By Matthew Collis
There are four key things you can do to supercharge your real estate email marketing. These tips will help you nurture existing relationships with the clients in your database and market to your leads, converting prospects into lifelong clients.
1. Monthly enewsletter. A monthly enewsletter is really a no-brainer when it comes to valuable things that you can do to build relationships with those in your sphere of influence (SOI).
Enewsletters are a fantastic way to keep in touch with your SOI over time. And we know that keeping in touch is instrumental to building a business based on referrals and repeat clients. Consider this: The National Association of Realtors (NAR) found that 85 per cent of home sellers said they would recommend their real estate agent or use the same agent next time they need to buy or sell. But the majority of agents do not stay connected with their past clients. When you fail to keep in touch and stay “top of mind,” you run the risk of clients forgetting about you, forgetting your name, and moving on to the next Realtor they come across.
A good real estate contact management system gives you the ability to easily send out a monthly enewsletter that’s designed and written for you by real estate marketing experts. The newsletter will contain helpful and interesting articles on topics such as home improvement or assessing the value of one’s home. You simply select the contacts in your database and hit the send button.
2. Personalized and targeted mass emails. Along with enewsletters, you should be communicating to different groups of people in your database through email (in addition to face-to-face meetings/events, direct mail pieces and phone calls) on a consistent basis as another way to keep in touch.
I don’t believe in the “batch and blast” approach that often entails sending one generic, impersonalized email to your entire database. With your contact management system you should be able to categorize and group your database and send different, directly relevant emails to different groups, as appropriate. For example, you’ll send one email to your “hot leads” group, another to your “A-list client” group and yet another to your “former colleague” group.
Each email should be addressed to the recipient’s name. An email with a generic salutation such as “Hello” or “Dear Valued Client” is both impersonal and cold and tends to get categorized almost immediately as “spam” in the recipient’s mind.
3. Drip marketing. Drip email marketing is a fast, effective and easy way to keep in touch with clients and nurture the leads in your database. Drip email refers to emails that get sent automatically from your customer relationship management (CRM) system at various time intervals. The beauty of drip email marketing is that it’s automated so while you’re busy on the road showing homes, you’re marketing to hot leads at the same time.
Your CRM should have pre-designed drip campaigns already created. This means that you would simply choose which type of drip marketing plan you’d like to send out and select the contacts you’d like to assign to the campaign. The emails are pre-written and the times that each email goes out are specified.
As soon as you get a new lead, it’s important to assign them to a lead nurture campaign so you’re “touching” this lead from the time they first contact you to weeks and months down the road until they’re ready to finally become a client.
4. Email campaign reporting. Never underestimate the importance of measuring the effectiveness of your email marketing. This will help you improve moving forward and truly take your email marketing to the next level.
A great real estate contact management system will have an email campaign reporting feature that will let you view statistics on the email communications you’ve sent, such as open rate, click-through rate and forward rate.
I also highly recommend A/B split testing your emails to measure effectiveness. This is the process of sending two variations of an email to two different groups of people. The variation in the email could be a different subject line, a different image or email header, or a different introductory paragraph (anything you choose). With A/B testing, you can see which email resonates with your recipients more and this can serve as a useful guide when deciding how to structure the content and design of your emails.
Matthew Collis is the sales and marketing manager at IXACT Contact Solutions Inc., a North American real estate CRM firm. In addition to overseeing many of IXACT Contact’s key sales and marketing programs, Matthew works with Realtors to help them achieve their real estate goals through effective contact management and relationship marketing. He has written a wide array articles, news releases and blog posts on contact management strategies and implementation. Email [email protected].
