an agent.

Real Estate Welcome Email Template

2. The Newsletter―Educate, Entertain, and Nurture Leads

There is no better way to tell your lead that you’re a local market expert and someone they want to spend time with than an email newsletter. Email newsletters are a terrific way to educate, entertain, and nurture your leads until they’re ready to hire you. They’re also an ideal way to stay in front of your best source of new leads—former clients who refer you to friends.

After the welcome email, your newsletter emails should focus on educating, entertaining, and selling to your lead in that order. Try to keep these emails short enough to read or skim in a few minutes, and only send relevant, engaging, and shareable content. You can include market reports, interesting articles, or sneak previews of new listings. Two to four topics or articles per email are more than enough, and your content should match the season.

Real Estate Newsletter Email Template

3. Buyer Lead Emails

Unlike most of the subscribers to your newsletter, buyer leads primarily want to see new listings. If they sign up to receive listing alerts through your website right away, that means they may be ready to buy. These emails need to include information about the newest listings that match each subscribers’ criteria and how to contact you for an appointment.

A good email auto responder like Mailchimp or Constant Contact allows you to add each email to a list depending on where they signed up on your website and what interests, locations, and demographics they specified upon sign up (their criteria). This is called segmenting your list. Once you have segmented lists, you can create an email series for each with content that speaks to those specified behaviors, interests, and demographics.

Buyer Lead Email Template

4. Seller Lead Emails

Whether seller leads find you through a home valuation page on your site, an open house sign-in sheet, or referral, potential home sellers are primarily interested in only two things: learning how much their home is worth and figuring out if you’re the person they want to hire to sell it.

With a series of strategically written emails sent at the right time, you can give them the right answer to both questions. These emails should be sent every 28 days with information about the sales market in their area, any increase or decrease in their home value, and what homes around them have sold for in the past 30 days. Also, be sure to mention what homes you have sold recently.

Seller Lead Email Template

5. Former Client Emails―Get More Referrals

Most real estate agents receive up to 30% of their business through referrals. That’s enough to make or break your business, so it makes sense to invest in referral generation. As such, staying top of mind with former clients should be a large part of your email marketing efforts. These emails should be sent 90 days after closing a deal and be personal. Asking for a referral requires trust, and that means making yourself more approachable.

Former Client Email Template

Top 5 Tools & Resources for Real Estate Email Marketing

Having the right tools for real estate marketing makes collecting, managing, and marketing to leads not only possible but successful as well. A real estate agent with the proper tools will notice a significant increase in their client base and commissions.

Here are the top five tools and resources to help you with your real estate email marketing:

• Freshsales CRM: Freshsales Free Forever CRM helps real estate agents monitor leads as they progress through the pipeline towards conversion; this is an ideal way to keep all of your marketing efforts in one place
• Real Geeks Lead Generation: Real Geeks lead generation starts at $199 per month and includes an internet data exchange (IDX) website with marketing tools and online advertising to collect lead information
• Fiverr: Agents can use Fiverr to find real estate email marketing freelancers to help with administrative tasks, email campaigns, and graphic design work, beginning at $5 per project.
• Canva: Canva is a free real estate email template and graphics design site that makes image creation and editing easier for nontechnical real estate agents and brokers
• GetResponse: GetResponse is an all-in-one email marketing platform with a 30-day free trial for real estate agents seeking landing pages, webinars, and autoresponder emails

8 Top Tips From Real Estate Email Marketing Pros

Success with real estate email marketing is nuanced and can be very challenging. That’s why we’ve reached out to the pros to get expert guidance on how to get buyers to share their email addresses, engage readers using dynamic email content, and keep buyers interested throughout the sales process.

Here are the eight top tips from real estate email marketing pros.

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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 a visual representation of attractive 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 written approval of the recipient might be violating the Can-Spam Law. The best way to avoid violating the spam law is never to 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. In the end, this will likely save you time and increase your return on investment. Learn more about the best real estate lead generation software.

Bottom Line

Real estate email marketing, as well as real estate text message marketing, engages buyers and sellers over the long term with topic-specific campaigns to make sure that they progress through the sales funnel. This intentional approach to marketing means a greater chance of securing clients and, ultimately, increasing sales and commissions. Given the success of email campaigns, all agents should consider it as part of their marketing.

To be truly successful at email marketing, however, agents need to stand out. BombBomb helps agents and brokers do exactly that with email-based videos designed to engage the reader. Find out more about BombBomb video real estate email marketing by scheduling a free demo.

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