What are the smartest ways for real estate pros to maximize email marketing efficiency in today’s market?
Email marketing remains one of the key real estate promotion channels. Still, as well as it works for some real estate pros, others are struggling to get started. Having said that, what are some of the strategies that can be put into play to get more out of this marketing channel?
Email Marketing
Email marketing has been one of the staples of real estate marketing for a decade. It has been through its own cycles, just like direct mail, internet leads, and outdoor advertising. In spite of the fact that a large percentage of generation Z may rarely use email, it remains one of the best marketing tools for reaching today’s buyers, sellers, lenders, renters and investors.
Email marketing offers an array of benefits including:
- Staying in front of customers
- Driving inbound real estate Internet traffic
- Boosting social media marketing
- Highly targeted marketing
- Ease of pinpointing delivery
- Affordable and high ROI
- Simple to create and distribute
- Easy to automate
Common Struggles Facing Real Estate Marketers
Email marketing can be great, but it can be challenging too. Some of the common challenges include:
- The stress of hanging on to every small metric
- Getting started
- Consistency in messaging
- Figuring out what to email
- Time constraints
- Avoiding landing in the spam box
- List building
- Retaining subscribers
Hiring some help can aid real estate pros and companies in overcoming most of these challenges. Put someone on the task, and get on with closing the leads.
Email services are getting smarter, and better at filtering out spam. Unfortunately, with all the real estate related marketing going on, that means many related words and phrases are deemed spam. The real problem, however, is that many are scaling back all of their content for these words and phrases. What about SEO? You don’t want to wipe out your online presence and give the competition the edge just to get more emails into inboxes. Make sure to differentiate between your different types of marketing. Think about tweaking and optimizing your in-email content without sabotaging your website and blogging.
Email Lists to Check Out
A great way to get ideas for email marketing is to check out what others are doing. Some email lists and email newsletters to check out include:
- FortuneBuilders
- CT Homes, LLC
- Seth Godin
- Tim Ferriss
Email Services and Tools
There are many different email services to use today:
- AWeber
- MailChimp
- iContact
- Constant Contact
- Get Response
- Vertical Response
Most are very similar. Look for simplicity and easy integration with your real estate websites and other online marketing channels. One of the newest trends is also to use email templates that match your website design.
Have Somewhere for Readers to Go
One of the most critical mistakes that real estate marketers are still making with email is talking at consumers, versus leading them to where they really want to go. If you just blast your entire blog post, what reason do they have to click through to your website? None. An email is to spike interest and create action.
Before launching another email campaign, make sure you have some type of real estate website, blog, or at least a landing page for them to visit. This is also essential for recruiting more email list subscribers.
Expanding Your Email List
There are many ways to build your list. Yet, one of the simplest and most affordable remains exchanging marketing messages with strategic partners. Send a recommendation email to your list on behalf of one of your business partners, and have them do the same. It really doesn’t cost either of you anything extra, except for content creation.
Summary
Email marketing remains a core part of the real estate investor’s lead generation tool kit. Whether you have been dragging your feet or just need to take what you are doing to the next level, the end of this year is the perfect time to ramp up, cross this off of your to-do list, and get ahead for the New Year.
