The Importance of Email Marketing for Real Estate Investors
As more and more businesses focus their efforts on social media marketing – and rightly so – sometimes other, equally effective mediums get lost in the mix. To be sure, placing posters in buy/sell groups on Facebook is more effective and efficient than putting bandit signs up all over town, but it may surprise you to learn that email marketing is actually more likely to give you the most bang for your buck than just about any other method.
So if you’re neglecting that email list of yours, what exactly are you missing out on as an investor?
Email lists are effective precisely because they tend to be the best curated and most accurately targeted. After all, recipients have to opt-in to receiving them in the first place, which suggests they wouldn’t do so were they not interested in your brand. For example, when you place a sign on a street corner, you have no idea who is going to be passing by. For every 100 people who see your sign, maybe one or two are going to be your target audience, let alone actually interested. Google and social media ads are slightly better, but you can only take advantage of the tools they offer if you really know what you’re doing, and it’s a constant go-round of trial and error before you see results.
Email marketing, on the other hand, puts targeting into the hands of the audience you’re courting. If it seems like we’re belaboring the point, it’s because we want to drive it home: by requiring subscribers to your list to opt-in, you ensure that the only people who are receiving your emails are the ones who are interested enough to sign up. This means that sending emails and newsletters to this audience is by definition a more efficient use of your time and has a higher likelihood of getting results.
That’s all well and good, but how do you go about building your list in the first place? For starters, you need an email list provider like MailChimp (there are others, but MailChimp is the easiest to use, and you can always switch platforms later). You also need a means of adding to and maintaining a backup of your email list, and an Excel or Google spreadsheet should work just fine for that.
It’s also best to maintain multiple lists. If you’re an investor, you don’t want to wear out your audience by sending them emails that don’t apply to them. You might, for example, keep separate lists for real estate professionals, newsletter recipients, and prospective tenants and buyers, depending on the nature of your business.
Once you have your tools in place, it’s time to actually encourage people to subscribe. As we mentioned a moment ago, it’s best to define your objectives before soliciting subscribers, and multiple lists are a part of that consideration. Do you want actions taken on your website, like calls and clicks? Do you want to reach potential buyers or sellers, or both? Do you wish to maintain a network of other real estate professionals with whom you can work if needed? Do you want to announce new listings and find buyers quickly, or get on the radar of buyer’s agents?
These objectives will define how you go about soliciting subscribers and building your list. Whatever your objective(s), the one tool they all boil down to is an indispensable part of any email marketing strategy: the squeeze page.
A squeeze page is a sort of traffic hub (see our explanation for that here) where you direct all your incoming traffic towards a specific action. In this case, the desired action is users subscribing to your list – and their characteristics should define exactly how you go about directing them to your squeeze page.
You can find an example of a squeeze page here. Squeeze pages should be clear, direct, and entice subscribers to sign up while letting them know exactly what they’re getting and why they should be excited. In the example cited above, you can see that the carrot is the promise of a quick sale, which is probably appealing to most sellers you’d court as an investor looking for a below-market sale.
You can also see that there’s another action on that squeeze page as well, which is the prompt to call. While not every list requires those options, not every list has the same goal; here, the action is the seller reaching out so you can land a deal. You want them to have options for taking that action, because what’s important is the sale.
An example that’s a bit more relevant to email lists is this squeeze page. Here, the goal is to get email subscribers, but as you can see, there’s an added incentive. Not only are subscribers afforded advance notification of listings (which is a huge plus for buyer’s agents), but businesses of all stripes are invited to subscribe to receive newsletters, information, blogs, and list their own businesses on this website in order to promote themselves and find connections.
Which brings us to our final point regarding email marketing: what does the subscriber get out of it? You should consider this carefully and construct an incentive for your target audience to subscribe; otherwise they have no reason to. By defining your objective well in advance, you’re able to formulate a plan for giving your subscribers something that’s to their advantage, whether it’s information, leads, the ability to sell their home to you, or an opportunity to promote their own business.
For more perspectives on real estate investment and web practices, check back with us each week as we post new blogs and be sure to sign up for our Priority Access List for advance listings and market updates. Next week, we’ll go into more detail on how to properly construct marketing emails and newsletters once you’ve defined your objective, formulated a method, and populated your email list. We’ll see you next week, and in the meantime, don’t forget that you can also keep up with us on Facebook and Twitter!
- Get It Right Solutions