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5 Email Marketing Tips for Real Estate Agents

When you get a newsletter from yet another business in your inbox, is your first instinct to move it to the trash?

Well, you’re not alone. To run successful email marketing, you have to set yourself apart from the crowd. A well-written and attractive email newsletter is a fantastic way to keep your clients, both new and old, in the loop about your business, recent developments, and great new listings on the market. On the other hand, a poorly written and badly planned out newsletter just feels like spam, and will lead your clients to hit unsubscribe so fast that you might get whiplash.

So how can you avoid being mixed in with the spam? How can you deliver useful information that your clients will genuinely want to read?

Here are a few tips for those real estate agents who are trying email marketing for the first time, or need to course-correct inneffective email marketing.

1. Build Your Email List

If you don’t have an email list, well, then what’s the point of sending out emails?

There’s an art to the collection of emails for business purposes. You don’t want anyone to feel that you’ve somehow tricked them into giving you their email. And you definitely want to avoid the perception that you’re sending them spam every month.

Add an email sign-up on your website. Make sure that you tell the client what they’re signing up for. If it’s a newsletter, that’s what they should get. You could also encourage your clients to forward your newsletter to any interested parties. Maybe a friend of theirs is looking for a new home and, if they receive a forwarded email, they might give you a call. This can be a strong form of word-of-mouth. You never know.

Also, be patient. Building an email list can take some time. Once you have a list, it’s something that you’ll want to continue to nurture through your entire real estate career.

2. Keep It Short, Sweet, and To the Point

Nobody likes to get an email the length of a graduate thesis in their inbox. If you deliver a newsletter that looks like it will take too much work to read, then it will go in the trash before your client even gets to the end of the subject line.

Speaking of the subject line, you want one that will grab their attention while not appearing to be spammy. Avoid ALL CAPS! Try making your subject line into a question–something that will entice people to open it and read more. Try something like:

“Do you know how to make your home 10x more attractive to prospective buyers?”

Once the newsletter is open, keep your introductory paragraph brief and to the point. They don’t want to have to read two paragraphs of your prose before getting to the good stuff. And by the good stuff, we mean informative blog posts, useful tips, listings, etc.

Finally, always make sure that the newsletter contains essential pieces of information, such as your website, Facebook page, Twitter handle, and phone number. It should also have a great call-to-action that makes people want to use that contact information to get in touch with you.

3. Get Someone Else to Do It

Unless you’re skilled in graphic design and content creation, making a great looking newsletter can be a difficult and time-consuming task. But for a pro, it’s quick and easy.

There are some areas of marketing when it’s a good idea to admit that you aren’t an expert. You’re a realtor and salesperson with a wide skillset, but do you know how to build a newsletter that won’t “fall apart” on a mobile device? Hiring a professional to create your newsletter will ensure that your email marketing has a professional flare that your version might lack.

This isn’t an area where you need to break the bank. There are many different services online, from virtual assistants to freelance newsletter specialists, who are able to help you develop something that your clients won’t mind getting in their inbox every month.

4. What Kind Of Content Are You Going To Provide?

Sending someone a newsletter isn’t going to do a bit of good unless they read it. And how do you get them to do that? By providing quality content.

While your end goal is of course to generate business, that should not be the specific goal of your newsletter. Providing quality content–content marketing–should be the immediate goal; providing useful information to build a trusting relationship with your contacts.

Your newsletter shouldn’t just be a “Hi, how ya’ doing? Buy from me!” message every month. It should provide some piece of quality, useful content. It could include a great blog post about how to sell your home, or some kind of a special you’re offering, or even a contest. There has to be something in the newsletter that makes your client want to check it out on a monthly basis.

5. Make Sure It’s Optimized for Mobile

On a desktop computer, a newsletter can look fantastic with a great layout and lots of big, colorful graphics to grab the reader’s attention. On a phone, all of can get stripped away and you might be left with a couple of small photos and a single column of text.

Knowing how to optimize your newsletter for email is knowledge that you may not have, but it’s important to either learn or outsource. The first thing your client sees when they open the newsletter on their phone will determine if they keep scrolling down or if it gets instantly deleted.

There’s a great case to make for keeping your newsletter simple and clean, so it will have better readability on a small screen. Use single column layouts of text rather than multiple, as this will be easier to read on a mobile device. Keep your font size and type in mind, as some are harder to read on a smaller device.

Email marketing and building a great newsletter can seem like a lot of work, but the rewards can be extensive. Just like giving a client a great business card, a newsletter can act as a sort of digital calling card; a little slice of who you are and what you can offer them. Providing your clients with quality real estate content every month can help keep you top of mind, while also helping to drum up referrals. You just need to do it right and your email marketing will pay dividends on a monthly basis!