When you’re selling properties with a hefty price tag, attracting new customers isn’t the easiest thing in the world—especially since they’re only likely to buy if they’re actively looking for a new home.
Despite the fact that the number of leads generated for real estate companies has increased by 65% since 2016, the conversion rates of those leads are tanking. It’s not as easy to take a prospect from initial meeting to sale completion as it once was.
Related: 8 tips to get more responses to your email marketing
However, there’s one thing you can focus on to change the story: Email marketing. In an industry where high-ticket items are a huge investment, email marketing could be the perfect channel for you. That’s because consumers who purchase through email spend 138% more than those who don’t receive email offers, on average.
That’s right: By diving into the inbox of your potential clients, you’re etching your real estate brand in their mind. Then, when they’re ready to take the next step and purchase a new home, they’ll come to you—rather than the other way around.
If you fancy making that dream a reality, follow this guide to real estate email marketing.
How real estate companies can use email marketing
Are you ready to hit “send” on your emails and fire off a message to everyone who’s contacted your real estate company?
…That might not be the wisest idea.
There’s a whole list of things you need to do before sending an email marketing campaign, and here, we’ll cover a few of the major ones.
1. Collect information on potential customers
You can’t email people who might be interested in your properties if you don’t have their contact details. Sounds obvious, right? However, you don’t want to contribute to the 79% of marketing leads that never convert to sales.
So, start your real estate email marketing campaign by making sure you’re emailing the right people. You could attract potential clients (and convince them to handover their email address) by:
- Creating a free ebook on a relevant topic but asking for their email address in return.
- Asking people who’ve inquired about a property whether they’d be interested in receiving your newsletter.
- Running Facebook ads which ask target customers to fill in a form and receive a brochure via email.
Just take a look at this ebook, created by The Kingdom Real Estate, which helps to collect leads from their website:
Because the free ebook is gated and requires an email address to access, it’s a fantastic way to add warm leads to your email marketing funnel.
But, this step comes with a warning: Always make sure you’ve got permission to contact the person you’re emailing—especially if they’re located in the EU. You don’t want to land yourself a hefty fine for going against GDPR regulations.
2. Create a perfect subject line
When you’re sending an email, the subject line is almost—if not more—important than the email itself. Why? Because 47% of email recipients decide whether to open an email based on the subject line alone.
If you’re not crafting an interesting subject line that piques your audience’s attention, there’s a high chance your email will head straight to their virtual trashcan. Research has found that the best subject line:
- Contains 6 to 8 words (source)
- Includes the recipient’s first name (source)
- Has a sense of urgency (source)
Use these best practices when piecing together the tagline of your real estate email marketing campaigns before hitting send.
3. Write (or share) something valuable often
Think about the last time you opened an email in your inbox. (It doesn’t have to come from a real estate company.)
What made you open it?
Chances are, the message didn’t land in your trashcan because it contained something of value to you. Whether it contained a discount code for your favorite store or a free guide to something you’re struggling with, your customers are the same.
They’ll only open and respond to emails they get value from.
Your real estate business can use this concept by asking yourself, “What value am I providing in this message?” before hitting send on your latest campaign. That could be:
- A message to let them know about a discount on a property they’ve inquired about.
- A discount on realtor fees if they’re looking to sell their current home.
- A solution to one of their pain points.
In short: If you’re not giving value to your subscribers, think twice about sending it. You don’t want to be seen as the annoying company who constantly sends self-promotional messages. That’s only going to lead to an unsubscribe.
4. Analyze what’s working
You’ve built up the courage to hit “send” on your email after working hard to perfect the subject line and email copy. What happens next?
Well, like any new real estate marketing campaign, you’ll need to analyze whether your new strategy is working. It’s the only way to know whether it should play a key role in your marketing plan, going forward.
To do this, head to your email software and analyze key metrics like:
- Open rate. What percentage of people received your message and opened it?
- Click-through rate (CTR). Did many people click the link in your email?
- Response rate. How many people hit the “reply” button and started a conversation off the back of your newsletter?
- Conversion rate. How many people made a purchase as a result of your email?
Your goal here is to find a common denominator across high-performing emails and replicate that moving forward. For example, if the emails with the highest click-through rates contained emojis, build this into your set of email marketing best practices in the future.
Tools for real estate email marketing
Using the right tools will help you be more efficient and effective at your email marketing. To start, you will want to select an email marketing tool that can collect contact information, segment lists and schedule emails. For agents starting out with smaller lists, a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact will provide the basic functionality you need.
In addition to managing your email list, you will need a tool to help you design your emails and generate content for your email campaign. Lucidpress offers an easy-to-use design tool with social media templates, infographic templates and flyer templates to get you started. You can also design the entire email in Lucidpress with one of our email newsletter templates and use our ConstantContact integration to send your emails straight from Lucidpress. Or generate HTML code and paste it into any email provider of your choice.
Bonus: Free real estate email marketing template
Are you ready to put these tips into practice?
If you’re still hesitant, don’t worry. Writing email messages to your potential customers can feel daunting—which is why we’ve created a free email marketing template you can use to push subscribers back to your website.
Simply edit the capitalized text, add your own personal touches, and you’re good to go.
Subject line: ? NAME, here’s a free guide to BLOG POST TOPIC
Message:
Hey NAME,How’s it going?
Here at COMPANY, we’ve been working hard on RECENT ACTIVITY. In fact, we’ve listed X new properties this week! (That’s no easy feat.)
To top it off, we’ve just published a guide to BLOG POST TOPIC.
Including DETAIL #1, DETAIL #2 and DETAIL #3, it covers some of the most common issues we see with home-buyers-to-be.
Click here to give it a read: LINK
If you’ve got any questions, ideas or suggestions for this guide (or anything we talked about in it), drop me a line. I watch my emails like a hawk, and I’ve always got time to chat with you, NAME.
Best,YOUR NAME
Key takeaway
As you can see, email marketing is a fantastic way for real estate companies to generate more leads—and turn those people into paying customers through your email workflows.
By committing to a weekly newsletter or regularly sharing free value with your subscribers, there’s no reason why a few tweaks to your email marketing strategy couldn’t be the best thing you’ve done for your business lately.
(At least not when you’re using our templates.)
