Reaching out to your real estate database on a regular basis is important for staying top of mind—but at some point, does it start to backfire?
There’s a fine line between staying in touch…and being downright obnoxious.
If your emails are annoying, you’ll get fewer opens, more unsubscribes, and maybe even some spam reports. Not ideal.
In this blog post, we’ll analyze your real estate emails by asking five questions:
- Is the email useful?
- Is it relevant?
- Is it a quick read?
- Is everything in good working order?
- Are my recipients engaged?
I’ll also provide you with some actionable tips to make your emails less annoying and more engaging!
Ask Yourself These 5 Questions About Your Real Estate Emails
1) Is it useful?
Does the content of your email teach the reader something? Does it provide info that will save them time or money? Does it provide a tool—a PDF guide, or maybe a link to your property search tool? If the answer is No to all of the above…your email isn’t useful. And that makes it annoying.
This is the #1 rule of content marketing: Make it useful. Make it worth their time. Provide value.
Top-producing real estate agent Shay Hata is a boss at sending high-value emails. Here are a few examples of emails she sends to her clients after close:
- Instructions on how to claim your home on Zillow so it can’t be used in a scam
- Quarterly home maintenance reminders
- Reminder to appeal property taxes
- Reminder to protect your pipes from freezing (and what to do if they do freeze)
- Details on free money from city and state programs
- A copy of ALTA statement in January
- Reminder to file homeowners’ exemption
When you sit down to write an email, remember to focus on the lead or client who will be receiving it. Make it about them, not you. To be useful, always be helping.
2) Is it relevant?
It’s not enough to be useful to any person at any point in time. So, is your email relevant to where the reader is in their buyer/seller journey? Relevant to where they are in life?
Don’t send an article on the Top Cities For Retirement to leads who are in their 20s. And don’t send information about selling a home to your renters.
To send highly relevant emails, you need to have a good understanding of your contacts’ needs and personal interests, and have this information saved in your real estate CRM. Use tags to segment your contacts—buyer, seller, currently renting, investor, dog owner, parent, football fan, relocation, etc.—and create email lists you can reach out to with highly relevant information.
- For contacts tagged investor, monthly real estate market updates would be relevant.
- For contacts tagged first-time buyer, you could send a series of emails explaining each step of the home-buying process.
- If you have a lot of dog owners in your database, you could send them a list of dog-friendly restaurants in the area, best trails for hiking with your dog, top local dog parks, etc.
- Lots of football fans in your database? Raffle off a few tickets to an upcoming game—that’s sure to get their attention!
- Home improvement tips will be relevant to your past clients
Bottom line: To send highly relevant emails, you need highly segmented email lists.
3) Is it a quick read?
Does your email beat around the bush, or does it get right to the point? Straightforward is the way to go if you don’t want to be a nuisance.
After you’ve written your email, go back through and see if you can cut anything. Eliminate fluff. If you can, make it short enough that people reading on their phone don’t have to scroll.
If the topic of your email really does require a longer explanation, be sure to break up the text using short paragraphs, headings, and bolded text. Or write a short summary and link to a blog post on your website, where the subject can be described in more detail.
Get right to the good stuff. These people don’t have all day.
4) Is everything in good working order?
This question addresses the more technical aspects of your email. Do all of the links work? Is your text properly formatted—consistent size, font, and color?
If this is an automated email that uses a template, are your merge fields written correctly—no missing brackets or misspelled words?
When creating your email templates, always send a test email to yourself to make sure everything functions and displays as it should. An email with formatting errors feels careless. One missing bracket results in a message addressed to [Name, which makes it very obvious that the email was sent by automation, not an actual human.
And your email certainly won’t be useful if that handy link is broken.
5) Are my recipients engaged?
How many people are opening your emails? Are they clicking on links? What is your unsubscribe rate?
These metrics are indicators of whether your leads are finding your emails valuable or annoying. Monitor opens, clicks, and unsubscribes closely. If your numbers start moving in the wrong direction, you may need to adjust your content, frequency, or send days/times.
If you’re just getting started and need some benchmark statistics to measure against, check out MailChimp’s Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry. The averages for the real estate industry include:
- Open rate: 19.17%
- Click rate: 1.77%
- Unsubscribe rate: 0.27%
Keep an eye on these metrics to gauge how well your real estate emails are working.
We all received annoying emails that drive us to unsubscribe (or, worse, to harbor ill feelings for the sender that grow stronger every time we get yet another email from them). These emails are irrelevant, or provide zero value, or are just way too long.
Don’t let your emails become an annoyance to your real estate leads. Make sure each email you send is useful and relevant. Eliminate fluff to make it a quick read. Test and proofread your email for errors. And continue to monitor your email analytics for engagement.
If you do it right, your contacts will actually look forward to getting your emails!
This article was originally published on October 2, 2018. It has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
