3 Essential Truths About Effective Real Estate Email Marketing
When you’re a real estate professional, you don’t exactly have a lot of time to send out an email blast, so making sure to put your time to best use is key. Let us help you jumpstart your campaign today with 3 quick tips that will set you in the right direction.
1. Be A Real Estate News Source… Not A Vacuum Cleaner Salesman
Remember, sending an effective real estate marketing email can serve two purposes; first it should act as a helpful tip and/or news resource for your reader. It can also, when appropriate, drive home a (preferably) subtle offer for your reader to act upon… if they are ready. Let’s explain why it’s important to minimize the “marketing” aspect of your emails; it’s all about deliverability. If people don’t find your emails helpful most of the time, they won’t read them, and will probably unsubscribe ASAP. The way to keep your bounce and unsubscribe rates low is to stress delivering free, useful information. The idea is to become a news source for your readership. You want your readers to start missing your updates. So take the time and care to make them meaningful, and don’t beat your readers over the head with pitches for your real estate services. Once you establish yourself as a true authority on your real estate market, you won’t even have to ask potential clients to contact you.
2. Timing is Everything
Experiment with what day you send your email marketing blasts out. Some markets tend to have people who are too busy to read email during the week, while others have home buyers and sellers looking to do all of their online work during the weekends. Keep an eye on your mass email program’s analytics. Most reputable providers (such as iContact) will give you a way of seeing bounce rate and interaction with any links contained in the email. You might want to first experiment with a controlled kind of blast like a single property home listing. Make sure they are both attractive, comparable properties and the information contained in the messages is formatted in a similar fashion. That way you can be sure that you’ll get more accurate results from your test run. We realize it sounds like a lot of work, but if you spent all that time working on your messages, why throw that work all away by just guessing when would be the best time to send out those messages in your local market?
3. Always Provide Your Full Contact Info
With all email messages sent out, you should have complete contact information and links to your websites and social media profiles. That way, if people are impressed they will take the step of seeking you out first by checking the message for your email address, phone number, or Twitter user name. This one goes in line with our suggestion that if your content is good enough, people will seek you out. That doesn’t mean we can’t make it a little easier for them to find you when they do decide to consult with a professional!
We hope you found this free post useful. Check out our Email Marketing Strategy category for more great tips with setting up a successful real estate blast.