In the evolving landscape of real estate marketing, email remains an essential tool for agents and brokerages alike. From nurturing leads to showcasing properties, email marketing continues to prove its efficacy in driving engagement and conversions.
In this comprehensive guide, we dive into the strategies and tactics so real estate agents can harness the full power and potential of email marketing, offering insights into crafting compelling content, optimizing delivery, and leveraging automation to build lasting connections with clients and prospects.
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Why does real estate email marketing work?
Real estate is an industry built on relationships, which means email is an ideal marketing channel. Here’s a look at the main benefits of real estate email marketing:
- Keeps you top of mind: Consistently sending regular emails with valuable, compelling content helps you build trust and rapport. With over 3 million active real estate licenses in the U.S., nurturing leads through email helps ensure that when clients are ready to buy or sell, they think of you first.
- Is cost effective: Email marketing eliminates the need for printing, postage, and advertising fees associated with traditional marketing methods. This allows businesses to reach a large audience instantly and repeatedly with minimal overhead costs, while also offering precise targeting and analytics capabilities that maximize ROI.
- Gives you control: A dialed-in email marketing campaign frees you from the tyranny of a social media algorithm and lets you build your business on your own marketing territory. With targeted emails, you get ungated access to your contacts whenever you want, with a higher likelihood that they will actually see the content you send them.
- Feels personal: Email marketing makes your clients feel as if you’re talking directly to them. You can take advantage of the ability to develop content that adds value to your contacts.
- Provides smart tools: Email marketing software streamlines audience segmentation based on various data points and automates campaigns, such as a welcome email series, to efficiently engage potential clients with tailored content.
While a comprehensive real estate marketing plan is essential in order for agents and brokers to succeed in 2024, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you need help crafting an efficient, scalable strategy for your business, schedule a free call with Luxury Presence to learn how our marketing experts can help.
What you need for effective real estate email marketing
A standout CRM
A robust customer relationship management (CRM) system is indispensable. Through CRM integration, agents can automate various aspects of their marketing campaigns, including lead nurturing, follow-up communications, and personalized messaging. CRM automation streamlines the email marketing process, saves time, and helps real estate professionals stay engaged with clients and prospects effectively.
Personalization features within the CRM enable agents to address recipients by name, incorporate personalized property recommendations, and tailor content based on individual interests and behaviors.
Segmentation
By dividing contacts into different groups, real estate agents deliver more personalized and relevant content to their audience, increasing engagement, conversions, and overall marketing effectiveness. Here are six common real estate email marketing segments:
- Geographic location: Segmenting by location allows real estate agents to tailor content and listings to specific neighborhoods, cities, or regions.
- Client persona: Creating buyer personas based on demographics, interests, and behaviors enables agents to target messages to different types of buyers, such as first-time homebuyers, empty nesters, investors, and luxury buyers.
- Funnel stage: By considering where potential buyers and sellers are in their real estate journey, agents can deliver relevant content and resources to prospects at each stage (researching, actively searching, ready to buy or sell).
- Past interactions: Depending on how your contacts have interacted with your emails, website, or listings in the past, you can personalize communications and follow up with messages that are based on recipients’ engagement levels and interests.
- Property preferences: Segmenting by property preferences, such as home type (single-family, condo, townhouse), price range, amenities, or desired features, enables agents to send targeted listings and recommendations that match recipients’ criteria.
- Lifecycle stage: Consider where prospects are in the customer lifecycle (new lead, active client, past client) and tailor communication and offers accordingly.
Valuable content
The best strategy for real estate email marketing is to focus on what your audience wants to know. Email marketing only works when it provides value to your audience.
Once potential clients have joined your email list, you need to take that responsibility seriously and not spam them with unrelated and purely sales-y content. Instead, focus on topics you know your ideal audience wants to hear about.
Consider including the following real estate content ideas:
- Announcing new listings
- Neighborhood guides
- Your opinion on market trends
- A recent blog post you’ve created
- Success stories or testimonials from past clients
- Calendar of local events
- Tips for seasonal house maintenance
- Decor trends
- Community news
Include video content and strong images and infographics to make your content more engaging.
Custom drip campaigns
After you’ve identified your segments, you can create a series of emails that go out to each type of lead when the time is right based on the actions they’re taking (or not taking) on your website or in response to your initial emails.
An example might be a series of five to seven follow-up emails that you send to a lead who used your free home valuation tool but didn’t schedule an appointment with you or someone whom you spoke to on the phone but can’t get ahold of anymore. These email campaigns only get “dripped” out when they’re triggered by certain actions.
Sample welcome email drip campaign
A welcome drip campaign provides new subscribers with valuable information and sets the stage for a successful relationship with your real estate business. Each email in the series addresses key aspects of the homebuying or selling process, helping to educate and empower recipients as they embark on their real estate journey. It conveys your expertise and professionalism, in addition to providing real value to your audience. Here’s a buyer template you can customize for your own business:
Subject: Welcome to {your brokerage}!
Hi {first name},
Welcome to {your brokerage}! We’re thrilled you’ve joined our community and look forward to helping you navigate the exciting world of real estate.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sending you a series of emails packed with valuable information, tips, and resources to assist you on your journey. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect:
Week 1: Getting Started
- An introduction to our team and services
- Tips for setting your homebuying goals
- A guide to understanding the current market conditions
Week 2: Financing and Pre-Approval
- Overview of different mortgage options
- Steps to getting pre-approved for a mortgage
- Common financing mistakes to avoid
Week 3: Home Search Essentials
- Tips for narrowing down your search criteria
- Guide to understanding property listings and features
- How to make the most of open houses and private showings
Week 4: Making an Offer
- Overview of the offer process
- Strategies for crafting a strong offer
- Negotiation tips and tactics
We’re here to support you every step of the way, so please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or need assistance. Feel free to reply to this email or give us a call at {###-###-####}.
Welcome aboard, {first name}! Let’s find your dream home together.
Best regards,
{Your name}
{Your brokerage}
{Your contact information}
A must-read-more subject line
Crafting compelling subject lines for real estate emails is crucial given the short attention spans and busy inboxes of potential clients. Here are some tips to create subject lines that entice subscribers to click:
- Keep it concise, around 40 characters, to quickly convey your message
- Use action words to inspire engagement, such as “Sell your house with ease!” or “Connect with buyers all over the state”
- Personalize subject lines using custom fields to increase open rates and avoid the spam folder
- Include a clear call to action to inform readers of the email’s purpose and entice them to click
- Utilize keywords based on SEO research to align with subscribers’ interests, ensuring relevance and authenticity in your email content
Examples of subject lines for a drip campaign
Imagine you’ve created a drip campaign for that lead that got a general home valuation but hasn’t set an appointment. Here are some possible subject lines for each of the emails in the series:
Email 1: Introduction and Invitation
- Unlock the True Value of Your Home With Our Expert Evaluation
- Your Home Evaluation: The First Step to Unlocking Your Property’s Potential
- Discover Your Property’s True Market Value With Our Detailed Home Evaluation
Email 2: Reminder and Value Proposition
- Don’t Miss Out: Secure Your Personalized Consultation Today
- Your Property’s Potential Awaits: Schedule Your Consultation Now
- Act Now: Schedule Your Free Consultation and Maximize Your Property’s Value
Email 3: Urgency and Final Call to Action
- Schedule Your Consultation Today and Unlock Your Property’s Potential
- Time Is Running Out: Don’t Miss Your Opportunity to Maximize Your Property’s Value
- Reminder: Schedule Your Consultation Before It’s Too Late
These subject lines are designed to capture the recipient’s attention, convey the value proposition of the consultation, and create a sense of urgency to encourage action.
Real estate email marketing templates
You don’t have to write every email from scratch. There are plenty of quality real estate email templates out there, and we’ve pulled together some of our favorites:
- Our own collection of email templates and scripts from our real estate marketing experts.
- HubSpot has some great ideas for templates for your next email campaign, as does Constant Contact.
- You can also use artificial intelligence to craft your email copy. Prompt a tool like ChatGPT, explaining your goal, audience, and content idea, so it can create a drip campaign for you. Just be sure you read it over and look for errors.
A powerful CTA
A call-to-action (CTA) is crucial in real estate email marketing as it tells recipients what action you want them to take next, whether it’s scheduling a viewing, requesting more information, or exploring available listings. Without a clear CTA, recipients may not know how to proceed, resulting in missed opportunities for engagement and conversion.
By including a compelling CTA, real estate agents can guide recipients through the sales funnel, increasing the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes and ultimately driving business growth. Here are some examples of compelling CTAs for four different types of desired actions:
- Schedule an appointment:
- “Schedule your free appointment now”
- “Book your personalized consultation today”
- “Get in touch to schedule your appointment”
- Learn more:
- “Learn how we can help you achieve your real estate dreams”
- “Discover the benefits of working with us”
- “Find out how we can maximize your property’s value”
- Contact us:
- “Contact us to get started”
- “Reach out for personalized assistance”
- “Get in touch with our team today”
- General take action:
- “With changing markets, don’t wait any longer”
- “Start your journey to success today”
- “Seize this opportunity and take the next step”
A plan to measure success
You should assess, monitor, and evaluate your email marketing efforts regularly to ensure effectiveness, identify areas for improvement, and maximize ROI. This process allows you to understand what strategies are working, which demographics are responding best, and how engagement metrics are trending over time. Here are five tools and methods that can help:
- Email analytics: Monitor metrics such as open, click-through, conversion, and unsubscribe rates to gauge the performance of email campaigns.
- A/B testing: Experiment with different subject lines, content formats, visuals, and CTAs to determine what resonates best with your target audience.
- Segmentation analysis: Evaluate the effectiveness of audience segmentation by analyzing engagement metrics among different groups and adjusting strategies accordingly.
- Conversion tracking: Track conversions, such as property inquiries, website visits, or appointments scheduled, to measure the direct impact of email campaigns on business outcomes.
- Feedback and surveys: Collect feedback from recipients through surveys or feedback forms to gain insights into their preferences, interests, and pain points.
By regularly assessing and evaluating your email marketing efforts using these methods, you can optimize campaigns for better results, refine targeting strategies, and continuously improve the overall effectiveness of your email marketing initiatives.
How to grow your list of subscribers
In a marketing landscape where people are increasingly selective about sharing their contact information, deploying a compelling lead magnet that incites urgency is crucial. Creating something of value that will entice your prospective leads to join your email list is a great way to revitalize a stagnant list or kickstart growth.
Effective real estate lead magnets range from free data reports and local resource lists to buyer and seller guides and home valuation tools. Leveraging website analytics can you help tailor content offerings to meet prospects’ needs. For example, you could easily convert a popular, high-traffic blog post into an exclusive PDF guide that requires email sign-up for full access.
In addition to clever lead magnets, here are some other tried-and-tested methods for increasing the size of your email contact list:
- Tell your network about your new email list and explain how to sign up
- Include an email opt-in on your website
- Run ads to drive people to a landing page with a newsletter sign-up form
- Post on social to share the value your emails provide and the positive responses you’ve had from current subscribers
- Partner with other real estate industry professionals and get them to share your list
Staying compliant
In the United States, the primary legislation governing email marketing is the CAN-SPAM Act, which mandates that all commercial emails include accurate sender information, clear subject lines, and an option for recipients to opt out of future communications.
Additionally, real estate agents must adhere to any state-specific regulations regarding email marketing, which may mean additional requirements or restrictions. To stay compliant, regularly review and update your email lists to ensure accuracy and relevance, obtain consent from recipients before sending marketing emails, and honor opt-out requests promptly.
Real estate email marketing + Luxury Presence
From crafting compelling content to building beautiful landing pages with effective email capture forms, Luxury Presence can help you elevate your emails and other marketing campaigns. Schedule a free demo today to learn about our award-winning design and branding services and expert marketing solutions.
