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Email Marketing can be a big lead source, just as long as you use the right techniques when using your email list.
Build your list through opt-ins or Facebook and other social media. Home value ads and pixeling anyone who visits your website or page will build it out. Collect contact information during any open house or event that you are a part of as well. Email is effective because it is one of the most private and the longest lasting form of social media these days.
You can't go a week or so without sending to your list and you can't send multiple things in a short span and overload your list. People will forget about you then unsubscribe if you send something after going a while without sending anything.
The best practice is to find your most successful days and stay with those.
Email marketing in the real estate industry averages 18.48% open rates, according to bombbomb.com.
They also say that Wednesday and Thursday produce the best open rates, but this is going to vary with each person and niche they are targeting. You're going to have to test each day until you find the system that will work the best for you.
The majority of your emails should not be about new listings or open houses. That's going to be a very quick way to burn people out and get them to unsubscribe. If they're not looking to buy or sell then that's a bad strategy.
Mix in any sort of content that you produce or anything that will be of benefit to your list. Here are some options:
This is where you can share recent updates and other news with your audience. You can put new listings or open houses in here, since that's not all it will focus on. Making it a community newsletter and talking about upcoming events in the area is a great way to get it read.
Add latest posts from your blog or even any video walk-throughs you've put up recently. You can talk about the local market or any trends. It's just a way to stay fresh in your lists' mind. Have your logo or brand at the top of the email.
This is kind of like a newsletter, but it's just a bunch of blogs, articles or news that you find from all over the web and put together for your audience. You can add your own blog posts or something from your site as well.
The benefit of this is that it doesn't matter it's from someone else. Digests are the perfect email type for your leads who don’t have a lot of time to read through newsletter emails.
These are your holiday themed emails. It's basically just taking advantage of timely events. Sports, Olympics or anything can be used for this, they don't have to relate to your business or real estate at all.
This is where you can send out any information on listings or any buyers who are looking. This is also where you can focus on market reports and things of that nature if you want to as well. The key to this will be the next step though.
This way, if someone clicked on a home value ad, then they should be in a different list with people interested in selling. Click through rates for multiple smaller lists are higher than those for one large list. So this will improve your rates in general.
But segmenting them as much as you can (which won't always be possible), will let you send your listings or open house notifications more freely, since you know you'll be targeting people that have shown some sort of interest in that.
Text links get a bigger click through rate than buttons. Sending text links with your personal name and email without huge company branding is also more successful.
Both links in the text and the url do better than buttons. People won't open emails as often if it seems affiliated with a big company. You need to have your own personal email, separate from your company email, so people feel connected. Always use your own name to end it.
It's probably a smart idea to have them in a separate list. This way you can send some tailor-made emails to them. You already know by now how important referrals and testimonials are from your past clients.
So be sure to stay in touch with them by sending holiday emails and occasional updates on events in the area.