Why Real Estate Agents Should Care About E-Newsletter Marketing
This post was updated on 09/15/2017.
This is part one of a two-part series on e-newsletter marketing for REALTORS®. Read part two, on how to build a strong newsletter list, here.
Before we get to how realtors can go about creating and running a successful e-newsletter, we want to delve into why e-newsletter marketing is so valuable to a real estate agent’s business.
After all, building a recipient list, developing content, and sending a regular e-newsletter is extra work. You might not think it’s worth your time or energy.
But, it is. Here’s why.
It Keeps You Top-of-Mind
Social media channels do a great job of promoting a real estate agent’s services, but we’ve also seen how effective they can be when it comes to building relationships. An e-newsletter works the same way, keeping customers connected to you and your business through direct messaging.
Consistently sending an e-newsletter out every few weeks reminds current clients — and prospective ones — that your services are around and available.
Plus, it’s a way to centralize all your efforts. Your e-newsletter can include links to your social media accounts, your listings, your open houses and your latest blog posts.
It Drives Traffic
Back to our point about how e-newsletters are a centralized hub for all your marketing efforts. E-newsletters can be a big, if not the biggest, driver of traffic to your website, your listings, and your social media accounts.
Think about it: if 300 people have signed up for your newsletter, and 90 of them open it and each of them click on one link, that’s 90 more visits to your platforms, on top of the other traffic you’re generating through Google search and social media. That’s a lot for the average agent.
It Helps You Engage With Prospects and Clients
When someone agrees to let your emails land in their inbox, you’ve basically been granted access to them on a more direct level than what any social network could offer. By opting into your e-newsletter list, they’re expressing an interest in reading your content.
But beyond that, marketers often get excited about e-newsletter marketing because the engagement rates are often much higher than that of social media posts or even blog content (we’re talking open rates, click rates and driving traffic to your website).
Higher engagement = more eyeballs to your website = more prospective sales.
It Gives You a Way to Provide a Personalized Marketing Message
In the early days of e-newsletter marketing, the Nielsen Norman Group conducted studies that found that “users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters.” As the group says now, that’s no longer the case.
Because we’ve all become so accustomed to receiving marketing messages in our inbox, even the e-newsletters that we signed up for no longer seem interesting.
The exception: highly personalized content, according to Nielsen Norman.
Your subscribers want content that’s relevant to them and e-newsletters give you the power to meet their demands. Advancements in e-newsletter marketing tools (like MailChimp, Constant Contact and Vertical Response, for instance) make it easy to create more personalized e-newsletters.
In your e-newsletter signup form, you could ask users whether they’re looking to buy or sell soon, or if they’re just interested in local real estate. You could ask them to select whether they’re more interested in detached homes, or condos and townhouses. Based on the responses you receive, you can craft slightly different newsletters for your different segments of subscribers.
The payoff: higher open rates, click rates, and replies.
Do you send out an e-newsletter for your real estate business? What’s working for you? Tell us in the comments.
