Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing for RE Agents
Though email marketing is an extremely effective tool for real estate agents, we’ve found that it is underrated among a lot of them.
Agents often stray away from email marketing because they’re not sure how to do it, or they’re concerned about irritating their database.
If you’re unsure about email marketing or would like to brush up on your knowledge of it, continue reading.
This blog will...
Explain benefits of email marketing for real estate agents.
Outline different types of email marketing campaigns.
Provide tips for effective email marketing.
Share how to get started with email marketing.
Why Should Agents Do Email Marketing?
Real estate agents need email marketing because it offers a very high return on investment, builds trust with contacts, and maximizes time.
In most industries, email marketing has a reputation for generating high returns for the money invested in it. This is because it costs very little.
Outside of the cost of your email marketing platform or CRM, email marketing is free. As an agent, this should be music to your ears!
In addition to a high ROI, email marketing helps agents position themselves as real estate experts by sharing helpful and appealing information with their audiences.
Demonstrating local real estate expertise is a great way to build trust with your audience as you nurture them from leads to clients. It’s also the best way to get people to remember you when they’re asked to recommend an agent.
Email marketing is a great tool for busy agents because it allows them to communicate with their database even when they’re not available.
Automated email campaigns can send perfectly-timed content to your database without you having to click send.
At the very least, having the ability to send a mass email saves you tons of time. Imagine how long it would take you to individually reach out to 200 or 1,000 people!
These are just a few reasons, but trust us, there are plenty others!
Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is an umbrella term for several different types of campaigns and functionalities.
Since the list of email marketing campaigns is extensive and varies by industry, we’ll explain the handful of campaigns that are most relevant to real estate agents.
Lead Nurturing Campaign
This is the most important type of email marketing campaign for real estate agents.
Nurturing is the process of warming up your leads by sending intentional content to build trust and brand recognition with them over time.
Email marketing is great for nurturing leads because it allows you to periodically send information to potential clients.
For example, you could set up a nurturing campaign for seller leads, and send information to them each week about the selling process or the housing market.
Lead nurturing campaigns can often be automated if you have enough appealing content, that isn’t time sensitive, to send to your leads.
Newsletter Campaign
Though newsletter campaigns can aid in nurturing leads, they are not to be mistaken for nurturing campaigns.
They differ from nurturing campaigns in that they are used to keep people informed and to keep the agent in the audience’s minds.
Instead of using newsletters to motivate leads to become clients, agents will use newsletters as a way to stay in touch with their database.
By sending newsletters, you let people know about what’s happening in their community, and you give them the opportunity to reach out to you if they have real estate needs.
Since newsletters share current news and information, it is difficult to automate them like some of the other email campaigns.
At the very least, an agent should send a newsletter to their database twice a month.
Home Valuation Campaigns
This is an underrated campaign for agents because most of them offer free home valuations to build their email lists rather than to nurture their database.
They don’t realize that people in their database are going to want home valuations periodically or that those who weren’t ready to move are now interested in moving.
It’s a good practice to offer your database free home valuations monthly or to even add it as a call to action on all of your seller-targeted emails.
You never know when someone is interested in knowing the value of their home, and by asking them, it opens the door for conversation!
Event Promotion Campaign
This is just as it sounds. Event campaign promotions can be used to both announce and remind people of events.
Agents often use email marketing to promote the following types of events:
Open Houses
Community Events
Agent Q&As
Holiday Parties
Your database is often a local audience that is able to attend nearby events, so we suggest promoting events that might fit their interests.
Referral Campaign
The formula to getting real estate referrals is simple: provide someone with value, then ask them for a referral.
Adding referral campaigns to your email marketing strategy is effective, especially if you are constantly providing value to your database through some of the previous campaigns we’ve discussed.
Agents should run a referral campaign once a month in addition to personalized referral requests sent to recent or current clients. These campaigns don’t include time sensitive information, so they can be automated!
In addition to a call to action for referrals, you can add a call to action for leaving a review on your Google listing or Facebook page.
If your audience feels guilty about not being able to provide a referral, then they might feel inclined to leave you a positive review!
Email Marketing Tips
There are three goals to strive for when conducting email marketing campaigns:
Maintain high open rates.
Increase readership.
Improve CTA response rates.
The trick to achieving these three goals boils down to sharing content that appeals to your audience while making it easy to consume. Continue reading to see how to do it.
Make Your Emails Easy to Read
Readability is becoming more and more important in our high-speed world.
If your emails are easy to read and share appealing content, you can expect people to continue to open your emails.
Keeping your emails short and organized improves their chances of being read because your audience can skim them quickly.
Adding bolded headlines with distinct sections is also a great way to improve the readability of your emails -- white space is good!
Make sure to use simple language and sentence structure to ensure a seamless reading experience.
Tailor Your Content to Specific Audiences
An agent’s database should be segmented into different audiences based on:
City or Neighborhood
Relation to You (SOI, Lead, Former Client)
Readiness to Move
Personal or Lifestyle Interests
Family Type
Stage of Life
To increase the chances of your audience opening and enjoying your emails, it’s critical that you share information based on their segment.
For example, sending newsletters that cater to specific neighborhoods. Though this might mean more work for you to put together multiple newsletters, it will earn you a higher ROI in the end.
Diversify Your Content
We see so many agents neglect email marketing by relying on their automated system to send weekly emails about nearby listings.
That is the fastest way to irritate your audience and end up in their spam folder.
Your email marketing campaigns should provide them with a variety of valuable content with every email.
Remember, your audience should be excited to open your emails to see what’s inside.
Always Use a Call to Action
A call to action (CTA) is a polite command given to your audience to perform a certain task. For example: “Click here to view this report.”
CTAs have various degrees of commitment and should be strategically given based on where your audience is in the sales cycle.
To improve the rate in which your audience completes a call to action, you should provide appropriate CTAs based on each segment's needs.
Adding the CTA several times throughout your emails is also a good way to increase your CTA response rate.
How to Start Email Marketing Campaigns
Find an Email Marketing Platform
When you’re ready to get started with email marketing, the first step is to find an email marketing platform. Most CRMs for real estate agents offer email marketing functionality.
However, if your CRM doesn’t offer those capabilities, or you don’t have a CRM, then you should consider using a platform like ActiveCampaign or ConstantContact.
Here are a few criteria to consider when selecting an email marketing platform:
Does it integrate with your website?
Does it integrate with your IDX?
Can it sync with your CRM?
Will it charge based on mailing list size?
Does it offer automation functionalities?
Is it easy to use?
Are there a lot of tutorials available for it?
How is the customer support for the platform?
Can you add custom fields/tags for segmentation?
Build Your Email List
There are several ways for real estate agents to build their email lists.
Some of the more popular methods for growing your list include:
Offering free home valuations
Adding lead capture pop-ups to your website
Requiring a sign in to view IDX listings
Promoting your newsletter on social media
Offering free lead magnets on your blog
Collecting emails from open houses
Hosting giveaway contests
Running Facebook ads
If possible, try to collect additional details about the people you add to your list that will help with segmentation.
Define Your Purpose
Earlier in this blog, we listed the most popular types of email marketing campaigns for real estate agents.
Evaluate your needs and prioritize which types of campaigns will benefit you the most.
It’s best to start with a simple campaign or automation, then build out your other campaigns over time. This ensures that you follow-through with quality campaigns without getting overwhelmed.
If you’re overwhelmed with the different options, start out with a newsletter since it is a good catch-all for information your audience will want to see.
Create Your Emails
Again, start with something simple until you get the hang of it.
You might find that simple emails are not only easy to write, but also high performing. Remember, simple means easy-to-read, and people prefer that.
Once you’re comfortable with writing email market emails, you can incorporate links, images, and even polls -- in moderation.
Try to write your email campaigns well in advance if possible, so you’re not scrambling to keep up.
Send and Monitor
Schedule your emails to send throughout the month, or activate the automation. One email per week for each audience is a good rule of thumb.
Monitor open rates and engagement rates to gauge how your emails are being received. If people aren’t opening them, then it means they are not interested.
Using data to inform your email content is good, but seeking feedback directly from some of the recipients is the best way to know what people do and don’t like.
Use the data you collect to inform your email content and subject lines.
Take What You’ve Learned, and Use It!
If you’ve gotten this far, then you’re extremely serious about using email marketing. Continue your momentum by starting to work on your email marketing campaign(s) today!
It doesn’t have to be a lot; planning out your purpose for the campaign is a perfect start.
The Forge Philosophy
At Forge Marketing Group, we care about providing our clients with sustainable, holistic, and client-owned marketing solutions to help them grow their real estate businesses.
We’ve worked with too many real estate agents who have been burned by “lead generation” companies, so we make it our priority to offer everything those businesses can’t.
Need help with email marketing? Click here to request pricing and more information.