During the past two weeks, 18 real estate salespeople sent printed flyers to our Toronto home. They all looked pretty much the same and delivered almost identical messages. They’ve become an annoyance, and the individual salespeople sending them have blurred into one another.
During the same period, we received only one email promotion from a Realtor. Amazing, when so much hard evidence proves that email is by far the more effective marketing tool.
Are household flyers still effective in 2016? Here are some facts: For any promotional message to be effective, it must be delivered where the targeted audience is likely to see and read it. And where are people spending most of their reading time these days? On their mobile devices, PCs and tablets. Moreover, the time people spend reading printed materials, including household flyers, is declining every year.
The evidence is clear. To be successful in 2016 and going forward, real estate salespeople must adapt to the realities of today’s digital economy and focus their marketing efforts on digital media, especially email.
Email is today’s top-rated marketing tactic. According to the American Marketing Association, email delivers an average ROI of over $40 for every dollar you spend.
Email offers sales reps five major advantages over printed household flyers:
1. Email can be precisely targeted to those most likely to use your services.
Printed household flyers are a blunt instrument. You must send them to everyone in a particular region, even those who will never use your services.
2. Email messages can be personalized.
Email allows you to build real relationship and enter into a two-way dialogue with your prospects. Everyone on your contact list feels they are receiving personal attention. Every message reinforces your professional credentials and builds your reputation as the one to call when a real estate salesperson’s services are required.
Email is the ideal solution for building a large sphere of influence where you are the go-to salesperson for hundreds or thousands of potential home buyers and sellers.
3. Get more than seven times the impact for every dollar you spend.
The average cost to print and deliver household flyers is about $1.25 each, regardless of how many actually get read. Assuming a readership rate of 20 per cent, your cost per contact from flyers probably averages about $6.25 each.
Today, there are email marketing services for real estate professionals that charge just 85 cents per contact. You pay only when someone reads your messages. For what you spend to make one contact using printed flyers, you can make 7.6 contacts using email!
4. Measure the effectiveness of your messages.
After each email campaign, you get a report on how many were delivered, opened and read, and how many were clicked through for more information. You also get the email addresses of everyone who opens your messages more than once. These are prime prospects.
Email presents challenges, but easy solutions are available.
To make email work, you must develop a sizable email database that is compliant with Canada’s anti-spam regulations (CASL). However, there are services available that provide you with a process to quickly set up a core email database of 100 to 200 names, and add an additional three to five new contacts each week thereafter.
This enables you to develop a CASL compliant email database of 250 to 500 contacts within a year and keep it growing, year after year after year.
Another challenge is developing the engaging, high-value content required to get your email messages opened and read. To build solid relationships, it’s recommended that you contact those on your database about twice a month. But to produce this volume of content requires research, writing and editing capabilities beyond those of an individual sales rep.
This issue can be resolved by outsourcing your full email marketing program to a service that specializes in managing such programs for real estate professionals. As part of this service, they will provide a steady stream of quality content for your email messages.
In summary, if you haven’t assessed the effectiveness of your marketing tactics in today’s fast changing digital economy, it’s probably something you should put near the top of your ‘to-do’ list.
Ron Hume is the founder and president of Top-Tier Realty, a company that provides digital marketing services to Realtors. One of Canada’s most respected marketing authorities, he is a recipient of the American Marketing Association’s Donald D. MacAskill Award for Marketing Excellence. Email Ron Hume.
