If you’ve landed on this article, chances are you’re an independent agent looking for help with your email campaigns. My guess is that your story follows (tightly or loosely) with one of these two narratives.
Storyline A: You’ve never seriously used email as a focal point of an online marketing campaign. Your list is tiny, and you send emails on a whim just to be sure people remember you exist. Only one problem: They forgot you a while ago and they need a better, more authoritative reminder.
Storyline B: You’ve been trying to develop the right approach with your email marketing, but your efforts keep falling flat. Your open rates are virtually nonexistent, and you have no idea what you’re doing wrong.
Whichever one of the above most closely relates to your situation, we have some advice that we think will help you get better results. Stay with me until the end – there is going to be some very good stuff I want to share.
Keeping Email Engaging
Email is powerful, but it’s also very fickle. People judge the caliber of your content by their first impression of it. If what they saw on your landing page or in one of your ads motivated them to join your list, you want them on it. These are people with genuine interest who are more likely to respond positively, forward key messages, and more. In short, you really want to build a cheering section around them.
Now, getting people on your list and keeping them on it are two vastly different things. Most people will stay on email lists until they can no longer navigate their inboxes. That’s when they start unsubscribing from anything they haven’t found interesting in a while. “Well, they probably bought a house…” OK, well… what about the people they know who are reading your stuff? Some of the best business comes from shares on social media and as forwarded content in emails.
When someone forwards one of your emails to someone they know, it improves your reputation dramatically. Never think that if someone buys a house you have nothing more to say to them anymore. Referrals and recommendations are a huge part of any Realtor’s networking strategy, and yet the vast majority – an overwhelming vast majority – never even think to use email to pull more of them.
The secret to accomplishing that is to simply tell people to perform the actions you want. Calls to action (CTAs) are essential to good email marketing. When you send emails about open houses, for example, there should always be a CTA to forward the current message to anyone who might have an interest or know someone else who might. Your reach can extend much further than you think if you just couple the power of email with the power of a well-presented call to action.
So, what if you’re already doing all (or most) of that and still aren’t getting results? What are you missing? Well, it could be several things, from the quality of the writing or use of grammar and punctuation to poor subject lines that simply don’t attract attention. However, it’s far more likely that you aren’t using the right approach with most of your audience.
With that in mind, here are the promised five strategies that you can use to test the waters and start seeing better results. An outgrowth of this is that you will learn volumes about your audience and how to keep them excited about hearing from you.
1. Cold Campaigns
These are the first contact email sequences that give people the clearest picture of your brand. This is also where people decide whether they like you enough to open your next message.
You can give them good incentives to keep reading through the use of storytelling. It’s true: A compelling story laced with open loops that require opening your next message to learn what happens next can be particularly effective. Andre Chaperon knows a thing or 12 about this. You should listen to him. Just sayin’…
2. Targeted Campaigns
Please tell me you’ve already segmented your email list. I’ve done a couple pieces here just on that subject, so I won’t tackle it in this piece, but this one hinges on it. Targeted campaigns assume a high level of research, observation, and social listening before launch.
It’s crucial to thoroughly understand your audience and how they respond to your messaging before just dumping them onto a targeted list. If you don’t take the time to observe how they engage with email, you might not have much of a list left before long.
3. Open House Campaigns
I touched on this a minute ago. This is a prime example of why “they bought a house” is no excuse to stop speaking to them over email. If your clients know people who know people who want to buy a house, forwarding an email is quite easy. Just ask them to do it, like I mentioned earlier. A brief, concise CTA in a message like this will motivate your more preferred readers to forward the message or tell people they know about the event.
4. Post-Event Campaigns
It goes without saying that staying in front of your leads and nurturing them into either buyers or avid fans is mandatory, so I’ll be brief on this one. Be prompt, but don’t look desperate. Give it a day or two before sending this kind of message. Also, think “relationship building” over just plain networking. This is important because it will help steer the messaging in a direction that engages. Sales pitches aren’t engaging. Relatable, personalized, relevant messaging is.
5. A Word About Renters
I want to tie things up by mentioning that renters are rapidly becoming their own niche audience in real estate content marketing. More millennials are opting to rent long-term instead of buying, and this presents a unique and increasingly urgent responsibility to reach out to them with high-quality content. Keep this in mind when assessing your list segments and deciding what kind of content to develop.
Final Takeaway
All of the above comes down to this: There are several ways to approach a real estate audience. If what you’ve tried thus far hasn’t worked, hopefully, the above advice helps. If you need more than advice, contact us, and let’s figure out the fine details together.
