The Triple C Guide to Email Marketing
for Curaytor Excellence
Introduction: Successful email marketing can be broken down into three key factors: building a database, consistent messages, and content. With those three elements combined, you can launch successful email marketing campaigns that will help grow your business, market your listings, and even make you a more attractive agent to potential buyers and sellers. Offering eblasts to a large database is a powerful form of marketing that can persuade sellers to list with you and buyers to follow your work. This adds value to you and your brand and will help you secure future business and keep current clients happy.
Collecting Data to Build your database
For your emails to matter, you must first have people to send them to. You can write the most brilliant, compelling, evocative email campaign on the face of the planet, but if no one reads it, it doesn’t exist. The first thing you should do when building a database is enter your Sphere of Influence. Collect the email addresses of everyone in your contacts list, address book, etc. You can also use landing pages—which can be found online for free—to grow your database. Also, add agents whom you have networked with; they will want to know when you have listings to advertise so that they can bring a buyer! Overall, you should have at least 100 people in your database. Then focus on growing it to 1000, and then 10,000.
Consistency is Key
The most important aspect of email marketing is CONSISTENCY. You can’t send out a handful of eblasts and expect business to just fall into your lap. You need to touch your database regularly for it to be effective, and you can expect it to take three to six months to before you see results. Many agents give up or decide that eblasts aren’t effective before they can reap the rewards of proper time, effort, and consistency. That is an easy way in which you can distinguish yourself from other realtors in your area and scoop up the business that they’re leaving behind.
Rule: Send one eblast per week. But no more than one per day, excluding weekends.
Content
Next to consistency, Content is the most important aspect of your email marketing. If you build your database and send messages to it regularly, it’s important that those messages say the right thing, or else it won’t matter if people are reading them. You need a call to action in every email, whether you’re telling people to visit a landing page for more information, go to your website, or to reply back to your email, you need them to respond in some way.
Three types of business-related emails: Coming Soon, Open House, and Just Sold. The first two lets buyers know about your new listings and are an added value you can show your sellers. The last one gets you more listings.
The number of responses you get is an important metric; track that to see how effective your calls to action are. Your emails also need a clear point, even if that point is just to let everyone know you’re hosting an Open House that weekend. Finally, it’s important to look busy. All the business you’re doing means nothing if people can’t see that you’re doing it, which brings us to our next point…
The Humble Brag
It’s important to let your database know that business is BOOMING. Send out those new listings! Advertise those Open Houses! Tell them all about the house you sold in two days for 105% of asking price! BUT, it has been shown that people don’t respond well to bragging, which is where the term #humblebrag came from. You can tell your database about that new listing you sold, but frame it in a way that puts the emphasis on them, not you. “Hey, I just sold this house in your neighborhood. Can I help you sell your home next? Email back if you want me to give you a free home valuation. This home sold for _____. Could yours do the same?” This one-paragraph email accomplishes all of the above without sounding like you’re bragging. Remember, you’re here to help people realize their home-ownership dreams!
Market Statistics and Newsletters
The final email type that you should produce are monthly statistic videos and monthly newsletters about the area in which you work/live. People respond to advertisements that have pictures, but they respond even better to video. Take a video of you talking about what’s going on in your local real estate market, upload it to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, everywhere, and blast it to your database. Then, create a newsletter about everything going on in the area. What’s the most expensive home that sold in the past month? What celebrity just sold their Hollywood mansion for an obscene amount of money? What new construction could affect the value of your home? Paint yourself as the #1 source for real estate news in your area!