5 Ways to Make Email Marketing Work for You

For real estate agents, email marketing is one of the best ways to stay in touch with contacts, clients and prospects. As you know, you need to maintain relationships over a long period of time since people don’t buy new houses every year! Email marketing is cost effective and 60 percent of consumers agree that email marketing influences them to make a purchase. Here are five ways you can make your email marketing as effective as possible.

Send High-Quality Information

Everyone is busy in today’s world. They don’t have time to waste reading generic real estate information. Make sure your content engages your audience. While you should take advantage of the time savings offered by your real estate CRM software, add your own personal flair.

Customize your emails with local market updates, local news, information on local events and things to do in your area. You’ll help prospects coming from outside of your community get to know the area. In addition, you’ll prove to people in your target market that you’re interested in the community and a good source of local information.

That customization will also help to engage people in your sphere, and people who aren’t thinking of buying or selling. While many people like to keep an eye on the real estate market, emails that focus only on buying and selling are of little value to your contacts who have  just purchased a home, or aren’t planning to move for another five years.

Personalize Your Communications

Personalizing your emails is a key to engaging your reader. When you have a large contact list, it’s usually impossible to write a one-to-one email to everyone. Therefore, the key is to use your real estate CRM to do the best job of personalizing your emails as possible. You can set up categories for your contacts that will let your CRM do the personalization for you.

In fact, 51 percent of marketing influencers say that list segmentation is a critical email marketing technique. Setting up categories for your contacts, also called segmenting your list, will allow you to avoid the problem of sending an announcement for your new $750,000 listing to people who are looking at $300,000 homes. You can set up your CRM to select the people who will receive a particular email based on the categories you’ve assigned to them. It may make the most sense to hire an expert, like Diggity Marketing, to advise you on strategizes for personalizing email campaigns.

Include Calls to Action in Your Email

Make sure your readers feel like you are speaking directly to them. Write your emails, or the customizations you add to an existing email, as if you were talking to a friend. And, keep the interaction going with calls to action that encourage the reader to take an action. In an email, the typical call to action will be an invitation to find more information by clicking on a link that leads back to your website.

For example, if you’ve written a market update, you may not want to overwhelm the email with all the pertinent statistics. You could write an introduction, then encourage the reader to get the details by clicking on a link that goes back to a blog post on your website. Another good call to action for market updates is to link to an evergreen blog post that explains how to interpret the data you’re providing.

It’s also a great idea to develop a special offer that your readers want to take advantage of – that’s another excellent opportunity for a call to action.

Always Include All Your Contact Information

Here’s an effective digital marketing strategy: any time you ask the reader to do something, give them what they need to take that action. Whether you’re writing a web page or an email, never include something like “feel free to give me a call” without listing your telephone number. If you think someone might want to email you, make sure you include an active mailto link. There’s nothing more annoying that having to search a web page or an email to find the information required to take action.

Track Results, Revise, and Repeat

You don’t need to send emails just to have something to do because you’re already busy enough. Track your results to see how many people opened your email, and how many clicked on a link. Then, refine your strategy for the next email and determine if the refinement improved your statistics. Just like your website, email marketing requires ongoing refinement in order to give you the best results.

Following these tips will help you hone your email marketing skills and increase your ability to use email marketing to grow your business.