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Real Estate Email Marketing
Combine Autoresponder Sequences & Live Broadcasts to Nurture Your Database Via Email
Goal:
Nurture your database and Sphere Of Influence (SOI) using systematic Real Estate Email Marketing.
This type of one-to-one automated Lead Nurturing is one of the best single investments you can make when it comes to:
- Keeping in touch with your Sphere,
- Nurturing old Leads,
- Drawing attention to time-sensitive Offers, and
- Ultimately boosting your Conversion Ratio across all channels.
These Goals can only be achieved if you systematically build out your Drip Email Sequences & Broadcast Messages, and ensure as many Prospects as possible are added to your Email Lists & opted-in.
How It Works:
Depending on your focus, Real Estate Email Marketing has two main approaches.
The first, and more important approach, is built around nurturing your own existing Email List.
Following this approach, you should be making every effort to ensure all your Prospects are receiving Email Marketing from you, ideally segmented with messaging targeted on each Prospect’s unique situation.
To make this as successful as possible, you need to systematically gather Prospect Emails via opt-in forms on your website(s), over the phone, and in-person. Regardless of where you meet a Prospect, you need a system to ensure they’re getting adding to your Emails.
This can be something for which you can enlist an Overseas Virtual Assistant’s help.
You might also consider using a US-based Virtual Assistant to help you write the actual Email Messaging… but we recommend staying as hands-on with this as possible, since email is such an intimate form of communication, it’s always best if the Real Estate Business Owner is working on them directly.
The second, and often overlooked (but highly viable) approach to Real Estate Email Marketing is focused on broadcasting your time-sensitive Offers to other Real Estate Lists.
Whenever you have Properties for Sale, Investment Opportunities, Buy-Side Requirements, and more…
… You can rest assured some Real Estate Business out there already has an Email List who would love to hear about it!
In a way, this type of approach to Real Estate Email Marketing is similar to Public Relations, or Marketing Partnerships:
You’ll need to figure out who might have the Email List full of your target audience, and then contact them to see if they would be open to a collaboration, mailing their List.
This is a very powerful approach that can help you get new Contacts, as well as more Closed Sales in less time, by getting your time-sensitive Offers in front of the widest variety of interested parties.
Building a List of potential cross-promotion opportunities, as well as performing initial cold outreach to these potential collaborators, are tasks you could potentially assign to either Overseas or US-based VAs to move the ball along faster.
Pros:
Real Estate Email Marketing is one of the single most efficient & cost-effective automated methods of Lead Nurturing & Follow Up.
Where applicable, it is also often one of the lowest Cost Per Lead tools for on-demand, direct response lead generation.
Cons:
Email Marketing takes a lot of work!
You need to not only create a ton of Email Messages, get them scheduled in your Marketing Automation Software, and make sure they’re being delivered…
… You also need to ensure as many of your Prospects as possible are actually getting added to your Email Lists in the first place.
This is a whole specialization in itself, and can be difficult to get up & running in the first place (often with a high carrying cost, and even higher initial setup cost).
For Cold Email as a Lead Generation tool, you’re opening other cans of worms, like CAN-SPAM compliance, domain warming, and email deliverability… which are probably more headaches & overhead than most Real Estate Businesses should be taking on.
Therefore, in Real Estate, Email is mostly only useful for Lead Nurturing & Follow Up (not outbound Lead Generation).
Work Estimate:
With the two distinct approaches to Real Estate Email Marketing come two fundamentally different work estimates.
First of all, if you’re interested in using Email Marketing for Lead Nurturing strictly in your own Sphere (with whom you have an existing relationship & permission to email), the main demands on your Virtual Assistants’ time will be writing, formatting, editing, scheduling, and tracking your email messages.
Taking that into account, each email message you’d like written & integrated into your autoresponder will take around 2 – 3 hours. For every 10 hours per month, you could expect 3 – 5 messages or so (depending on average message length & complexity of formatting), which can be broadcast in real-time or scheduled in advance to create a never-ending automated follow-up sequence.
If you’re more interested in using email marketing to generate leads, the work estimate will be 100% dependent on your target market.
For example, often real estate investors will consider email marketing to other active investors and absentee owners. An effort like this would take a combination of Real Estate List Building alongside Email Marketing (unless you already have a list with pre-verified email addresses), and would cost significantly more than just drafting up a few Email Messages & integrating them into your Autoresponder.
A similar effort that is popular among agents who have a property to sell is the “email flyer” – an email blast to hundreds of other brokers & agents in your area. In this case, the list is controlled by a 3rd party, so your entire effort is bound in the actual writing and design of the message. In this case, your Virtual Assistant’s actual Work Hours requirement might only be 2 – 3 hours for the initial design!