As a Realtor or agent, email marketing can be a goldmine for you, if you use it properly. You have a few options to play with but if you don’t want to mess with building an email marketing “opt-in list” of your own, then renting or buying a list of email addresses is what you want to do. But contrary to what you might think, this is NOT spamming. So you don’t need to worry about the marketing police banging down your door.
Write Email Subject Lines That Get Your Attention
The subject line is what determines if the recipient will open your email or delete it. You can read about all sorts of tips and tricks to use in creating a subject line, but you must know your recipients and what will interest them.
- What are they interested in and what kind of language will get them to open the email?
- How can you capture interest in just a few words?
People receive numerous emails every day, sometimes dozens or even hundred. Your subject line must be one that gets their attention.
What’s the ideal length for a subject line?
Some studies say the ideal length is between six to ten words. One study provided the results accumulated from 260 million emails that were gathered from 540 different campaigns. Subject lines with between six and ten words had the highest open rate at 21 percent while emails with five or fewer word subject lines had only a 16 percent open rate and 11-15 words came in with just 14 percent. What this study shows is that too many words or too few can have the same effect and reduce the open rate for your emails.
Some ideas to include in email messages:
- New listings on the market
- Recent sales
- Sudden changes in market conditions, which impact the recipient
- Limited time promotional offer
- Breaking news about the market or industry
These are a few ideas you can implement in your email subject line
Track and Analyze the Rate of Subscribers
Having a high open rate is not your ultimate goal. The focus should be on converting those on your email list into clients. To find out how well your email marketing campaign is performing and what return on investment you’re getting, you must have a web analytics tracking tool. One such tool that is available in certain email marketing platforms is the “Beyond the click tracking.” This tool lets you know how many people click through to your website and how many follow up. This is a valuable resource for any realtor who wants to analyze data.
Monitor Your Open Rate with Analytics
Marketing is essential to realtors but not all avenues return the same results. It’s important to analyze where and how much time you’re investing in marketing and which ones are providing the most results. Email marketing has one of the highest open rates in real estate of any industry. The average open rate is 26.01%, according to Constant Contact. If your open rate is lower, you may not be utilizing this tool effectively.
To capitalize on your email marketing campaign, follow these five basic steps:
- Define your concept for the email campaign
- Test out your concept and collect data
- Send the messages to your subscribers
- Measure open rates, as well as bounce rate, click-throughs and other essential data and evaluate
- Make changes based on the information provided
Email marketing can enhance your business but only if those emails are opened and if the recipient follows up.
