The Right For Real Estate Agents & Brokers To Use Email In 2018
I’m sure you have heard people in real estate and other industries talk about email being dead. So let’s start off today by getting one thing straight, email isn’t dead, but it doesn’t work if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Just like with anything, there is a right way and wrong way to getting positive ROI on email marketing for your real estate business.
The truth is, email is still one of, if not the most, effective drivers of web traffic and conversions. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t bother with it myself.
So if you are bummed by the lack-luster results you’ve had in the past, dust your shoulders off and get ready to get back on the horse.
Here is how you can sell more real estate with email marketing in 2018:
Subject Lines
As much as we all hate to admit it, we all judge books by covers. When it comes to email, that cover is the subject line.
Back in the early stages of the internet and America Online, everyone opened every single email with enthusiasm. Remember how special and pumped you were to here that deep voice proudly announce “You’ve got mail!”?!
Times have changed.
Now our inboxes are flooded with junk, spam, and other money-requesting, time-suckers, which is why we are quick to delete.
The difference between opens and deletes is all in the subject line. In fact, according to HubSpot, one-third of recipients open emails based solely on the subject lines.
Real Estate Email Marketing | Real Estate Email Campaigns | Sarah Layton
Winning subject lines include:
The sender’s name rather than the company or business
The recipient’s name
Forethcoming details that explain what’s in the email
Brevity and action verbs
Numbers, questions, and jokes
To increase your real estate email open rates even further, keep your subject lines under 50 characters and indicate if there is a video or quiz included.
Engaging & Interactive Content
Once you have gotten them to open your email, you need to deliver. That is, if you want to avoid spam and abuse complaints that land you in email jail.
The only way to get the results that you want from your real estate email campaigns is to inject the body of your emails with content that is both engaging and interactive. You need to hook your recipients from the first line.
HubSpot reports that interactive content generates twice as many conversions as passive content. Examples of interactive content include:
Polls
Surveys
Quizzes
Contentests
Calculaters (think mortgage and investment property return)
Maps & picture galleries
Everyone and their grandmother sendsplaint text emails sprinkled with static images. But if you want to stand out from the competition and get people engaging with you, you need to give them a way to interact with your content.
Using interactive emails is also an advanced way of gathering data about who is opening and engaging with your emails so that you can create segmented lists and increase your conversion rates even further.
Valuable Newsletters
You might think that newletters sound like an old practice, but they truly are the backbone of email marketing. They are also a powerful way to provide value to your prospects, stay top-of-mind, provide value, and position yourself as an expert without coming right out and saying it.
However, if you want to be successful with your real estate newsletters, you need to make yourself stand out.
The best way to appeal to your subscribers is to provide a divers, unique compilation of content in a variety of platforms. Filling your real estate newsletters with diverse content including videos, interactive content, and your real estate blog articles will also give you a visual edge.
Do not make the mistake of promoting yourself though! If you use your real estate newsletters to talk about yourself or how great you are, ask them to do something or buy from you, you’ll just turn them off.
If you must promote yourself in your real estate email newsletters, then make it 10% or less of the overall content. I’m serious about this. If your subscribers get the slightest hint that you are just trying to sell to them and you don’t give a shit about them, you will lose them forever.
Real estate newsletters are the time to give, not ask.
CTA’s
Email marketing is an immensley easy way to stay in touch with your “sphere”. But let’s be honest, the whole point of staying in touch is that you want commissions. That means that at some point, you need to push your subscribers through to the next stage of the sales funnel.
How do you do that?
With calls to action, silly.
CTA’s are best when they are direct and solitary. Don’t confuse people by giving them a million different things to do. Decide your mission before you design the email and make sure that your CTA matches that mission.
Crafting a call to action is a marriage of both art and science. Fortune 500 companies spend what you would consider a small fortune to hire companies that conduct research to study the effectiveness of colors, action verbs, tenses, placement, and sizes of CTA’s. I know you have no interest in that, but check out these interesting stats:
Blue is the most commonly used color for calls to action
About half of all companies match their CTA’s to their brand colors
The average email has 2 call to action buttons
The majority of emails contain the CTA within the top ⅓ of the body
Mobile-Responsiveness
We live and function in a mobile society.
Many of us spend more of our waking time looking at our phones than we do looking at anything else.
Most of us are never more than an arm’s reach away from our phones.
So it should come as no surprise to you that your emails need to be mobile-friendly and responsive.
Since I know most of you are wondering what the hell I mean by “mobile-responsive” let me break down the basics of what you need to know:
Your newsletters need to be in a single column so they are easy to scan and read properly on mobile devices
Keep your CTA’s and buttons to a minimal size. When you are designing them on your emails on the computer it’s easy to make the buttons large but they will consume the screen of most phones and cause unsubscribes.
Avoid including non-essential information and details.
Optimize your preview text for the proper length and clarity to increase mobile open rates
Content Curation
I’m hesitant to include this section because I am afraid it will deter you from using email marketing for your real estate business at all. Or it could cause you to get lazy about it out of frustration.
Designing and writng effective real estate emails is more complicated than most of you realize. It’s one of those cases of you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s actually the case for all content and content marketing.
Questions about structure, length, types of content, colors, CTA’s, headers, etc. can send you into a tailspin. These are all questions that allude to just how challenging it is to craft a powerful real estate email.
So in the interest of saving you a lot of time, dissappointment, and research I am going to share some basics to curating the perfect real estate email campaign:
Always use second person
Make sure the tone of your body matches that of the subject line
Keep the greetings personal
Establish the email’s relevance immediately
Address the reader’s concerns rather than your own
Avoid blocks of text. Instead opt for bullet points, lists, etc.
Make it visually appealing
Keep the length below 200 words
Tuesday afternoons are statistically the best time to click send
Now, when I say these are basics...I mean these are SUPER basic. There is actually much, much, more that goes into crafting an effective real estate email.
Again, I don’t want to go too deeply into the psychology behind the words and all that other junk because I don’t want to scare you into never clicking send.
At the end of the day, crafting your weekly real estate email campaigns should consume no more than an hour or two of your time each month. If it is taking a minute more than that, just outsource it my friend. Your time is simply too valuable.
Trust me, email marketing does work when it’s done right.
Want To Learn To Craft Powerful Sales Copy?
Writing copy that sells is complex.
There’s a reason I spent years studying it before starting me real estate content marketing agency.
The difference between effective marketing materials and garbage ones is all in the copy my friend. Writing sales copy goes so far beyond anything you were taught in school about writing. It encompases formatting, positioning, voice, psychology, tense, and so much more.
So at this point you have three options:
You can hire a professional real estate writer like myself that fully understands the real estate industry, as well as, what it takes to write converting copy.
You can continue to wing it on your own and hope for the best.
You can take my 6-hour Cutting-Edge Copy Writing Course designed for sales professionals like yourself.
Which one do you think is easiest?
