Every realtor knows how competitive their industry is and how difficult it can be to break the mold and find success. You need to use a wide range of marketing strategies, and one of the most important ones is real estate email marketing.
But how can you create thoughtful and targeted email campaigns that captivate your subscribers? You’ll discover that from this guide, so keep reading.
The Elements of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Some of the most significant elements of a successful real estate email marketing campaign are the tools you use. Before we move on to some actionable tips and tactics to use in developing a powerful email marketing campaign, let’s cover the main tools you should consider.
A Powerful Design Tool With Robust Design Systems (MAXA)
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MAXA Designs is the first tool you should look at. That’s because it’s a design system made to help realtors and other professionals create stunning designs like email templates. You can get dynamic, branded templates that you can quickly and easily incorporate into your email marketing campaigns.
We also offer design automation and web-to-print solutions to relieve some of the top marketing headaches.
MAXA will help you maintain brand consistency in your emails, which is crucial today, especially in real estate. Staying true to your brand identity will make it easier for your target audience to trust you. Brand consistency will help your audience develop loyalty for your brand and thus sidestep your competition in favor of you.
An Email Marketing Platform for Automation and Outreach
Top email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and HubSpot are powerful tools that will help you with automation and outreach.
These platforms are generally used as centralized hubs for leads, clients, and past clients. With powerful segmentation features, you can send relevant emails to specific groups within your overall audience.
Moreover, they can send automated welcome emails to new signups and send a sequence of emails to build interest afterward. You can have a pre-written series of emails delivered at specific intervals. These could be:
- Monthly emails with general real estate news and updates
- A nurturing email sequence with home staging, market timing, and pricing strategy advice for sellers
- An email sequence with inspections and mortgage tips for buyers
A CRM for Managing Leads and Personalization
A good customer relationship management tool or CRM is a powerful asset at your disposal in email marketing. Top tools you can use include Salesforce, Follow Up Boss, and Zoho CRM.
For instance, Follow Up Boss is ideal for real estate teams as it’s specifically designed to help realtors with lead management and follow-ups. It’s focused on improving efficiency and speed in lead response and nurturing.
The other two are similar but geared to a broader range of industries. Salesforce is also known for its high customization and scalability capabilities, while Zoho CRM is primarily used because it’s a highly affordable option and features a user-friendly interface.
These tools will let you collect, organize, and analyze large amounts of data from clients and leads. The insights gained will help you segment the audience and create more personal emails for each group.
Analytics and Tracking Tools for Performance Optimization
Analytics and tracking tools are very important in real estate email marketing, which is one of the reasons why various email marketing platforms have reporting dashboards. There, you can get critical information on the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics and HubSpot are the best tools for this, but you can also choose others.
All of them focus on various metrics that will show the performance of your campaigns, including:
- Open rates — They help you understand the effectiveness of initial emails.
- Click-through rates — This metric shows engagement with your emails and how effective your CTAs are.
- Conversions — The metric tells you how impactful your email campaigns are on your business goals.
A/B Testing Tools for Continuous Improvement
Tools like Litmus and Mailchimp have A/B testing features that can be pretty helpful in refining your email marketing campaigns. By testing various aspects of your marketing efforts, you can see how effective they are and how you can alter each aspect to further optimize the campaigns. You can test aspects like CTAs, subject lines, and entire email layouts.
Litmus helps you ensure that the emails show correctly across devices and email clients. It doesn’t have a specific A/B testing feature for sending, nor does it send emails, but it’s incredibly beneficial for pre-sending optimization.
We’ve covered Mailchimp extensively as it helps create, send, and analyze emails. However, it also has many features that help with A/B testing. You can test your subject lines, email content, layout, CTAs, send time, and sender name to see how to optimize them further.
What Makes a Powerful Real Estate Email Marketing Campaign
Using tools is essential, but it’s not enough for you to run a robust campaign. Let’s see what else you need to do.
A Well-Defined Audience and Segmentation Strategy
We’ve covered tools that help you segment and define your audience, and it’s important to know that it’s paramount for you to do this to target the right buyers, sellers, or investors.
A generic email sent to everyone in your audience won’t do much. That’s why you need to use tools to identify different groups, like first-time, investment, or luxury buyers, for example. Then, you can craft emails that target each of these groups individually.
For instance, you can create a segment for first-time buyers and then craft email content to help them navigate the complexity of the mortgage process.
High-Quality, Visually Engaging Email Designs
Emails are no longer just text — they are very visual. High-quality visuals and interesting email design can help you attract the gaze of your audience. Most importantly, the visuals can improve the first impression of many, which is key in keeping a reader from skipping the email immediately.
Design systems like MAXA can help you create eye-catching designs without much effort. You can get things like:
- High-resolution property photos and videos embedded into the email
- Clearly written and concise text that won’t bore the reader
- Highly mobile responsive email layouts
For instance, you could have a branded template that highlights key features and shows a clear call to action.
Personalization That Drives Engagement
Almost everyone ignores generic emails. That’s why a powerful campaign must leverage personalization through dynamic content. This allows you to tailor your email sections based on recipient data you have within your CRM tools.
The AI features found in CRM tools can help you enhance this level of personalization. They can predict the properties or content most relevant for specific subscribers or groups.
A good example of this in practice is when an email is sent to a lead that has previously looked at apartments with waterfront views where the listings match these criteria. This could potentially lead to more engagement and even conversion.
Strong, Compelling Subject Lines and Preheaders
You’ve already heard how quickly a reader can skip or exit your email, but did you know that a compelling and strong subject line can prevent this?
That’s why you need to write a subject line that‘s clear and concise while managing to spark interest, create urgency, or offer some specific value. And yes, personalization has a place here, too. You can use the recipient's name or their location.
And don’t forget that the preheader, i.e. the snippet of text right after the subject line, can serve as the second chance at enticing the reader. You can use it to expand on your subject line (as you’ll likely lack space to fully convey your message) or offer a sneak peek into what the rest of the email provides.
Valuable and Actionable Content
Even though many realtors focus on listings and the overall design of their emails, the content itself is a significant part of successful real estate email marketing.
The goal is to provide actionable and valuable content to build trust and keep the readers engaged. Naturally, properties that match user criteria fit into that too, but you also need to provide content like:
- Neighborhood guides
- Insightful reports on the local market
- Practical tips on home buying or selling
- Advice and tips on home improvement
The key is valuable information that answers a question or solves a problem your audience will likely have. For instance, an email with a couple of steps that help people prepare their home for an open house showing.
Clear and Persuasive Calls to Action (CTAs)
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Since most of your emails will serve a purpose to guide the recipient toward a specific action, the CTA should be the final step in that mission. That’s why it needs to be clear, concise, and oriented towards inciting an action.
Use strong verbs to get the reader to action and don’t use generic CTAs like “Download your free home buyer guide now” or “Learn more”. If you have to use them because they fit, ensure they stick out by having visually contrasting colors from the content around them. This is also something that you should do with any other CTA.
Automation and Drip Campaigns for Lead Nurturing
Follow-ups and email marketing go hand-in-hand. You can use automation to make this process easier and avoid forgetting when to send each follow-up email. You can use drip campaigns to ensure that communication is timely and relevant.
For example, a person has an inquiry on your site, which automatically triggers a welcome email, followed by a series of emails with property listings that match their criteria, buying guides, and more.
This automated nurturing will keep your brand in your leads' minds, build trust and interest, and provide valuable information for every step in their journey with you. All this will increase the chance of conversion from a lead to a client.
Naturally, this is just one side of automation, and there are plenty of other automation tips you can use to your advantage.
Conclusion: Kickstart Your Email Marketing
Email marketing is clearly an essential part of marketing efforts for the real estate industry. It lets you stick out from the crowd and efficiently nurture your leads, eventually turning many of them into clients.
By using the real estate email marketing tools and tips provided here, you’re bound to achieve that for your business as well. If you need any help with the design and automation part, MAXA is ready to assist, so feel free to contact us to learn more.
