Real Estate Email Marketing: 5 Mistakes That You’re Making
Mar 06, 2023
As a real estate agent, one of the best ways for you to nurture your leads and close more deals is through your email list. Email marketing has a 40X ROI and allows you to personally connect with people who have said they are interested in what you do and what you have to offer.
Email marketing as a real estate agent is so much better than social media because when it comes to social media, only 3-6% of your followers actually see your posts at any given time. Email, on the other hand, you know that if you send an email to 1000 people on your list, all 1000 people are going to have the opportunity to see and open that email.
However, when we work with real estate agents, we notice that email marketing tends to be the area of marketing that they struggle with the most. Today, we put together the top 5 problems that we see when auditing real estate agents' email marketing and how you can begin to fix them and reap the rewards that come with a thriving email list.
High Bounce Rates
This is when you send an email and it gets sent back, either because the person entered their email incorrectly or they have changed their email address. An email bounce not only hurts your open rates but can also eventually land your emails in someone’s spam folder, which is the last place you want to be.
So what is the solution to fixing this problem? Doing a quarterly review of your email list.
Every three months, go through all of your subscribers and see if next to their names any of the emails are bouncing. If they are, delete those people from your list.
It may seem cool to have a big list of people (just like a following on Instagram), but it’s much better to have a smaller, higher-converting list than it is to have a bunch of emails that bounce every week.
Doing this will clean up your email marketing, ensure that you email the correct people, and cut down on your bounce rate, which in turn, will give you a much higher open rate.
Poor List Quality
The second issue when it comes to real estate agents and their email marketing is that they have a list that is poor quality. What do I mean when I say “poor quality?” I mean that they aren’t people who are their ideal clients or people interested in what it is they have to offer.
This happens when real estate agents are crystal clear on exactly who their ideal client/buyer/seller/etc is, so when they go to make free resources and get people to opt into their lists, they’re the wrong people.
Having the wrong people on your email list is like having the wrong followers on your social media accounts. Sure, the numbers look great, but when you go to try and talk about a listing, turn them into leads, or land deals, you hear crickets.
That’s why you always hear successful realtors (and all business owners for that matter) saying that you need to niche down, and as far down as you possibly can. I know that it can seem scary to niche down that far, because your first thought is, “I’m cutting myself off from so many people that could use my services . . .”
The problem though is that if you cater to everyone, you’re really for no one. We learned this in our agency which is why we now ONLY work with people in the real estate industry because it then allows us to create content specifically for our ideal client and it helps us become a subject matter expert.
You need to be that for your ideal client. Whether it’s first-time buyers, single-family homes, or being a realtor that specifically caters to one part of your city . . . niche down as far as you possibly can.
When you do this, yes your list will be smaller, but you’ll convert at a much higher rate than you otherwise would if you built a huge list. It isn’t about the number of people, it’s about the number of qualified leads you have and the number of deals you close.
Low Open Rates
Typically, there are three reasons why you as a real estate agent would have a low open rate on your emails. The first we talked about above, and that’s having a poor-quality list filled with the wrong types of people. The second is that you’re not producing the types of content that people on your list want to see. The third is that they’re not sure how to craft emails in a way that gets people to open them.
When people opt into your email list, it’s probably because you’ve given them specific information about a topic they are interested in. Maybe it was:
- The current value of their home
- Tips to increase the value of their home
- How to secure financing for a home
Then what usually happens is real estate agents have a few different resources like this but end up lumping all of the subscribers into one weekly newsletter. The problem with this is that while they might be interested in all topics of real estate, they might not because they didn’t opt-in for everything . . . they opted in for that one specific reason.
Doing this is one of the main reasons why real estate agents will have a low open rate because if you’re sending people information that’s not relevant to them, they’re less likely to open.
You can remedy this issue by having separate email newsletters for each free resource that you have. Will this take more work? Yes. However, that’s why you focus on quality instead of quantity because if you have a full list of qualified leads, then sending 2-3 emails instead of one a week isn’t a waste of time because you’re talking to your leads every week.
The last reason is that a lot of real estate agents simply don’t know how to craft great emails that get their subscribers excited and wanting to open them. Did you know the average person gets over 100 emails a day?
That means if you’re going to get your email opened, you’re going to have to have a great subject line. This means enticing your audience to want to open it will relevant terms and intrigue.
Then, when they open the email, is it beautifully designed or does it look like an afterthought? Is it well-written or a jumbled mess? Is it value-packed or are you simply selling your services constantly?
If you have a low open rate, then these are some of the things you need to be looking at immediately. The reason you never want to have a low open rate is that if it gets too low, it will start sending your emails to people’s spam folders because it believes you’re sending emails that aren’t relevant to people.
The average email open rate is 20% across all industries, however, we boast a 45-50% email open rate for ourselves and our real estate clients because we are careful to build a list full of interested people and send them value-packed emails that they look forward to.
Knowing these statistics and common issues, do an audit of your email marketing strategy, your list, and the content that you’re sending. If you find any problems, fix them right away! Your email list can be a goldmine if you treat it as such!
Lack Of Personalization
The point of email marketing as a real estate agent is to make people feel like they’re getting an email specifically from you . . . not something that’s being copied/pasted and sent to thousands of people.
So how do you do this?
As we talked about before, you make sure to send people information and emails based on why they opted into your email in the first place. However, there are a bunch of different things you can do to make your emails seem more personal to people. Here are some ideas below:
- Add their first name to the subject line/in the email
- Send emails on special occasions (birthdays, home anniversaries)
- Email them after they buy a home from you
- Market updates they should know about
- Things happening in their particular area
When people receive personalized emails with their name and hyper-specific information about their area, it gives the feel that this email was tailor-made for them because it has their name and information that they are interested in.
Again, yes this takes more work than simply sending out one newsletter to your entire email database, but the point is to turn these leads into deals, so take the extra 15-30 minutes every week and personalize your emails for your subscribers.
Inconsistent Frequency
This is by far the biggest issue that we see with real estate agents when it comes to their email marketing. For example, we just started working with a successful real estate agent that had an email list of over 5,000 people, but hadn’t emailed them in over six months . . .
SIX MONTHS!!!
So guess what happened when we sent a re-connect email sequence and asked if anyone needed her help? She closed 3 deals in 18 days! Imagine that: clients and deals were literally waiting for her to reach out on her list because they needed her help.
Now imagine this: how many deals she probably lost over that six-month period where she wasn’t emailing. Probably dozens . . . and that’s what you’re missing out on by not being consistent with your email marketing.
Imagine doing all the work of building a list of 5,000 people only to not stay in touch with them. Your email list represents warm/hot leads that you get a chance to connect with on a much deeper level than social media, which is why you need to make your email list a priority, not just an option.
We know real estate agents that do over 90% of their business strictly from their email list alone, and you can achieve the same results if you choose to take it seriously. Email marketing has the highest ROI of any other form of marketing, and there’s a reason why it’s been around for so long, and that reason is that it works.
Here’s what you do if you want to solve the problem of inconsistency with your email marketing: you create a calendar for it, just like you would with your social media content.
For example, say you’re going to email your subscribers once a week. First, figure out what day that is going to be. Second, the week before a new month, sit down and figure out what your topics for each email are going to be the following month.
If some big update happens, you can always slide that into a spot and save the other topic for later, but the main reason for doing this is so you don’t have to think about what you’re going to write about when you sit down, because it’s already been planned.
This brings me to the final point: create a calendar slot in your schedule every week when you’ll be writing the email. If you choose to have the email go out on Wednesdays, maybe you write the email every Monday morning of that week.
When you create a plan like this, it allows you to not only remain consistent with your email marketing but also allows you to create the best email content possible, because instead of creating last minute, you’re taking the time to carefully plan out your topics and content.
Conclusion
Having an email marketing strategy as a real estate agent can help you close 5-10x more deals than you normally would. How do we know this? Because we’ve seen it time and time again with the real estate agents we work with.
The best thing you can do is take a look at your entire email marketing strategy, see if you’re making any of these mistakes, and do your best to rectify them as quickly as possible. If you do this, I can safely guarantee you’ll land at least one deal in the next 30 days if you have a decent email list.
If email marketing is an area you struggle with as a real estate agent, then we’d love to help you out. Click the link below, and we’ll jump on a free call, and no, this isn’t a sales call. This is to simply help you audit your email marketing and give you tips and customized strategies that will work for you. Click below and we look forward to helping you with your email marketing!
