Most real estate agents who run email lists are measuring the wrong things, drawing the wrong conclusions and leaving the most motivated buyers sitting unopened in a database.
In a recent episode of their weekly sales and marketing show, Andrew Fogliato and Taylor Hack broke down how Hack built a list of 600 buyer prospects through Facebook lead ads, what his open rates actually mean, and how to flip a passive subscriber list into an active source of showings.
How the list was built
Hack’s insider list was built almost entirely through Facebook lead ads, offering prospects early access to listings before they hit the market. Over roughly a year, that produced around 600 contacts at approximately $5 per person.
Fogliato runs a comparable program for REM’s newsletter and has held a single ad for two years without being able to beat it.
“I can’t beat it. Every variation I’ve tried can’t beat a screenshot of my Apple Notes,” Fogliato said. “We keep running it. It keeps working. We’re adding people for around $1.50.”
The key caveat with lead ads, he noted, is that the ease of sign-up can work against you. People sometimes don’t remember why they’re on the list, which creates friction the moment you try to follow up.
Open rate is a signal, not a scoreboard
Hack pulled his market insight email stats: 4,300 delivered and 1,100 unique opens.
“That’s not industry standard for real estate,” Hack said, and Fogliato added that the industry standard is not a sound benchmark.
The widely cited industry average of around 19 per cent is dragged down by agents who scrape agency email addresses from MLS and spam them, or who blast databases of 50,000 cold contacts at three per cent open rates. Agents running clean, permission-based lists should expect averages closer to 40 per cent.
Even those numbers are unreliable. Apple Mail automatically sends read receipts on behalf of users, inflating apparent open rates. Filtering those bot opens from REM’s list, Fogliato said, can drop a reported 70 per cent open rate down to 40 to 42 per cent, which still understates true readership.
“The actual number itself isn’t as important,” Fogliato said. “What matters is whether it’s going up or down.”
Three levers that move open rates
When Fogliato found out Hack’s emails were going out from “Taylor Hack Realtor,” he said to drop the title immediately.
“Just Taylor Hack. You want them to feel like you are personally emailing them.”
He cited Dean Jackson’s question: who gets a 100 per cent open rate from you?
The answer? It’s the people closest to you, your friends or family. Emails from a name, not a brand, perform better.
The second lever is the subject line. Specific beats generic. A subject line that says “4 bed Sherwood Park” will outperform “My hot new listing” because the first one gives people a reason to open it. Numbers in subject lines also tend to lift open rates.
The third lever is the preview text, and most agents ignore it entirely. The default “view this email in your browser” signals spam before the email is even opened.
“You want the preview to build on the subject line. Either treat it like a secondary subject line, or write it like a subheadline — subject, then preview,” Fogliato said.
Getting hand-raisers from an insider list
Hack’s current cadence sends three emails per new listing: a signing announcement, a floor plan release after the shoot, and a pricing email before launch. The goal of each one is the same, to create hand-raisers, not passive readers.
Fogliato described what a deal-optimized version of those emails would look like.
“The email could be: We just talked to a seller, we’re getting them ready. It’s a four-bedroom in Sherwood Park. Photographers are out tomorrow. If you want the photos and details when we get them back, just reply and say send me the details.” Fogliato said. “It forces the most interested people to put up their hand.”
He added a practical warning: if you ask for replies, you need to be ready to respond. A one-day delay after someone raises their hand undermines the whole system.
For agents who can handle the volume, the payoff can be significant. When a colleague sent the nine-word email to 1,800 old leads, the resulting replies booked 44 calls in a single day, enough that he had to call his entire team in unexpectedly.
The deal of the week as a trust-building engine
For subscribers who aren’t responding to listing announcements, Hack is building what he calls a deal of the week, a BombBomb video email where he walks through a specific listing on camera, rating it across house knowledge, neighbourhood knowledge, market knowledge and deal knowledge.
“I want sellers to think this is the only guy who can communicate all the value in my house,” Hack said. “And I want buyers to think, if I don’t go with him, I’m missing out on things I didn’t even know I was missing.”
Fogliato’s advice on the call to action: do not put it only at the end. Most people never make it there.
“Seed it throughout. Open with a load phrase that gives them a reason to keep watching. Then halfway through a strong point, say it again: if you want to see this home, just hit reply and say showing.” Fogliato said. “A huge number of people are going to watch the beginning. Very few are going to make it to the end.”
Set expectations before the first listing hits
One of the biggest friction points in converting list subscribers to showings is that prospects don’t know what to expect when they respond. A welcome video solves this in advance.
Fogliato outlined what that video would cover: what the insider list is, what the email cadence looks like, and how showings work, including that a brief qualification call happens before any property visit.
“If you want to get that out of the way now so you can move quickly when the right one comes up, book a time here,” he said. “You start building the pipeline from day one instead of scrambling when someone finds a house they love.”
The approach also protects the seller. Hack frames the qualification requirement as a courtesy to the listing side, as agents owe it to sellers not to bring unqualified traffic through their homes.
The full conversation covers bot opens, spam filtering, email frequency and how to measure what actually matters.
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Content by REM Bot has been created with the assistance of AI. Audio and video interviews, conducted by our team with real people, are transcribed and repurposed into text for those who prefer reading. REM Bot articles are reviewed by staff before publication to ensure factual accuracy and maintain editorial standards.
