Getting your real estate email marketing right can be the difference between success and failure in a highly competitive industry.
In this article, we will look at how good marketing can benefit real estate agents and the best ways to leverage it to achieve maximum success.
The Benefits of Marketing for Real Estate Agents
Marketing is as essential for real estate agents as it is in any other industry.
Engaging in marketing helps you increase public awareness of your brand. A strong campaign can build positive associations in people’s minds, ensuring that if they need a realtor, you’re the first person they’ll think of.
This helps you find new prospects and leads, which you can then work to convert into customers, helping you maximize real estate sales. Marketing isn’t just useful for finding new customers but for retaining existing ones too.
When it comes to marketing as a real estate agent, the benefits of email cannot be understated. By using this medium to market to your clients, you’ll be speaking to many of them through their preferred channel (research shows that over 60% of customers prefer to be contacted by brands in this way).
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Reaching out to customers via their preferred channel helps make sure that the highest possible number of people see your marketing materials.
Email marketing can also help with lead generation. Capturing the details of potential customers by getting them to subscribe is one method of generating leads for your business, which you can then direct through your sales funnel.
If you’re looking for a cost-effective marketing method, email also ticks this box. It has one of the most attractive ROIs of all marketing options, providing organizations of all sizes with a cheap and simple way of keeping in touch with customers.
Email marketing is also incredibly simple to personalize and provides easily measurable results. You can use a range of metrics to help you understand how well your approach is working and what needs to be changed to achieve greater success.
How to Leverage Real Estate Marketing
Here are our top tips to help you achieve the best possible results from your marketing efforts.
Tailor Email Content to Your Target Audience
It’s important to understand your target audience if you want to have the best possible chance of developing effective marketing materials. You’ll want to start by considering who your target audience is and then consider how this can be reflected across your marketing.
Tools such as ERP software solutions can be great for providing analysis and identifying customer trends from across your business. They collect and store data from your whole business, including sales and customers, so you can get a detailed understanding of your target audience and how they engage with your brand.
Having identified your audience, think carefully about your brand voice. This should reflect the defining characteristics of your business and how you want people to perceive it. Then, consider who your ideal customer is and what their core characteristics are.
Where these two lists intersect, you’ll have found your brand voice. Honing in on this will help you develop email content that’s relevant to your target audience and represents your business in a way that makes it appealing to them.
When sending out marketing emails, every aspect of your communications should reflect this. That doesn’t just mean the body of the email but subject lines, images, and so on, too.
Finally, consider the content of your emails, and make choices with your target audience in mind. For example, if they’re older and less tech-savvy, you may wish to omit interactive elements from your emails and keep them relatively simple.
Understand the Value of Marketing
If you’re going to succeed in your marketing efforts, it’s important to understand how valuable this is as a tool—only then will you be able to give it the time and attention it deserves.
Email marketing, in particular, provides an excellent return on investment (ROI). Typically, for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses will see a return of $40. That’s a 400% return on investment! Not only that, but the ROI of email marketing has seen continued growth on average over the past few years.
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While other marketing methods may also return a positive ROI, only email marketing will achieve these particular results while also demanding a relatively small investment in terms of time and effort.
Using tools such as account payable software can help you keep track of the expenditure associated with email marketing, enabling you to calculate the ROI of your email marketing easily.
In addition, the real-time reporting features provided in a platform such as this can be used in conjunction with various email marketing reports in order to help you better understand the true value of your email marketing.
Develop Engaging Personal Communications
Creating communications that speak directly to your target audience is the best way to ensure your marketing achieves maximum impact. Personalization is one of the best tools to help you with this.
Personalization can range from simply using a prospect’s name in your email to including special offers or discounts tailored specifically to them.
Many marketers use tools like email list segmentation to achieve personalization. This involves sending out various emails to different segments of your customer base. These differ in key ways, ensuring different customers receive the message that’s most relevant to them.
For example, new customers may receive details of an “introductory offer,” while existing customers will be provided with some kind of “loyalty bonus” instead.
More than 60% of marketers report that email marketing is where personalization is most impactful (more than for any other area of the digital experience).
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Incorporate Persuasive Call-to-Actions (CTAs)
A call to action (CTA) is the part where you ask the reader to perform an action. This could be subscribing to your mailing list, clicking through to a landing page, or contacting you to book a valuation.
CTAs should be clear, concise, and unignorable. They should also include a simple yet persuasive statement that encourages the reader to perform the action. They’re often coupled with an eye-catching image or button to draw attention to them.
Offer Informative Content
Marketing that’s too ‘sales-y’ can sometimes turn potential customers away from your brand. A great alternative is to offer materials that inform and educate your audience while sneakily recommending your business as a solution to their pain points.
This type of content marketing can take various forms, including videos, blog posts, and scholarly articles. Marketers will use this to increase brand awareness, build loyalty among existing customers, and foster a reputation as an expert in their field.
Many examples of content marketing can be repurposed, helping maximize their potential reach and associated ROI. For example, snippets of blog posts can often be included in marketing emails, with links encouraging readers to click through to the full post to learn more.
Highlight Prominent Listings
Email marketing can serve a range of purposes for real estate agents. For example, emails can be sent out advising prospective buyers of newly listed properties or events such as open houses.
This is a great way to quickly and conveniently inform your audience about prominent listings, helping you drum up interest and create a buzz around your properties.
You can include photos of the properties’ distinguishing features or even brief video walkthroughs. This will give your audience more of a feel for the property you’re marketing and encourage them to come and view it for themselves to learn more.
Utilize Exclusive Offers and Promotions
Including exclusive offers and promotions in your marketing emails will help you build a relationship with the recipient, personalizing your communications with them and giving them extra incentives to do business with you.
Limited-time deals, such as discounts or preferential rates, can spur indecisive buyers into action, driven by the fear of missing out on an unbeatable offer.
Leverage Marketing and Email Automation
Utilizing email and marketing automation can also be helpful, allowing you to streamline your workflows and communications with leads and customers and further boost your marketing ROI.
For email marketing, for example, you can use automation to run nurturing “drip campaigns.” These involve sending your prospective customers regular emails, encouraging them to interact with and build a positive relationship with your brand.
You can also establish automation that sends customers regular updates about new listings that meet their requirements and budget. Alternatively, automatically send out emails when you publish a new blog post, encouraging recipients to visit your website to learn more (and hopefully browse while they’re there).
Establish and Track Email Metrics (Open Rates, Conversions, ROI, etc.)
To know whether you’re on the right track with your email marketing efforts, you need to track certain key metrics. Which performance indicators you choose to measure will depend upon your specific goals for your marketing campaigns.
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If your goal is to convert more leads into paying customers, for instance, then you’ll want to track your conversion rate. Or, if you want to know whether your emails are enticing and engaging enough for your target audience, you’ll need to look at their open and click-through rates.
Once you understand how your email marketing is performing according to your chosen metrics, you’ll be able to make informed decisions when it comes to updating your marketing strategy.
Final Takeaway
Hopefully, you’ve now got a better idea of the importance of real estate email marketing and how much of a difference it can make to your business.
It’s important to keep your communications relevant, exciting, and personalized, as this will encourage your readers to open, read, and engage with your content. Offer content that informs your audience as much as it tries to persuade them to make a purchase (but don’t forget to include some call-to-actions all the same). Also, automate where you can to save time and measure your key metrics to track your success. We guarantee you’ll be seeing plenty of it!