What should you do when your real estate email marketing campaign flops?
Like direct mail, social media, cold calling, and virtually every other type of real estate marketing; sometimes email campaigns just don’t strike gold as hoped. Sometimes this can happen to what you feel was the most important, and most valuable email you’ve sent in your life. So what do you do then? It is time to give up? Do you send it again? Do you strive to get better at your craft?
How To Take It
When prospects, clients, and contacts don’t respond to your emails, how should you take it? Is it time to curl up into a ball and feel bad for yourself? Do you charge ahead like a rhino, unfazed by any attempts to pierce your thick skin? Do you change things up? Before taking any action, perhaps it’s wisest to analyze why it failed.
There are many reasons that people don’t receive, open, and act on emails immediately. They might include:
- Bad email addresses
- Email providers blocking your messages
- Messages going to spam, or alternate boxes, versus main inboxes
- Recipients are just too busy
- Internet connection issues
- Weak email subject lines
- Bad timing
- Broken links in your emails
- Messages fail to resonate and get people to act
- They don’t have the financial means to act
- They don’t trust you enough
Everyone on your list could be impacted by any of these factors at any one time. You may not always be able to tell with 110% certainty, but if you pay attention to the data available to you, you should be able to test, and get some clarity.
How To Improve Your Email Marketing Success
There are a number of ways to investigate, tweak, and improve email marketing success:
- Clean up your email lists
- Build better and bigger lists with targeting and better calls to sign up
- Improve timing of mail based on your specific lists
- Resend unopened emails at different times
- Test new email subject lines
- Test new colors in your emails
- Change the types of links you are using in your emails, and where they go
- Test the from names and email addresses used
- Use different language in your messages
- Change the type of messages sent; newsletters, opportunities, etc.
The Risk of Ditching Email Marketing
Real estate marketers can’t afford to give up on and ditch email marketing. It is still a crucial spoke in the wheel for real estate agents, investors, and related business. It is a vital method of connection. Many want them, even if they didn’t open or act on your last email. Many heavy email users won’t use social media or pick up random phone calls. Give up on email, and you might be giving up on a massive chunk of your business. But there is always room for improvement and innovation. Chances are you’ve also invested a lot in email marketing and list building. Don’t throw that away. Overtime, email will have its better moments, and less fruitful ones for real estate marketers, but that will rotate with time. There is money in the list.
Alternative Real Estate Marketing Options
One of the worst mistakes that real estate marketers make is constantly hopping from one marketing channel or medium to the next without giving them a real chance to pay off. That can be financially devastating. However, it does certainly pay to maintain a balanced marketing mix. Some of the other real estate marketing ideas to consider mixing in might include:
- Social media marketing
- Outdoor advertising
- Pay-per-click marketing
- Direct mail
- In person networking
- Text and SMS
- Real estate blogging
- News releases
- Open houses
Summary
There are many reasons that emails might not always hit the target, but there are also many ways to improve your real estate marketing results. Dig into the why, test, improve, and consider augmenting deal flow with other channels.
