Getting your hands on high-quality real estate leads is becoming both easier and more affordable with an email campaign. Unfortunately, once the lead flow has been turned on, real estate professionals are faced with a new challenge: converting those leads into closed deals. Regardless of where you find your prospects, statistics have shown that when it comes to conversion, email marketing campaigns take the cake – hands down.
Just take a quick look at the facts:
- When it comes to converting a lead into a customer, email marketing has been shown to be 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.
- The average Joe (or Jane) is spending 6 hours a day on their email. Even assuming they take the weekend off (and most don’t) that translates into 30 hours a week, which is practically a part-time job.
- Speaking of jobs, while office workers are on the clock, they’re checking their email about 30 times each and every hour!
- The real estate industry boasts some of the highest open and click-through rates of any industry.
And there are plenty more equally inspiring facts and statistics out there.
In addition to being widely used, email marketing campaigns boast the highest ROIs of any of the other marketing channels available. So it makes sense that smart real estate professionals are using email to their advantage. If you’d like to join their ranks, making the move is easier than you think. By using these following five strategies, you can make the move into email marketing without spamming anyone and actually increase engagement from your lead list. When done right, your client base will actually thank you for bringing value into their lives.
5 Simple Steps to a Highly Converting Email Campaign
Before we delve into the five steps, it’s important to take a moment to understand the difference between an email campaign (often call a drip campaign) and just sending an email. Email campaigns use automation to send out a scheduled series of campaigns at predetermined intervals to multiple subscribers. With the power of a good CRM software, campaigns can range from relatively simple to extraordinarily complex. So, we’re not talking about manual BCC messages sent through your Gmail account.
With that understanding, let’s dig into the essentials of a high conversion campaign.
Step 1: Start Segmenting
Real estate professionals may have the highest open and click-through rates, but there’s one area where there’s a lot of room for improvement, and that’s segmentation. 60% of real estate pros fail to segment their list into highly specific and targeted subsets. When you consider that the key to generating revenue is starting with relevance, you can see why this can be a huge problem. Buyers are looking for different information than sellers are. Men have different hot buttons than women. Age can greatly affect messaging preferences. Old, inactive leads require different tactics than new, active additions to your list. Referral leads and social media leads require a different touch.
By applying tags or labels to our leads, you can drastically improve open rates, engagement and ultimately conversions. Obviously, it’s much easier if you start segmenting at the get-go, but it’s never too late to get started.
Step 2: Personalize Whenever Possible
Because email campaigns are bulk by nature, without a little finesse, your messaging can seem cold, impersonal and irrelevant. By using email marketing clients or CRMs, you can add a personal touch with very little effort using the merge function. This will allow you to personalize your emails with practically any data point, ranging from first and last name, gender, specific addresses and much, much more. If you input where a lead source originated from, you can add an even more personal touch to your messages.
Step 3: Keep Your Messages Short
Considering the fact that the average person’s attention span is about 8 seconds, you don’t have long to grab their attention and get them to take action. Your drip campaign is NOT the place to get long-winded. Brevity is best. The shorter, the better. How short? The best emails range from nine words to five sentences. Yep – you read that right. Nine words to five sentences.
The good news is that it’s okay to have more to say. Just don’t say it all right there. Instead, if you’ve written a killer 500-word blog post that you want them to read, give them a hook and link to it. Those that are interested will click through. Those that aren’t wouldn’t have anyhow. Whether you’re creating your messages yourself or outsourcing them, you’ll save time and money by keeping your messaging concise.
Step 4: Monitor Your Open and CTR Metrics
When it comes to any form of marketing, if it matters, you need to measure it. It’s not enough to call a campaign a success because you liked it. You need to know what the audience thinks. There’s no better way to discern this than to monitor your open and click-through percentages. In the real estate industry, the average open rate is about 25%. Knowing that, if you see that your last message had a 50% open rate, you know you’re on to something. If it was less than 10%, you missed the mark.
Furthermore, monitoring these metrics makes it easier to do split testing and see if a tweak to the headline or adding in an emoji might make a big difference.
Step 5: Have a Clear Call to Action
Even if your only goal of an email is to educate or inform, it’s still crucial to include a call to action. People expect it – want it – so don’t leave them hanging. There are no shortage of possible calls to action:
- Hit reply and let me know the best time to reach out and connect.
- Download this free report.
- Read our latest blog.
- Request a free market analysis.
- Find out how much your home is worth.
Any one of these calls to action will not only lead to greater engagement, it allows you to move prospects deeper and deeper into your sales funnel, taking you ever closer to obtaining the listing or the sale.
Make the Most of Your Email Campaign
Just because something is simple, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. But with a little time and practice, you’ll get the hang of it and start seeing real results and reeling in the revenues to prove it. However, if this all sounds like Greek to you, that’s okay, too. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when you’ve got an ally like us on your side. Whether you need someone to help guide you through the process or totally take the wheel, we’re here to help. Just contact us and we can help you get the ball rolling (and you rolling in the revenues).