Email Marketing

Email Marketing
By Shannan Hearne
Last month we talked about six powerful ways to drive traffic to your real estate web site. Over the next few months we will discuss these six tools in depth to help you attract more buyers and sellers, so you can sell more properties. Email marketing is an affordable, effective tool for marketing your web site and growing your contact base. Here are some simple tools and rules to keep in mind when email marketing.
Sell With Your Subject Line. If the subject line of your email message isn’t compelling, people are never going to make it to the message itself. If you want to excite someone about a new property you have for sale, use high power selling words in the subject line like “look”, “hot deal”, or “house of the week”. When you write the subject line of your email, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and think about what would make you open the message. Don’t overuse the same subject words and phrases, either. If the buyers you really need to attract need to be looking for a dog of a house, call it a dog of a house. Misleading subject lines might get a high open rate, but they don’t win you friends and influence people.
Meaningful Messages and Relevant Content. Most of us get more email than we need. Some of it we recognize for the garbage it is and hit the delete button. Some of it we are tricked into opening and then irritated with the sender. Separate yourself from the email marketing masses by sending meaningful messages with relevant content. Send property for sale message to your buyers and property sought messages to potential sellers. A nice way to send meaningful, relevant messages to your whole list is to occasionally, “send some love” as we put it in our office. Valuable information that is truly of interest to your whole list is a welcome email. And don’t forget to send holiday messages and congratulatory messages to new property owners.
Design Emails for Deliverability. What good does it do you to have a 20,000 name mailing list if your email marketing messages don’t make it to 15,000 of them? Not much! Take the time to design email messages for ultimate deliverability. Avoid words that you would spam block from your own inbox. Carefully craft emails that say what they mean and mean what they say. Whatever you do, check them through a spam detection program before sending to your list.
Keeping “You” in Your Newsletter. I genuinely hope that you will email a newsletter. There is no better way to keep in touch with your mailing list. But keep the newsletter a truly you document. Use your own content. Share information that is both relevant to your list and of interest to you as well. If you are a real estate investor who just happens to be an excellent fly fisherman, share little tidbits about your fishing life with your readers. Even if they don’t fish themselves, they will remember you as the real estate guy or gal who casts a fast fly and reels in the deals. Put a piece of yourself in each newsletter. You can refer to Larry’s Goins On section of this newsletter for examples of how this can be done.
Don’t Forget the Web Version of Your Email Newsletter. This isn’t really an email marketing tip, but it’s important to remember. If you are going to go to the trouble of sending a newsletter, be sure to publish it on your website as well. There are two powerful reasons to do this. First, it keeps the newsletter available for posterity sake so tomorrow’s subscribers can read it even though it was emailed today. Second, it gives your website all important keyword density and content, which improves your search engine rankings. Don’t waste your time and energy writing it once and then throwing it away, post it online and let it live forever. One easy way to do this is to create a blog connected to your site and uploading your newsletters to your blog site. We will talk about blog’s in depth soon.
Get to Know Your Customers and Build Trust. When you email your customers, you are doing two things. Telling them who you are and selling them something. Give them the respect of getting to know them, too. Invite them to interact with you by completing surveys or sending responses to questions. Find out what they are interested in, and then let them know that you care because they care by sharing information of interest to them in future messages. People like to do business with people they like. Show your customers how likeable you are by caring about them. This is one of the best ways to build trust. If they trust you, they will buy houses from you and sell houses to you. Think about the emails that you always open no matter how crazy the subject line or the content. They come from people that you like and trust. Make sure your mailing list feels that way about you and your emails.
Targeting and Demographics. If you are marketing properties in Michigan by writing an article about the Great Lakes, will you get much of a response from people in Florida or New Zealand or Texas? Target your email marketing. Send your messages to the people on your list who fit the demographics for your marketing message. It is so important that you maintain your mailing list in a manner where you can segment and send messages to the most appropriate people. This lets you email market to your list more often, without wearing people out with your messages. Keep them targeted at the right demographics.
Don’t Begin Before You Double Opt-In. As you collect email contacts, make sure that your members are double opting in. This is the process by which they subscribe to your list and then click on the link in a confirmation email. This protects you from being accused of sending spam mails. Don’t market to your list until the members have double opted in. If they neglect to double opt in, send them a gentle reminder invitation to double opt in to your list. You can encourage them to do this by offering a free e-book or report for double opting in.
More Links Equal More Clicks. The more times you put a text link to a URL in your email message, the more likely you are to have people click from the email message to the actual content on the website that you want them to see. Use hyperlinks as often as is reasonable to increase the click through rates to your offers. Don’t forget to include links to your primary web address, your blog, your property listings, etc.
Build Your List or Mail Paper Airplanes. Now that you know how to market with email, you have to build your mailing list. Otherwise your email campaigns won’t have much impact. Quality is as important as quantity. But without quantity you can’t ever fully test an email campaign. Be sure that your web site offers visitors ample opportunity to subscribe to your list. Create free reports and offers to grow your subscriber list. Keep it growing and healthy by providing good, quality content in your mailings. Without a quality mailing list, your email messages are a little bit like a paper airplane. It’s cute to watch fly by, by no one see’s the message that is inside.
Email marketing is an integral part of any internet marketing. Whether you are selling real estate or grass seed, you have to continually market with email messages to keep the sales machine rolling. Remember, the least expensive form of advertising available to you is your email marketing.