Look no further, agents, because you’ve found it: everything you ever wanted to know about using email marketing for your real estate business!

In this guide, you’ll find an introduction to email marketing, types of emails to send, best practices for crafting effective subject lines and email content,  automation tools and strategies, and more!

Introduction to Email Marketing for Real Estate Agents

What is email marketing?

Email marketing refers to the act of sending emails for commercial purposes. Here are some examples of email marketing tactics popular among real estate agents:

As you can see, the term “email marketing” applies whether the audience is one individual or one thousand.

Learn more: 10 Real Estate Email Templates That Convert

Why should real estate agents use email marketing?

Email marketing is a great way to nurture and convert leads, demonstrate your expertise and establish trust, and maintain ongoing relationships with past clients. Consider these findings:

How To Implement Email Marketing For Your Real Estate Business

Build & Maintain Your Email List(s)

The first step to implementing email marketing is building an email list. If you’re just getting started as an agent, add everyone you know—family members, friends, past coworkers, your plumber, your kid’s teacher, etc. You never know who might want to buy or sell a home—or who might know someone else ready to move.

The best way to manage your email list is with a CRM designed specifically for real estate. As you add new contacts into your CRM, you can also apply custom tags (buyer, seller, etc.), which will allow you to further segment your database into multiple highly-targeted email lists.

Keeping your email list accurate and up-to-date is very important. The last thing you want to do is misspell someone’s name or mention their spouse whom they’ve since divorced (awkward).

  • Make a point of regularly looking over your email list for typos.
  • Update contact and personal information as soon as you learn something new.
  • Send out an annual mass email to all of your contacts to confirm that the information you have on record is accurate and up-to-date.

Craft Compelling Email Content

Interesting, authentic, valuable content is the key to your email marketing success. Your email content has the power to create brand awareness, demonstrate your industry knowledge, build trust among your audience, and drive them to take action. 

The key is crafting emails that people actually want to read.

When writing* your emails, be sure that your content does the following:

  • Resonates with your audience: To accomplish this, you first need to have a deep understanding of your target audience—What do they care about? What keeps them up at night? What motivates them to make decisions? What is holding them back? Then, write content that speaks to those fears and desires.
  • Provides value: Whether you’re offering a free home valuation, sending them “5 Tips For Spring Cleaning,” or reminding them of next steps in their transaction, every piece of content you send should provide value in some way.
  •  Speaks in your unique, authentic voice. Allow your personality to shine through in your content. Your content will feel more authentic, and your audience will feel a more personal connection. (For some great examples of emails that are full of personality, check out these 5 creative out-of-office email messages.)

*And remember, your emails don’t always have to consist of just written content. A video recording of yourself speaking to the recipient is a great way to reinforce that personal connection!

Learn more:

Write Attention-Grabbing Subject Lines

A hastily written subject line is always a bad idea. Subject lines are the gatekeepers of your email marketing—if they’re not effective, your emails aren’t going to be opened. And if they’re not opened…well…nothing happens.

Your subject line has to grab a person’s attention quickly. It must be compelling, but it can’t give too much away. It should clearly state the benefit to the recipient. And, as a best practice, you’ll want to keep it brief—no more than 41 characters—so it can be viewed in its entirety on mobile devices.

Learn more: 

Avoid The Spam Folder

To prevent your emails from ending up in the dreaded spam folder, follow these guidelines:

  • Use accurate information in the “From” and “Reply-To” fields.
  • Write a subject line that accurately describes the content of your message.
  • Provide your business’s physical postal address in the message. 
  • Include an unsubscribe button.
  • Avoid using spam trigger words (such as free, sale, or discount) in your subject line.

Learn more:

Measure & Analyze Results

Most real estate CRMs or email marketing platforms will include tools for tracking the performance of your email campaigns. It’s important to analyze the data frequently so you can make adjustments to your future campaigns and find what works best.

The metrics you should track include:

  • Open Rate: The percentage of recipients who opened your email.
  • Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links within your email.
  • Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that were undelivered or returned as undeliverable.
  • Conversion Rate: The percentage of recipients who completed a desired action (such as creating a saved search on your listings website) as a result of your email.
  • Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage of recipients who unsubscribed from your email list after receiving your email.

You should also pay attention to the individuals who make up those metrics. Look at which people are opening your emails multiple times and clicking on links—those are your most engaged contacts, and the people most likely to convert.

Learn more:

Automate Your Email Marketing

If you’re not using an automation platform for your email marketing, you’re doing it wrong.

Automation allows you to delegate tedious, repetitive tasks to your tech tools. By creating and using email templates, you don’t have to write the same emails over and over again. 

Automation also makes it easy to add a human touch to your email marketing. Email templates can include data fields (such as Lead Name, Property Address, etc.) so even your automated messages will feel personalized to each individual.

A platform with workflow automation will enable you to put your entire business process—including all of the emails that need to be sent—into an automated system. Workflows will ensure that your drip campaigns run flawlessly, and that every email is sent to the right person at exactly the right time.

Learn more:

That’s a wrap!

We hope you found everything you were looking for in this real estate email marketing guide. If there’s something we missed, please drop us a comment to let us know! You can also subscribe to the blog and keep checking back—we’re adding new content all the time!