Real estate newsletter marketing will never go out of style as far as digital marketing strategies are concerned. This strategy keeps you relevant and ensures engagement with your past, present, and future clients. Below are the two facts about newsletter marketing and why you want to keep utilizing it.
- Consumers use the internet to research what they want, more so home buyers and sellers. Consumer behavior has shifted to searching online for houses and canvassing for local markets and listings before actually contacting anybody when buying or selling. Your real estate newsletter posted via blog/website, email, or social media platforms can capture these home buyers and sellers.
- Consumers have email accounts – more than the social media accounts of 3 popular or leading platforms combined. It can be subscribed, liked, and shared via email, much like in social media. So don’t be afraid to include email blasting for your real estate newsletter to engage your target audience.
Let’s Cover The Basics of a Real Estate Newsletter
A real estate newsletter is another marketing technique to capture leads, thus, it is a result/goal-driven process. Before churning up tidbits, tips, videos of your current houses in the market or listings and analysis as well as community news, think of the what, how, when, who, and why’s of the method relative to your marketing campaign.
- What results or goals are you expecting to achieve through the newsletter? What are you hoping to get out of the campaign? Is it to get your target leads into your sales funnel? Is it to establish your expertise in the particular niche or market?
- Why do you want to include the newsletter in your campaign? When you decide on a specific strategy, you’re convinced and dead set on reasons that this is the best strategy for your purpose and follow it through. So it is the key to knowing your why’s too.
- How are you going to do it? In the how, you are conceptualizing the initial plan. How are you going to get your initial message through? How do you break the ice? Email newsletter campaigns are a form of engagement and engagement is nurtured.
- When is the right time to send your real estate newsletters? Establish a time when you think is best. Is it before the weekend starts, such as Friday, or the start of the week Monday? According to Sendinblue’s research good send times are 10 am and between 3 and 4 pm — but decide what’s best for your audience, and be consistent.
- Who is your target audience? Are these new homebuyers? Or, sellers who want to make an optimized fast sale? Are your target audience customers looking at a specific community or area? Having enough information about your target demographics to be able to engage them through your newsletters is key.
After answering and jotting down the basics, it is time to make a formal plan. A real estate newsletter marketing campaign is a long-term commitment. It is set to provide a foundation for your brand, niche markets; and must be in sync with your overall marketing strategy. It needs to be followed through with new and fresh ideas to continuously entice targets to read, watch and view.
12 Engaging Real Estate Newsletter Marketing Tips & Ideas
1. Offer Engaging Information
The idea of a real estate newsletter is not to sell your services but to give your target customers what they need. What do they need? Information. What sort of information? The communities they are interested in, the market, and an analysis of prices and variables that affect it.
2. Become a Local Expert
Community expertise is another angle of involvement. When one says involvement, it means yours and your target’s. Your local knowledge – not just with properties but on other subjects such as activities, fairs, good news, lifestyle, and leisure are topics that will interest your audience. A short article on restaurants or an event breaks the ice and captures the interest of the reader. Follow this with a CTA to your site – service page or properties in your list, or a longer version of the article in your blog.
3. Make it Personal
Newsletters are more intimate because of the connection made with trust (you got them to subscribe and give you their information – name, email, and certain demographic details). Keep that trust by keeping the intimacy – through personalized articles within the newsletter. Write the articles or information like you are directly talking to them. Keep in mind to address your opening with their first name.
4. Target Engaged Readers
About personalization, it is a good idea to separate people who are more involved from those who aren’t that interested or are occasional readers. When you know the more interested customers, consider increasing the frequency of sending real estate newsletters packed with the kind of information frequently visited or viewed/saved property. If it is a certain location in your listing, do a hot news update for them like the number of properties sold in the area of interest, your sale, or knowledge and experience.
5. Filter Unengaged Contacts
Diligence goes a long way. First of all, not all who subscribed might be that interested. To save you the trouble and also to be able to focus on the target customers who want data from you, eliminate the ones who have not opened your email for the last 2 months. Always put an unsubscribe button on your newsletter to give readers a choice. A newsletter campaign works well when you value the trust received. “Unsubscribing” is a gentle reminder to where you should keep your focus.
6. Keep It Simple
Keep your newsletter balanced, content-wise. Don’t go overzealous on images or videos. One or two images, and a video, that drives the message across are enough. Same with text content, keep it sweet, short, and to the point. If you are doing a comparative pricing analysis on properties in a particular area, keep it short and choose the variables and values you want to present well, and the explainer text concise. Avoid confusing your audience. Too much information will not help you, so write a newsletter with just one topic and some supporting info.
7. Focus on Readability
Continued from #6 on balanced content, choose a readability design that will catch target leads attention. First – the Inverted Pyramid that puts the most important topic on top, and the supporting ones second. The base is a CTA text. Second – quadrant technique, with 3 quadrants filled with topics that readers can choose from. One quadrant left for CTA with a little information about your brand, like your current listing, contact details. Third – Z pattern is according to pattern audience usually follow in browsing pages. Read the headline, then down and across left to right, follow the shape of the letter Z. You must remember, the attention span of readers is short. That short attention must capture the reader’s interest before the message is deleted.
8. Get Dynamic
Dynamic content earns extra points from your target. Keep your content dynamic by adding news to your current listing, be creative in presenting the news, with a new image or house profile comparisons. You can ask your web developer or use automation tools to update and send as part of a newsletter. Sendinblue has some great tools for this and is one of the most affordable marketing platforms out there — the same one we use.
9. Be Consistent With Your Brand
Brand enhancement is an objective of newsletters. Again you are not selling anything, rather you are establishing a relationship through expertise and key information your readers want. That being said, make sure your brand is easily spotted in the newsletter. Your logo and contact on top of the email, a CTA after the first headline or topic, and text at the last.
10. Stay on Target
Your newsletter is not about you but your target customers. Make it about them by knowing your demographic and organizing information and activities around what you know about them. Design online and offline activities with them, use the newsletter in issuing the invitation and encouraging them to attend these activities.
Think of content that suggests inclusivity. Keep a suggestion box on your social media platforms and put your response as content for your real estate newsletter. Answering FAQs periodically and explaining legal and financial/taxation topics that require a bit of maths are major concerns of home buyers and sellers in good and inclusive newsletter content.
11. Interview Past Clients
Add reviews and interviews from your past homebuyers and sellers in your real estate newsletters. Ask them about their experience with you on their buying or selling journey. Your readers can learn from the experiences of others. These interviews will spark interest; curiosity that leads to forming their inquiry; and give them an idea of your brand.
12. Track Your Results
Like any marketing technique, you would want to track results once it’s launched. And it is also a fact that seeing results from your effort takes time too. Tracking results is up to you. The periods can be two times a week, once a week, once a month, or can be all three. Look for subscribers who unsubscribed, and reported the email as spam. Track the individuals who opened the email and the number of people acting on the CTA – clicked your links and what they clicked.
Real estate newsletter marketing is a long-term commitment, and must not be neglected. Make sure they are made with quality and test their functionality. Secure and test links before sending them out. To ensure readability on different devices, try sending to your own email; open on smart devices as well as laptop and desktop. You want to make sure they are functional and appealing across devices. It is a mistake in marketing that can cost you – the cost of losing your leads and the cost of setting up and operating the campaign.
Real estate newsletter marketing may be one of the oldest methods of establishing connection since letters were delivered by mail but are still the most reliable up to now. Take care of the trust given to you and deliver what you promise – great information that they can use.
