Email Marketing For Real Estate Agents: Tips and Best Practices

In real estate, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but the right words sell homes. Simply put: images entice, but effective messaging can educate potential clients, nurture new and existing leads, and ultimately close deals.

Since studies show that 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communication via email, one of the best ways to market yourself is by running email drip campaigns. Here are a few tips to ensure that you’re sending the right emails to the right audience.

1. Differentiate Your Audiences & Send Relevant Content.

This is the most important tip to create effective email drip campaigns. Readers don’t open emails that aren’t relevant to them. It’s as easy as that. So before sending anything out, it’s paramount to differentiate your audience segments by prospective buyers vs. sellers, hot vs. cold leads, and prospects vs. past clients.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll want to create a strategy for each segment and develop several relevant emails within each campaign segment. As an example, you might start by sending brand-new prospects a welcome email introducing yourself, followed by subsequent emails focusing on new listings, useful data on the local housing market, home improvement tips, and your favorite aspects of the neighborhood. This all works to build trust with prospective leads and establish yourself as a local thought leader–two things which won’t be as important if you’re dealing with past clients or following up with hot leads.

2. Create Clear, Compelling Subject Lines.

You can send your audience the most valuable, relevant emails in the world, but if your subject line doesn’t sell it, no one will read it.

Statistics show that shorter subject lines work best (the sweet spot is 9-14 words), but what’s most important is that you show readers how the content inside will be valuable to them. There plenty of blog posts and resources offering specific subject line suggestions, but some of the best email subject line practices to ensure your emails stand out are to personalize the subject lines with the person’s name or the neighborhood or listing where you met them, be casual and avoid coming across too sales-y, and make good use of the first 40 characters of the email (called the “preheader text”) to expand on the subject line and entice people to click.

3. Keep Emails Brief, Use Images & Link to Your Site.

According to Boomerang, the optimal marketing email length is between 50-125 words. Keep it short and sweet; add enticing images to break up text; link sparingly to keep people focused on your message; and be sure your links go back to your website, blog, and/or social media channels to drive traffic.

4. Track The Volume of Emails You Send Each Month.

The most common reason people unsubscribe from marketing campaigns is because companies send too many emails. In fact, the real estate industry is one of the worst offenders for email saturation and abuse! Of course, the more relevant, personal, and valuable your emails are, the less likely people are to disengage and mark your content as spam.

If people aren’t engaging with your content, you shouldn’t schedule your email drip campaigns to run longer than 2-3 times per month. At the bottom of each email, you should list your contact information clearly, so people know how they can respond to you. In addition, you should also create a clear way for people to change their email preferences and unsubscribe.

5. Get Personal.

Think about it: Are you more likely to open an email from someone you know or a bot?

The best way for your audience to get to know you is to include a picture of yourself in every email you send and to write your own emails. Following drip campaign email templates is fine, but be sure to modify them with your own personality and style. At the end of the day, drip campaigns are as much about selling yourself as a person as they are about selling homes, and people don’t just want to know what they’re buying, but who they’re buying it from.

Wondering how to take your email marketing efforts to the next level?

Check out our quick guide on the powers of email drip campaigns.