Real Estate Email Marketing

Email marketing for real estate agents is one of the fastest growing fields in both the email and real estate spheres. It's like a match made in heaven: as a real estate player, you need to promote your homes for sale, your real estate courses, housing finance products, and much more. Meanwhile, thousands of potential customers are looking for those offers. And, according to a recent study cited by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, 75% of people check their email every morning, even before they get to their voice mails.

There's more. People seeking real estate want to see pictures of the properties out on the market. Real estate email marketing is perfect for that, in that you can send pictures of available properties in your messages. Technically, you can include as many pictures as you'd like. However, it's ideal to include between 1 and 5 pictures, so your real estate email isn't too long, too crowded, or too large in file size.

The best email marketing campaigns include one large picture of the outside of the property, and 2 or 3 smaller pictures of the inside of the property. The top real estate email marketing programs offer pre-made templates with sample pictures in the right spots, so all you have to do is click and replace with your own property picture. You can also feature several properties in your email. The great thing about this approach is that the emails are highly customizable, and you can change them as often as you'd like, so as to achieve the perfect fit for each campaign.

But real estate email marketing is not just for realtors looking to sell properties. Maybe you run a real estate course; maybe you provide financing; or maybe you supply a different real estate service all together. Whatever the case, the great thing about email marketing is that it integrates your online promotion and sales process in one step. For example, say you teach a course on how to make the most commission from your sales. When you use email to promote your course, your potential customers can click a link right on your email, and be directed straight to course signup form on your website.

Don't sweat if you don't have a website. The best programs offer full, end-to-end solutions. So in addition to propelling your email campaigns, these services will also help you create and maintain a professional-looking website with all the features you need. Best of all, you won't need to break the bank or learn any complicated programs to get your website and email marketing up and running.

Another great benefit of this is that it helps you identify qualified leads. For example, say you sent out a message featuring several properties recently made available. First, you'll be able to see exactly who opened your email, and who went back to see it several times. Clearly, if one of your customers opened your message several times, he or she is at least partially interested in one of the properties featured. For you, that means it's time for a follow-up call. It gets better. With the top programs, you'll even be able to see exactly which property this person is interested in. For example, if you included pictures of properties A, B and C, and you included a link under each property saying "Click here for more pictures of this property," you'll be able to see that your customer, John Smith, clicked to see more pictures of of property A at exactly 3:45 pm. Now, indeed, it's time for a highly educated follow-up call, perhaps offering an exclusive early tour of property A.

When it comes to real estate email marketing, the benefits are endless. On top of it all, with the best programs, you'll have a dedicated account executive who knows the email marketing industry inside and out, and has lots of experience working with real estate professionals. Couple your own industry marketing savvy with your account executive's email savvy, and you're sure to have a winning formula. You'll soon be seeing more sales and more customers as you learn, first-hand, about the effectiveness of such a powerful online sales channel as real estate email marketing.

Sources: Microsoft Inc.