Real Estate Email Marketing in 2023

If you are a realtor, email marketing is the perfect tool. Email is an effective and efficient way to reach out and communicate with your audience in ways they want or need because it's so simple and takes up minimal time. This blog post will go over some of the best email marketing tips for realtors. These are tactics currently used by the top 5% of agents and have proven effective at reaching leads. If your emails haven't been getting results, it's time you revisit these basics before putting in a lot more work.

What is real estate email marketing? Does it work in 2023?

There’s a wide variety of smart marketing strategies for your real estate business, including social media advertising and local outreaches. One of the most common was the Covid-19 pandemic which forced some agents to embrace innovative methods in an industry dominated by traditional marketing techniques like postcards. However, email marketing is much more powerful than traditional marketing techniques. It generates a 4200% ROI- $42 for every dollar invested. It just goes to show how underrated it is! Luckily for us, in a survey by The Close, 66% of realtors said they want to improve their email campaigns and CRM process in 2021! Realtors still prefer email marketing over social media for leads due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it is less time consuming than social media. Well-composed and personalized real estate drip campaigns would be an ideal way to nurture new leads into clients.

Realtors who combine these innovative methods with advanced real estate email marketing techniques, like list segmentation, will have some of the best tools on their side. They'll be able to reach many people at once for promotional purposes and sell more houses this way. Real estate email marketing aims to maintain contact with leads and former clients to improve engagement and generate sales. You can use this strategy as part of your overall business plan if you're looking for ways to create brand authority, build value, and gain more customers by attracting new clients. 

First, a few email marketing jargons:

1. Open rate: 

It tells about the number of people that open your mail. If you're looking for higher open rates, it's crucial to create email subject lines that are enticing and compelling, something to attract the reader. Your brand recognition must be strong, and your preheader is crucial. The best time of day dependson what industry you're in; however, the average open rate is 22%.

2. Click through rate: 

What percentage of your total email recipients clicked on a link in your email? A video in your email can improve email click-through rates. Good visuals are catchy! The average email click-through rate is 2.13%.

3. Spam rate: 

The percentage of your email recipients who reported your email as spam. If 30 people reported your emails as spam out of 1000, your spam rate is 0.03.

4. Conversion rate: 

The number of people who contacted you as a result of your email campaign. That is, how many people moved from leads into prospects or opportunities.

5. Email nurture campaign: 

A nurture campaign is a sequence of emails (usually automated or drip). Creating trust and urging your leads toward the next phase is the purpose of a nurture sequence (Remember: Leads to opportunities).

6. Click to open rate: 

This is the best way to measure your email’s actual engagement. It tells the percentage of people who opened your email and clicked on a link or CTA (call to action).

7. Double opt-in: 

With a double opt-in, subscribers have to click a verification link inside an automated email to become part of your email list.

8. Bounce rate: 

This is the percentage of emails in your list (out of the total) that return an error due to invalid addresses, full email inboxes, or blocked servers. Email bounces are inevitable, but ideally, your bounce rate should be less than 2%.

9. Email deliverability: 

This measures the ability of your emails to reach the receivers’ inboxes instead of ending up in the spam folder or other minor inboxes. A high bounce rate and spam complaints would harm deliverability.

10. Unsubscribe rate: 

The number of people who unsubscribed after receiving an email divided by the total number of email recipients. Ideally, your unsubscribe rate should be less than 0.5. The goal here is to keep the number as low as possible!

How to do real estate email marketing in 2023?

1. Identify your area of expertise and your target audience

There are almost 2 million real estate agents (which seems like a lot). This means you are probably competing with some big-name realtors. Yet your unique experiences would help you stand out. You should define your audience, your unique selling points, and your area of expertise. This will help you create targeted content that solidifies your authority while meeting their needs. Don’t just try and serve everyone! Next, you want to divide your audiences into different sections. For example, an SRE (Senior Real Estate Specialist) would attract:  1. Seniors (people over 50) looking to buy a new home  2. Seniors (people over 50) looking to sell  3. Millennials (people under 40 years of age) looking to help their parents move

2. Create a customer journey map

It would help if you looked at marketing from the prospect’s point of view. What do you think they’d like to hear you say? To do this, you have to interview your customers about their journeys. An excellent question to ask customers would be: how did you find me (us)? What sort of content-led them to you? Apart from this, you can ask other questions to help you understand your ideal buyer, their needs and what kind of content they’ll find helpful! For example, a first-time homebuyer is usually interested in the different mortgages and mortgage assistance available. An email sequence to such a segment could feature current 30 and 15-year mortgage rates, ARMs, escalator mortgages, and first-time buyer assistance programs. Here’s an excellent example of a customer journey map for a wealth management company from digital experience consulting firm Rightpoint. You probably don’t want to send listings; you want to give helpful information relevant to your prospect’s position on the buying journey (unless they specifically subscribed to get listings). Note that you can’t do all this with purchased lists.

3. Outline drip sequence ideas for each journey map

Your real estate email ideas are not effective because they are not targeting the right people. Drip campaigns (sometimes called follow-up messages) produce a 119% increase in click-through rates compared to normal campaigns. Combine relevance with automation, and your conversions could skyrocket. A drip campaign is an email sequence scheduled for a particular segment of your customers. These emails are important as you will quickly burn out when manually sending multiple emails to different segments of your customers. Let's face it, that’s a lot of grunt work.

What type of emails do you send to real estate clients?

Set out an order of importance for your email campaigns that starts with current customers, former clients, hot leads, and cold leads. Keeping your existing real estate clients up to date at each step of the home buying or selling process is probably something you should do manually. For former clients, real estate email templates or sequence examples include: 1. Client testimonial request email(s)– If you do a good job for them, your past clients should be happy to provide testimonials. Ask them to put in a good word for you! 2. Referral request email(s) –Most people are more likely to trust referrals from their friends and family than marketing campaigns. Your previous clients may have someone in need of your services from time to time. 3. Social media contest invitation email(s) –Since we’re all a little competitive, one of the best ways to generate traction on social media is to run a simple contest. Everyone loves contests. You might want to consider partnering with a local small business to accomplish this. 4. Local events and happenings newsletters –Provide past customers with information about exciting events, happenings, and news in your area. 5. New listings newsletter(s) –You should let your past clients know about some of your remarkable new listings. Who knows? They might have a friend who wants to upsize their home. 6. Event announcement(s) –Have an upcoming event or presentation? A couple of your past clients might attend. 7. Company new(s) – What news would help increase your brand perception? Share news about new real estate agents joining your team, company expansions, or cool projects you are working on. Make sure to keep the focus on the company and its activities! 8. Holiday, Anniversary, and Birthday emails – You probably should know the most important details about past clients, including their wedding anniversaries and birthdays. Make them feel important! This offers an easy, effective way to personalize your emails and make a good impression during the important dates in their lives.

What types of emails should you send to your real estate leads?

You want to increase the frequency of emails to warm leads while decreasing email frequency to cold leads. Ideally, you should be removing anyone who hasn’t opened your email in 2 months. This ensures you don’t have a high spam rate, and your email deliverability stays in top fettle. Emails to real estate leads should include:

1. Welcome email(s)

2. Educational/nurture email series

3. Social media contest invitation email(s)

4. Local events and happening(s) newsletters

5. New listings newsletter(s)

6. Open house and event announcement(s)

7. New reviews and client testimonials/stories

8. Holiday emails

Should I use a template or write each email from scratch?

The purpose of an email template is to save time. Writing each email from scratch is inefficient and, frankly speaking, tedious. However, you don’t want to use real estate email marketing templates every time. For example, clients anticipating updates on a home sale aren’t going to care about your email’s visual appeal. With that being said, there are many email templates online, both text-based and visually designed emails, that have been proven to work. You should customize them to fit your brand voice, type of service, and colours. You can also hire experts to help with email design and copywriting. 

Why are people not reading or engaging with my real estate emails?

Real estate emails perform so-so in terms of click-through rates. For real, the open rate is 28.37%, the unsubscribe rate is 0.16%, and while spam rate is 0.06%. 53% of email marketing professionals struggle with low click-through rates.  Why is the click-through rate significant? Because it is a measure of email engagement. Based on Ascend2’s survey, 73% of marketers use click-through rates to evaluate the success of their email marketing campaigns. The Click-through rate is the essential email marketing metric. So why do most real estate emails have low click-through rates?

1. Your emails are not optimized for mobile

More than 60% of emails are opened on a mobile device. Emails optimized for mobile generate have 15% higher click-through rates (compared to emails that are not optimized for mobile).

2. Your email contains too many CTAs positioned wrongly

The paradox of choice states that when people are presented with many options, they choose none (Indecisiveness is real!). It’s very common to see real estate emails and real estate landing pages with lots of listings, each bearing its own CTA. Though this seems like a good idea, it isn’t. It creates an overwhelm of options. One CTA placed in the centre or the upper left would work better.

3. You are not using an email preheader

The email preheader is the summary text that follows your subject line. On mobile, a preheader can help improve your open and click-through rates. Having a preheader to accompany your email’s subject line could increase your open rate by 3% and your click-through rate by at least 1%.

4. Your subject lines are boring 

Your subject line determines whether or not someone opens up your email. It also subtly determines the amount of attention they pay to your email content. A subtle way to improve your open and click-through rates is by personalizing your subject lines. Studies show that marketers who use personalization to make their emails more relevant increase click-through rates by 139%.

5. You are not using high-quality, relevant images

Marketing emails with at least one image have almost 6% higher open rates than text-based marketing emails.

4. Choose templates that align with your brand

With marketing emails, design and images that are not overwhelming can significantly affect your click-through rate. In addition, you want your brand to be recognizable across a vast number of touchpoints.  color has been proven to affect purchasing intent. There is an essential field of marketing that studies this: color psychology. According to a study titled “Impact of color on marketing,” up to 90% of snap judgments about products are based solely on color. As odd as it seems, beige yellow on your landing page design but no yellow in your email design could create inconsistency that affects prospects’ decisions.  Here are some ways to create more aesthetic designs in your real estate emails:  1. Using complementary colors, create an attractive color scheme. You can use a free tool called Coolers to define your color scheme.  2. Choose font pairings that work well together – one as a headline and the other as body content.  3. Create email marketing templates that are simple but aesthetically pleasing. (If you use header images) place only one attractive appearance per email.

5. Connect your CRM

It is important to easily sync contacts between your real estate email marketing software and your CRM.

The best time to send emails to potential customers?

GoCustomer found that the best day to send an email to get the highest click-through rate is Monday and Tuesday (the worst day to send an email is Sunday). The same study shows that email click-through rates are highest at 6 am and 3 am – with a peak click-through rate range between 7 am and 11 am.

How often should I send emails? 

You don’t want high unsubscribe rates (nobody wants those). Hence your emails need to provide good value constantly. This is hard to do when you keep sending emails daily. Research shows that marketers who send out one campaign per week get the highest average open and click-through rate. 

Bring your automated real estate email campaign to life:

Coronavirus has caused real estate processes to lean towards the digital world. Even though the average real estate agent has a median age of 55 years old, most have adopted new technologies like drones, virtual staging, and podcasting. Many realtors have adopted real estate content marketing. There are now dozens of real estate clubs on podcasting service, Clubhouse, with sizable memberships. Yet real estate email marketing boosts the highest ROI of all marketing efforts.