5 Crucial Email Tips For Real Estate Agents in 2020

Email marketing is an important part of any real estate agent’s marketing strategy. After all, email is one of the few marketing channels that will reach just about anyone, regardless of their demographic.

With that in mind, agents need to take special care to ensure that they are putting their all into nurturing their email marketing efforts. Here are five tips to help ensure that you’re using email to its fullest potential.

1. Segment your contacts into lists

Especially when you’re busy, it’s easy for your emails to just pile up into one big mess. However, this is one instance where it really pays to be organized. Specifically, you’ll want to divide your leads into lists, depending on where they fall in your sales pipeline.

While some real estate agents have their own methods for organizing their leads, if you’re just getting started with segmenting your lists and you aren’t sure where to begin, consider using the following categories:

• Potential buyer
• Potential seller
• Current client
• Past client

In this case, you’ll want to group your email contacts and leads by the type of service that you provide for them. If you’re interested in marketing to other service providers in real-estate-adjacent industries like lenders, home inspectors, or appraisers, you’ll want to create an email list for them as well.

2. Create targeted content

Once you’ve divided your leads into the appropriate lists, you can move on to the reason why you ought to have them organized in the first place. Put simply, you’ll want to have the ability to create targeted content, or emails that speak to the unique needs, questions, and concerns of each of those groups.

For example, potential buyers may benefit from hearing news of falling mortgage rates while potential sellers may be more suited to offers to perform a free comparative market analysis and past clients may be most interested in home renovation tips.

If you were to send each of those emails out to your whole email list, there’s a chance that a portion of your leads would find them irrelevant to their interests and unsubscribe. However, by specifically targeting different aspects of your consumer base, you can make sure that the content stays relevant to their interests.

3. Keep it short and sweet

Years ago, the theory was that marketing emails should tell a story. As a result, many people would spend ages writing emails that went on for much longer than was truly necessary. These days, however, the thinking is much different. In fact, the ideal email length is much shorter than you might think.

According to Mailup, an email marketing platform, the ideal length for a marketing email is between 75 and 100 words. At that length, the average response rate is 51%. For emails that were either longer or shorter than that, the response rate starts to fall off.

That said, you’ll want to make every effort to ensure that your email still feels informative and complete. To that end, you’ll need to choose your words carefully so that you don’t end up going over your word count or missing out on some important components of the email.

4. Always end emails with a call to action

Truthfully, nearly every marketing email should follow a similar format. It needs to have the following elements:

• An intriguing subject line
• A brief explanation of useful or relevant information
• A strong call to action

In marketing, a “call to action” is a segment of copy that is meant to incite the reader to take a specific action. For real estate agents, this could mean saying something like, “Call today to schedule your free CMA” or “Email me to start your home search.”

Above all, calls to action should start with a strong verb. They should include a clear direction on how the reader can move forward and should also include an incentive for why the client should want to take the next step.

5. Send your emails at the right time

Finally, you’ll also want to do your best to make sure to send your emails at the right time during the day. According to recent data by OptinMonster, Thursday is far and away the best day of the week to send a marketing email if you’re looking for high open rates. If you’re looking for a high click-through rate, on the other hand, you should choose Tuesday instead.

Meanwhile, the best time of the day to send a marketing email is either 1:00 PM or 4:00 PM in the afternoon. OptonMonster suggests that readers may be looking for a distraction at that time of day. Though, 8:00 AM and 10:00 are also strong contenders, since they occur either before or after the slew of emails that readers often receive around 9:00 AM.