An email list can be one of the most powerful marketing tools for real estate agents. It’s a direct pipeline to clients, vendors, fellow agents, and leads, and can be used in a myriad of ways. A well crafted email campaign converts leads to lifetime clients and builds a consistent sales pipeline. If you aren’t using email—you’re missing a vital piece of your marketing business.
Of all email CRMS we’ve tested—Mailchimp is easily our favorite. Mailchimp is a full fledge marketing CRM that sends email, social media ads, landing pages, websites, and more. The platform is incredibly simple to use. You don’t need design or coding skills to create beautiful emails inside their platform. If that’s not enough—Mailchimp can be totally free so long as your audience size is smaller than 2,000 contacts (although the paid plans are well worth it!).
Here’s 5 tips for getting the most out of your Mailchimp account.
Use sign up forms. Lots of agents miss this easy opportunity to passively build their email list. Instead of manually importing contacts, signup forms enable interested parties to voluntarily sign up to receive your emails. You can create online signup forms for your website, social media accounts. You’ll also want to take advantage of Mailchimp’s mobile forms— which turns your mobile device into a signup form. This is perfect for collecting emails at events like home buyers seminars and open houses.
Our next recommendation is to segment your mailing list. Segmenting is a fancy word for grouping contacts, and it’s very effective for organization. Segmenting allows you to create groups like “clients”, “leads”, “fellow agents”, or “vendors”, allowing you to send targeted messages to specific groups of people. For example, you can send ‘coming soon’ listing blasts to fellow agents, but not to your clients or leads (who will quickly get tired of those emails). Likewise you can send monthly newsletters to your loyal customer base without having to send to your full email list. List segmentation is the best way to ensure your target audience gets the right message delivered.
Our next tip is to build automation sequences. These are emails sent automatically when triggered by a specific activity or event. With automation sequences you can build a “welcome” automation series that gets sent to subscribers as soon as they are added to your list. You can also set up a sequence that sends specifically to first time homebuyers who sign up for the information. The best part of automations is that they work for you around the clock. Once you spend the time on initial setup, they’ll run night and day.
Create templates. We recommend creating email templates for several reasons. The first—templates will save you time. Instead of manually building out every email, you can create one style that you re-use for every email. Build a clean looking template with text boxes, image boxes, team branding, logo, email footer, URL links for social/website, and use it for every email. This leads to the second benefit for using templates. They build brand awareness and a consistent feel to your emails. Instead of sending different looking emails every time, you can build out 1-2 templates and use them forever. This will keep all layouts, fonts, and branding consistent through your email campaigns. You can find more information on templates here.
Our last tip is analyze campaign reports. Reports provide detailed insights on campaign performance, giving you immediate feedback on how your email performed. You can quickly assess your email results by looking at the open rate, click rate, and overall engagement in the campaign report dashboard. If you notice your emails aren’t performing well you can take steps to fix it. You can compare emails that did great vs. emails that didn’t do well and get a better understanding of what your audience wants. Did the catchy subject line generate more open rates? Did the overly sales-y email fall flat? Campaign reports will give you all the information need to make that assessment. Click here if you want to learn more about campaign reports.
In closing, email is a powerful tool and should be used regularly in your marketing campaign. We personally recommend Mailchimp, but most popular email CRM’s work fine. If you’re struggling to get the most out of Mailchimp and need help— let us know! We offer email consulting and management services and would love to help you build your email strategy.
Thanks for reading!
HD BROS.
