By Andrew Gale
Part of being a real estate professional is meeting a lot of people with a lot of different motivations. When you’re building an email campaign, you want to make sure your campaigns are set up to target the exact motivations of your prospect with the right material. This will help turn your leads into clients.
Website signup: Best practice on website signups would be to segment them from your website to automatically be followed up with the correct campaign. You can do this type of email segmentation by having different types of lead capture tools on your website. For example, if you have an eBook offer for first-time buyers, require an email for download. When they sign up for that offer they should automatically be added to your first-time buyer email campaign.
Open house: Hopefully at the open house you found out what type of motivation they have (buyer/seller) but, if you didn’t, create a somewhat generalized marketing plan with local market information. On top of having that information, you’re looking to engage with these people to find out if they are planning to move soon. Ask questions that are easy to answer and start getting responses that will help you build that relationship.
Buyer: If they’ve been through the buying process before, focus on sending material that shows them why you’re the agent who can get them the best price for any house on the market. Show some past sales that you had some rock star negotiating on, as well as testimonials.
First-time buyer: This type of buyer is taking the biggest financial leap of their life, as you know. Focus on sending them content that will help make them comfortable with the whole process and with you.
Seller: Sellers want to know that not only can you sell their house in a timely manner, but you can also do it while getting them the best price possible. The type of material to help convince them will include testimonials, your marketing strategy and proof of expertise.
Investor: True investors are interested in one thing. ROI. This type of campaign should be targeted with data and your past sales that have made investors some great returns.
Income property: This is different than an investor campaign. Think about people who are interested in income properties – middle class looking for a safe investment that will help benefit their family.
Distressed property: These people are looking for help and it’s safe to assume most of them want this kept private. Address both of those issues with this type of campaign and focus on getting in contact with them as soon as possible.
Newsletter campaign: I would put everyone from all the campaigns above into this newsletter. You don’t want to spam them so make sure you’re only sending out a newsletter around once a month with your best stuff that’s relevant to them. In your monthly newsletter campaign you might include a monthly local market update, important local news, events, a local feel-good story and a mortgage rate update.
Creating campaigns for each one of these types of prospects is not hard. At first it’s a little time-consuming but once it’s done you can use it forever. Some great email services that you can use to create awesome email campaigns easily are:
– Mailchimp – It’s really easy to use and starts off free. I would recommend this over the other email service providers, although all of these are really good.
– AWeber – Starts at $19/mo. One of the more popular services.
– Constant Contact – Starts at $20/mo. Another great service.
– Campaign Monitor — Starts at $9/mo. Has some of the best email designs out of all the competitors.
– Get Response – Starts at $15/mo. Includes a landing page creator that is cool.
As you send out these campaigns you’ll get data on them such as:
– Bounce rate – How many emails were not sent successfully.
– Unsubscribe rate – How many people unsubscribe from the email you sent.
– Open rate – How many people open the email.
– Click-through rate – How many people click a link in your email.
You’re going to want to focus on always improving these numbers throughout the campaign. You might have five to 20 automated emails set up for each campaign to deal with all the different types of prospects you have and you want to make sure that on email four, people don’t start unsubscribing at an alarming rate. Monitor all the data you’re getting and always try to improve it.
Getting everything set up is time-consuming and might seem like a distraction, but how many agents in your office do you think are actually building custom email campaigns tailored for every type of lead they get? Probably not many. Be the first and get ahead of the game.
Andrew Gale is the founder of https://FlyerCo.com, an easy-to-use real estate flyer creator online. He is passionate about all things marketing and start-up related.
