What does it take to develop a quality real estate newsletter that can reach and impact those who receive it? Perhaps even more importantly, are newsletters even relevant anymore?
Email newsletters continue to be a highly profitable medium for real estate agents, investors, and other industry professionals. With minimal investment, newsletters can reach new contacts, retain old ones and even increase business. In fact, with all the noise on social media, email is proving to be one the best mediums at the moment. So what are some of the best practices and strategies for maximizing their potential?
Planning Your Real Estate Newsletter
While nobody may lead as hectic a lifestyle as today’s real estate professionals, it is only smart for them to invest some time in brainstorming, strategizing, and mapping out the process and details of creating a newsletter. Perhaps among the most important factors to consider, include:
- The purpose of the newsletter
- What positioning and branding must be carried over
- Who will read it
- How these readers will get it
Creating a Reader Base
A real estate newsletter isn’t going to do much for your lead generation, cultivating repeat business, or anything else unless someone is receiving and reading it. Spamming the world isn’t an efficient solution either. You may have existing lists and lead databases which assimilated, but you’ll want a tool to continue to add new readers. Having an opt-in form on your real estate website and via social media is a great way to accomplish this. Not only can it simply bulk up your real estate newsletter following, but it can help maximize the results of the traffic landing on your pages too.
The keys to optimizing signups are making it easy, prominently displaying the opt-in form, and incorporating a call to action that will motivate visitors to sign up. All too often, real estate pros and business owners neglect this starting point, and effectively cripple their ongoing results.
Choosing Your Tools
The next step is choosing your tools for sending your real estate newsletter. There are a wide variety of email services out there. They include:
- iContact
- Constant Contact
- Vertical Response
- AWeber
- Mail Chimp
Don’t sweat this part too much. The key is finding one which is easy for you to use and integrates with your real estate website.
Choosing Your Newsletter Format
The general consensus on the best format for email newsletters changes over time, and will certainly evolve further as new options come up. Some individuals that are keeping their branding simple and personal may still wish to go the plain text route. Others may need to get more ‘designy’ in order to keep in line with their professional branding. Some options now allow email formats to mimic website design for a seamless experience.
Selecting Your Content
If there is one principle which should probably be adhered to without exception when it comes to content strategy for real estate newsletters, it should probably be packing in tons of value. If you want people to stay on your list, act on your content, keep opening your emails, and maybe even share them. You want to bring a lot of value and interesting content to the table. Attention is almost priceless today. At best, it is expensive to earn new readers. So don’t be a scrooge.
However, one mistake that many have made, is distracting prospects. Where do your links take readers? What does it make them think about? Does it bring them closer, and faster, or the opposite? Will your content bring readers back to your site? How will you accomplish that? With snippets of your unique blogs? Real estate eye candy and exclusive listings? With competitions?
Don’t overlook the potential for sharing either. If your real estate newsletter is that good, it won’t just be missed, but others will want to share it. You can increase the odds of this using social sharing buttons.
Delivery and Advanced Tips
Just as important as everything else on this list, is the manner in which the newsletter is delivered. How often will you send them? How often can you send newsletters and consistently get them out on time? How often can you send them and still keep up quality, while avoiding burning out or boring prospects? Daily, weekly, or monthly?
The time and day newsletters are emailed is critical too. Real estate can be unique to most other products and services when it comes delivering messages effectively. When will your prospects have time to open, read, and act on your material?
Those real estate pros that want to get a little more advanced or creative may considered augmenting with print, or changing up the medium with podcasts, video, and infographics, or offering more tailored and custom options for more personalized content.
