What Is Automated Email Marketing?

In automated email marketing, the real estate agent identifies leads and attempts to develop them into clients via a series of emails.

An autoresponder series of emails, also known as drip emails or drip marketing, first introduces the real estate agent and the services he or she provides. Often sent at one-week intervals, further emails provide such information as listings, neighborhoods, market analysis, and other things likely to prove of interest to the prospective client. Agents sometimes combine drip marketing with monthly newsletters that feature certain listings, discuss the particular real estate agent and the real estate industry in general, and alert the reader to local events.

Behavior-triggered emails go out when a lead takes a certain action on the real estate agent’s website. Looking at a particular listing is a good example. The behavior-triggered email might then provide additional information and invite the recipient to attend an open house or schedule a viewing.

Automated email marketing and automated follow-up for realtors can be highly effective sales tools in today’s real estate industry, but only if the real estate agent follows email marketing best practices. To that end, here’s a list of automated email marketing dos as well as a couple don’ts.

Email Marketing Dos: At the Beginning

Before the first email goes out, you’ll want to do the following:

• Generate leads. Naturally, your email campaign can’t succeed if you don’t have a good healthy list of leads to start with. You can find leads via social media advertising, referrals, and networking. Zeroing on a specific area and a specific group like first-time buyers is often a fruitful approach, and so is engaging the services of a lead generation company.
• Make sure you have permission to email the leads. You need written consent from the prospect to make sure you’re not breaking the Can-Spam Law. When people are signing up for your emails and/or newsletters, be sure to tell them how often they’ll receive them. Having that information makes it more likely that people will in fact sign up.
• Have a customer relationship manager (CRM) capable of handling email. The CRM manages email marketing, tracking the success of a campaign and making sure email marketing takes advantage of every opportunity that arises. By automating the process, it’s also a valuable timesaver for real estate agents.

Email Marketing Dos: When the Emails Go Out

• Make a positive first impression. Present yourself as professional, motivated, approachable, and uniquely qualified to help clients achieve their goals.
• Be entertaining. As a real estate agent, you know all sorts of esoteric information about your profession and industry that’s of interest to you. It may not hold the same interest for someone who lacks your background. It might simply bore or baffle them. So keep your audience’s needs firmly in mind. Provide information that’s of practical use to them in a way that’s diverting. Mix up the actual listings and other information that’s immediately relevant to real estate with stories about local events and charity fundraisers and other amusing material. Sharing information about your own community involvement can create a positive impression and make readers more likely to avail themselves of your services.
• Be educational. Although you don’t want to bury readers in technical information and jargon, it’s nonetheless true that they probably wouldn’t be receiving and reading the email if they weren’t interested in buying real estate. So do provide information that’s of practical use to them in a way that’s easy to understand.
• Consider including a Chat Now link. This is a good way to draw the prospective client into a more active, two-sided form of communication.
• Consider including video. Some companies have reported a fivefold increase in email responses as a result of incorporating video.
• Conclude with a call to action (CTA.) Emails should finish by encouraging the lead to take some sort of action. Examples include signing up for the real estate agent’s newsletter or attending an open house. By actively engaging the lead, you further the relationship.

Email Marketing Dos: After the Sale

• Ask for positive reviews and referrals. This may well lead to new business.
• Keep in touch. Simply keeping in touch after the sale can also generate referrals and new business. Bear in mind, though, that the client is likely no longer interested in a deluge of real estate information or in hearing from you as often. So be personal and be less frequent. Birthday and holiday greetings are a good approach.

Email Marketing Don’ts

• Don’t use a hard sell approach. This can be a powerful temptation, for after all, the whole point of the email campaign is to drum up business. But remember how much you dislike it when you yourself are on the receiving end of a hard sell, and just don’t do it.
• Don’t make your website obnoxious. Your email campaign almost certainly aims at bringing leads to your website. Don’t give them an unpleasant experience when they get there. Capture widgets and plug-ins can definitely serve a purpose, but too many pop-ups is a turnoff.

By following these guidelines, the real estate agent has an excellent chance of maximizing the effectiveness of an email marketing strategy.