Real Estate Drip E-mail Marketing Campaigns - Simplified

Create real estate drip marketing campaigns that effectively convert by stepping back and looking at the narrative you’re building with each e-mail to your real estate clients and leads.

What is drip marketing?

Real estate drip marketing is a sequence of e-mails that is sent to individuals on an e-mail list. Typically, you’d set up different ‘drips’, or e-mail sequences, for different types of real estate contacts.

For instance, you might have one drip for individuals who submitted their e-mail to your website’s lead capture form, and another for individuals who have used your services in the past.

How do you get started?

To begin running drip marketing in your real estate business you will need three things:

#1 - A website
To capture lead information (name and contact information).This ensures that no matter how many inbound leads you get, no one ever falls through the cracks.

#2 - A real estate lead or customer management system
To take the lead capture information and integrates with a drip campaign tool. You want a real estate CRM to be the go-between so that you have a client profile that is created with a record of the e-mail marketing the client received.

#3 - Real estate drip marketing software
There are a number of e-mail marketing tools that allow you to automate your drip campaigns. Our favorite is MailChimp because it’s free for less than 2,000 contacts and it manages the unsubscribe process to ensure you remain spam law compliant. It also integrates with most real estate lead management software, including RealOffice360.

What does a drip campaign look like?

A drip marketing campaign for new real estate leads could be designed as follows:

#1 - Thank you for getting in touch e-mail, asking the recipient when they're available to discuss their needs. (Immediately upon signup.)

#2 - Fist follow-up e-mail with all your current home listings. (One day later.)

#3 - Second follow-up e-mail with listings that have gone up or down in price, talking about current market conditions. (Three days later.)

#4 - Third follow-up e-mail asking how the recipient’s home-buying or selling experience has been so far, and if they have any questions you can help with. (One week later.)

What differentiates a good campaign from one that needs improvement?

The difference between a campaign that works like it's supposed to, and one that backfires is the extent to which e-mails are designed with the target audience in mind. If you just got a new listing, sending it out to everyone you’ve ever worked with is simply a recipe for getting a lot of unsubscribes. Instead, approach your drip campaign with a narrative in mind for the specific market segment you're communicating with, and provide value that rewards your contacts for opening your e-mail at every single step.

For example, the narrative in the example outlined above is that you have the availability, interest, information, and tools to help the individual who signed up on your website with their home buying and selling needs.

What do I actually say in these e-mails?

If you’re unsure of how to craft a real estate marketing e-mail, here’s a basic formula you can follow for any topic:

#1 - Greeting

#2 - Personal note, which can be as simple as:

• “Thanks for getting in touch, I'd love to set up a time to talk about what you're looking for.” in the case of new sign-ups, or
• “It’s been a while since we chatted, but I thought this article about new home renovation trends might interest you.” for past clients you’ve lost touch with.

#3 - Value-add message, if you didn't already integrate this into your personal message. Include something of immediate interest to the recipient such as:

• “5 Things every homebuyer should know” article for someone looking to imminently purchase a home, or
• “Homeowner’s guide to maintaining property value”

These can be links to articles written by others, or content that you’ve produced yourself.

#4 - Ask a question to encourage a response, such as, “What are the must-haves you’re thinking of for your new home?”.

#5 - Have a call to action based on what the point of your e-mail is. For instance, with new leads encourage the recipient to get in touch with you. You can even link to an online calendar where they can self-book an appointment to speak to you.

#6 - Your contact information E-mail marketing software includes a mandatory footer to maintain compliance with regulations. When you're pasting in your signature, also check that this displays as you want it to.

You can modify this basic formula to be as long or short as you’d like. Of course, you're not limited to this format. You can also design newsletters, cards (think birthday or holiday), and catalogue-style e-mails.

Take Note: Anti-Spam Laws

Before you send out a single marketing e-mail, take a moment to look up what the laws are in your country and state or province regarding e-mail marketing. While some are general, others such as Canada’s Anti-Spam Law are quite specific with their opt-in rules and timeframes. You can find a general overview of both US and Canadian laws here.

Is there anything I should you avoid?

Your goal with your real estate drip marketing campaign is to move potential buyers and sellers down your sales funnel. For past clients, this means staying top of mind so when the time comes to move again, you’re the person they call. This sounds simple, but you need to walk a fine line between staying in touch and providing useful tidbits of information, and risking souring your prospects because you spammed people.

Spam can impact your business beyond any annoyance caused by someone’s clogged inbox. If e-mail recipients mark your communications as spam, you’ll find yourself being auto-filtered to peeople’s junk inbox, even when you’re sending a transactional rather than marketing e-mail. This is incredibly hard to undo, and your best bet is to avoid such a situation.

So take the time to really consider how many touch points you need to have to successfully nurture the different segments of people in your real estate database. It makes sense to have more frequent contact with someone in the market to buy or sell right now. However, that won’t look the same for a past client or an acquaintance who said they’d keep you in mind the next time they need to sell their home.

Pay attention to your e-mail metrics

Look at your metrics and refine your e-mails so they resonate. Beyond automation capabilities, metrics are the main reason why you should use an e-mail marketing tool. They allow you to track open rates (% of recipients that opened your e-mails) and click-throughs (% of recipients that clicked on each link you provided) in a way mail-merges from Microsoft Word or other manual measures simply can’t. Without these, your only gauge of interest is replies.

Use these measures to help you craft better e-mails in the future. If you find some e-mails are getting much better opens and responses than others, here are some possible cuplrits:

Subject line
This is your e-mail’s first impression, and will have a disproportionate impact on open rates. Do certain subject lines lead to more open rates that other? Test different patterns, but make sure you send multiple e-mails of each ‘type’ of subject line before scrapping it, because other factors might be at play too.

Topic
If you’re finding you’re not getting many clicks, you might have defined your audience too broadly. Homeowners, buyers, and sellers have different interests at different points in their homeownership journey. Experiment with a variety of content that would speak to each of these groups

General formatting
This can be anything from colours, sizing, fonts, and the ratio of images to words to links in your e-mail. Compare what you did on e-mails that your clients and leads spent more time on, and do more of that in the future.

Call to action
What was the outcome you were looking for from your e-mail? If it was to new clients and your goal was to have them set up an appointment, try reworking the last few lines of your e-mail. Conversely, if you’re simply trying to stay in touch and sent out a newsletter, you likely won’t get many responses by virtue of the fact that this form of communication doesn’t require a response.

Time of day/year
Sometimes, none of the above factors played a role in which e-mail generated more responses. Instead, you might find that leads are more responsive at the end of the week when they’re anticipating visiting open houses in person. Other times, you may have inadvertently sent something out before a holiday. For these reasons, try sending out a series of e-mails before making any drastic changes. Otherwise, you might end up scrapping something that would otherwise perform well for you.

Summary

Start with just one market segment. Decide what role you need to fill for that group of people, and how often. Once you've set up your campaign, review it and see adjust based on how your different e-mails are doing. Designing a real estate drip marketing campaign may seem daunting at first, but once you're done, you'll have successfully pared down your workload from hundreds of manual e-mails to a manageable few.

Between designing drip marketing campaigns, juggling showings, and staying on top of your leads, you need a system to manage your workload in a stress-free and intuitive way. RealOffice360 is an unbelievably simple CRM, business tracker, and daily planner for real estate agents and Realtors®. Rather being just a data dump for client information, RealOffice360 helps you visually build your business plan, cultivate your real estate database towards your goals, and ultimately keeps you focused on what matters most: your clients and your deals. Get started for free - no credit card required!