Email Marketing Glossary for RE Agents
Time and time again we say that email marketing is one of the most important tactics to include in a real estate agent’s marketing strategy!
This is because we always encourage our clients to look beyond lead generation and to prioritize cost-effective marketing solutions that produce consistent results.
Email marketing is perfect for agents because it yields a high return on investment (ROI) by nurturing leads into clients over time.
As you begin to implement your own email marketing efforts, you might come across unfamiliar vocabulary. Here's a glossary of popular email marketing terms you’re likely to encounter!
To learn more about how agents can use email marketing, read our Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing for Real Estate Agents.
Bounce Rate - The percentage of email addresses in your subscriber list that didn’t receive your email because it was returned by recipients’ mail servers.
An email bounces when a recipient no longer uses an email address or their email server is under construction. If you are getting several bounced emails, then you need to clean your email list by removing the email addresses that are causing bounced emails.
If you get too many bounces, your emails will start getting flagged as spam by recipients’ inboxes. If you’re collecting emails from people who are interested in receiving information from you, then you don’t have to worry about that happening.
Call to Action (CTA) - A CTA is a polite command given to your audience to perform a certain task. For example: “Click here to start browsing homes” or “Sign up for our monthly newsletter here.”
CTAs have varying degrees of commitment and should be strategically given based on where your audience is in the sales cycle.
Click-Through Rate - The percentage of people who clicked a link, image, or button in your email. This metric provides insights about the engagement within each of your emails.
With the click-through rate, you can get a sense of how appealing and effective your call to action, link placement, and content are.
Conversion Rate - The percentage of people who followed a call-to-action in your email. This metric is important because it helps determine how effective your email was in accomplishing its purpose.
A low conversion rate may indicate a need to adjust factors such as your call to action, email content, timing, or audience segmentation. The average conversion rate across all industries, as stated by Mailchimp, falls between 2% and 5%.
Double Opt-In - Asking subscribers to confirm that they want to receive emails from you by clicking a confirmation link in the first email. In a double opt-in, the user is only added to the email list after the confirmation click is done.
Double opt-ins significantly reduce the amount of spam accounts, bots, and fake email addresses that can lead to high bounce rates.
Drip Campaign - A pre-written, automated campaign that is designed to guide email subscribers to complete a particular conversion, such as reaching out to an agent to get a home valuation.
Drip campaigns are often used to build trust among subscribers by sending helpful information over an extended period of time. This is why they’re extremely effective for agents who have a long-term view for generating new business.
Email Blast - A single email sent out to a subscriber list simultaneously. These types of emails are not personalized, so they should not take the place of targeted emails.
Email blasts are best used to share boilerplate information or to promote events. An agent might use an email blast to share information about a new listing with their database along with a call to action to forward the email to those who might be interested.
Email Campaign - A single email or series of emails sent over a period of time designed to achieve a certain goal such as building trust among leads by sharing helpful real estate information. A good email campaign should have a specific purpose with defined metrics to measure its effectiveness.
Email List - Your list of email subscribers. Also known as a mailing list or a subscriber’s list. This is the list of people who will be receiving your emails.
Landing Page - A web page to which readers are sent when they click on a link in an email. Landing pages are usually designed to assist in facilitating a conversion of some sort. For example, a real estate agent may direct their subscribers from email campaigns to a landing page where they can request a market report or CMA.
Effective landing pages typically include a strong call to action as well as images, buttons, and/or text that prompts visitors to complete the conversion.
It’s important that the landing page reflects the value that the email’s call to action promises. If the landing page doesn’t reflect what was promised in the email, subscribers will get confused or feel discouraged.
Open Rate - The percentage of subscribers who opened your email. This metric can be used to measure the success of your email marketing strategy.
A low open rate often indicates that your emails are not appealing to your subscribers. In a report by Mailchimp, a popular email marketing platform, the average open rate for the real estate industry is 19.77%.
Preheader or Preview Text - The couple lines below the sender’s name and the subject line that your audience can read before opening the full email. It gives the recipient a better idea of what the email is about before they open it.
The preview text should also be as compelling as possible to encourage subscribers to open it. The most effective preheaders are written like cliff-hangers.
Segmentation - The division of an email list based on a set of criteria. Segmentation is used to ensure that your subscribers receive information that’s relevant to their needs. For example, segmentation would help an agent avoid sending buyer leads information about selling a home.
Some common criteria for segmenting an email list include: city/neighborhood, readiness to move, family size, lifestyle, status (lead, past client, SOI), etc.
Subject Line - The part of the email subscribers read before opening the full email. The subject line should summarize what your email is about in a way that is appealing to your audience.
It’s the first thing people see when they get the email, so it should be as compelling as possible. The subject line is not to be confused with the preheader or preview text.
Subscribers - People who have opted-in to receive marketing emails from you.
To learn more about how agents can use email marketing, read our Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing for Real Estate Agents.
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” sites and agencies, so we make it our priority to offer everything those businesses can’t.
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