Email marketing is an essential part of every sales strategy for real estate agents. During uncertain times like COVID-19, email drip campaigns and email marketing can be tricky. It takes data-driven decisions as well as a thoughtful touch to create emails that will move customers closer to important moments like selling or buying. With this blog, you’ll learn just a few of my what I consider to be “best practice” options that will help you to craft email marketing drip campaigns that both engage customers and provide valuable content.
Building Trust
First things first…
Even the best email marketing campaigns aren’t worth much unless they actually get opened. Follow these tips and tricks to avoid being categorized as spam and keep your subscribers’ confidence high.
1. Permission. Make sure your contacts know exactly what you’re sending them, how they’ll benefit from it, and why they need to approve it before opting in. Make sure you keep opt-in boxes unchecked by default, and clearly explain what you intend to do with their information. Before collecting their email address, make sure you ask them if they want to receive promotional emails.
2. Quality over quantity. There’s less importance in having a lot of prospects than there is in knowing who’s getting your messages. Check your list of contacts and see which ones are interested in what you’re doing. You should easily be able to see this in a CRM with “Intelligent Link” technology. Then make sure each of those contacts are OK with receiving your emails. Don’t send messages to an email address if you don’t know its source.
3. If they’re not engaged, let them go. Stop sending the same emails to contacts who haven’t opened or clicked your emails for over 90 days. If someone hasn’t opened or clicked one of your emails for over 90 days, move them over to an advertising audience. Send one or two win-back emails, and automate this process to save time and execute at scale.
Did you know…most customers prefer to communicate with companies by email.
4. People are busy. They don’t have time to read long emails. Your email should be easy to read and be visually appealing so people get what you want them to know right away.
5. Template planning. What kinds of messages are you sending? Consider how many different types of messages you might send and how to structure them. Is it better to build one template with different modules, or would it be better to create a series of templates with unique layouts for each message?
6. Get their attention. There’s no doubt that shorter subject lines have higher open rates, which ultimately affects conversion rates. Try to make them no longer than 50 characters.
It’s true…customers are twice as likely to view personalized emails as important.
7. Personalize it. Now that you have the customer data and you should know your audience well – you can personalize pretty much anything. From including first names to complex messages personalized for each subscriber. Personalization doesn’t have to be complicated, either way. With a proactive CRM with merge fields, personalization can be sincere AND automated.
8. Automation is key to follow up. I know you all have heard me say this before – but the money really is in the follow up. You’ll be amazed at the potential for automating messages. You can utilize automation emails for things like the anniversary date of new home, re-engagement, birthday or holiday messages. They can be complimentary to your newsletter, email blasts, or other sends. Use automation to make your job easier.
If you are struggling to make your emails convert or just don’t have any idea where to begin when it comes to creating an effective and long-term drip campaign take a look at EngageMore CRM and Exposed Agent. You’ll find great ideas, superior advice and tips from a veteran real estate pro to make the most out of your email marketing campaigns.
- Contributing writer – Andrea Hendrix
