How much time are you ACTUALLY spending on building and nurturing your email list?
If your answer is not that much, it’s time to reevaluate your approach.
Many realtors underestimate the impact a good email marketing strategy can have on your business.
The reality is your email marketing can be even more important than the ads you run.
Ads might lead people to follow you, but what then?
Your email list is your direct line to past and potential clients.
It’s the key factor to nurturing those clients into buying or selling through you – whether it’s for the first time, or as a repeat client.
Today, I’m going to give you a complete guide to email marketing for real estate agents. I’ll cover everything you need to know – from common mistakes realtors make to expert advice on creating a successful strategy.
Let’s get into it, shall we?
Recognizing the Importance of Email Marketing
When you look at your marketing strategy as a whole, your email list is an important, critical piece to that puzzle.
All roads in your sales funnels should lead to capturing an email.
For example, if you offer a lead magnet, people should opt-in to receive it through an email sign-up.
And when you’re considering what to post on social media, make sure you’re thinking about how to migrate your social media followers over to your email list. You can do this by regularly mentioning your lead magnets and promoting them in your posts.
I’ve taken this advice myself and have been very intentional with how I’ve built my online audiences. I have far more email subscribers than social media followers on any other platform.
Why?
Because every part of your marketing strategy across all platforms should come down to capturing emails.
Building and maintaining your email marketing is incredibly important for real estate agents.
Here are the top three reasons why you need to start prioritizing your email marketing:
1. It’s the only list you actually own.
How many times in the past few years have Instagram and Facebook crashed?
Social media is a great way to connect and interact with your audience. However, it’s entirely unpredictable.
You can do everything right and the algorithm can still choose to limit or ban your posts from your audience.
Or you can get hacked and lose your following overnight.
The people on your email lists made the decision to hear from you.
This gives you direct access to your audience without needing to rely on an untrustworthy algorithm.
2. It’s where people have the most attention span.
If you’ve been here a while, you’ve heard me talk about omnipresence.
Omnipresence is maintaining and holding your audience’s attention in multiple places. It gives your audience the impression that you’re everywhere at once.
Your audience is likely to pay closer attention to emails than any other platform.
By appearing in their inbox regularly, you create that sense of omnipresence. You’re top of mind at all times with your audience.
Then, when they open your email, they are intently focused on your message – especially compared to platforms like Instagram and TikTok where they may be aimlessly scrolling.
This focused attention makes email a powerful tool in your omnipresence strategy, giving you a direct line to your most engaged audience members.
3. It has the highest open rates.
When you consider the reach of all the marketing platforms, nothing comes close to email.
Emails allow you to connect with a significant portion of your audience, consistently.
If your emails contain valuable, relevant, and engaging content, your open rate should average around 40%.
That’s considerably more than the 5-10% of people who see your content through social media.
As real estate agents, using your email list to its full extent can have a huge impact on your business.
Effective email marketing keeps you connected with your audience, establishing credibility and maintaining your relevance.
Common Mistakes Realtors Make with Email Marketing
In all my years mentoring agents, I’ve noticed a pattern of mistakes realtors make in their email marketing.
Here are some common mistakes you might be making with your email marketing and tips for how you can better nurture your email list.
Only Doing One Newsletter Per Month
One monthly newsletter isn’t nearly enough to nurture your email list effectively.
Thirty days is plenty of time for people to forget what they last read from you.
Plus, because newsletters are often formatted with images and graphics, they often get filtered into the promotions tab or even spam.
Monthly newsletters are an old-school, traditional approach to email marketing that we don’t teach in The Listings Lab.
Instead, the best way to nurture your audience is to aim for 2-3 touch points per week.
But if this feels like too much, send at least one weekly email, with some additional touch points over social media and/or texting.
This way, you’re always top of mind for your ideal client. Frequent, consistent emails mean you’ll be the first person they think of when they’re ready to buy or sell.
Not Changing with the Times
Many times, we do things a certain way just because it seems to be how everyone else is doing them.
This is particularly true in email marketing. You see other real estate agents sending emails and think, “I guess that’s how I should do my emails, too!”.
However, most of these strategies tend to be rooted in traditional email marketing rather than how to nurture a modern-day email list.
Simply copying what everyone else is doing won’t cut it anymore.
You need to be intentional about how you engage with your audience and be innovative in your approach.
Not Including Personal Content in Your Emails
The average person moves every eight and a half years.
If your emails only talk about real estate, you won’t be relevant to a large portion of your email list.
And this lack of connection leads to a higher unsubscribe rate.
By including personal content, you keep people interested and engaged.
Your stories and updates make your emails more relatable and maintain your connection with your audience. When you add that human touch, you stay relevant to your whole audience – from the family looking to upgrade next year to the couple who just settled into their new home.
Only Doing Random Acts of Marketing
Another mistake I see realtors making in their email marketing is what I call random acts of marketing.
This is when you’ve built an email list but haven’t done anything with it in a while – or maybe even at all.
Then, when business becomes slow, you blast your entire list with marketing emails out of the blue.
Don’t just email them when you want something from them! Instead, you want to consistently nurture your subscribers.
One way to do this is through an automated nurture funnel.
Set up a sequence of automated emails that go out to your list regularly to keep your audience informed, engaged, and feeling valued.
Which brings us to…
No Automation or Consistency
If you don’t have automation, you won’t have consistency.
And without consistency, you’re missing a key step in creating omnipresence.
When people see you regularly in their inbox – regardless of whether they open your emails or not – you’re still building that sense of omnipresence.
You’re still forming that top-of-mind awareness.
When your email marketing is automated, it’s easier to keep up the level of consistency you need to keep yourself at the forefront of your audience’s mind.
Not Being Niche-Specific
Treating your email list with generalized content is the best way to increase your audience churn.
It’s so important to know who you’re talking to and exactly what they need to hear from you.
By not being niche-specific, you’re sending out content that isn’t relevant to a portion of your audience.
And not being relevant is the fastest way to turn your audience off.
Not Segmenting Your Email Lists
The last common mistake I see real estate agents making in their email marketing is not segmenting their email lists.
Segmenting your lists shows you have a profound understanding of your audience, their wants, their problems, and their needs.
For example, you should always know who the active buyers in your lists are.
These are the people who need more sales-driven content.
However, by sending sales emails to people who aren’t buying or selling, you lose your relevance.
Your emails become annoying and instantly get deleted, or worse, recipients unsubscribe altogether.
Instead of bombarding your entire list with sales content, segment your list based on where they are in their customer journey.
➡️ READ: Customer Journey In Real Estate: The Secret To Having 100s Of Leads Reaching Out Each Year
How to Grow Your Email List for Real Estate Agents
Once you’ve nailed your process for email marketing, you’re ready to take it to the next level.
It’s time to grow your email list. Here are five effective ways to do just that:
1. Your Methodology Guide
In The Listings Lab, we teach agents to create a lead magnet that details their signature methodology.
This guide is your biggest asset. It shows exactly how you address your audience’s pain points and solve their problems with your signature system.
By creating a landing page for your lead magnet, you’ll have one main hub to drive audience traffic to across all of your platforms.
2. Your Facebook Lead Forms
If you’re running paid ads, everything should always lead to an email capture form. Facebook lead forms streamline the process of building your email list. They allow users to provide their email address and opt into your lead magnet directly within Facebook, without needing to visit an external website.
3. Audience Swaps
Collaborations and interview swaps are probably the fastest and easiest way to grow your email list.
This works by finding complementary communities – people who have the same niche as you but offer different services.
Then, you swap audiences for a day – think Instagram story takeovers, free trainings, or podcast interviews.
The goal is to share your expertise with an audience similar to yours to grow your own following.
And, of course, capture those valuable emails along the way!
4. Open House Opt-ins
Although I wouldn’t expect much growth from this tactic, gathering email addresses during your open houses is still a valid way to grow your email list when done right.
5. Website Registrations
While websites don’t convert as high as they once did, it’s still valuable to have email sign-up forms on your website.
Your email list should be your largest audience. It takes priority over any of your social media followings.
Make sure you’re consistently making time to grow and nurture it.
Email Marketing for Realtors FAQs
Even knowing common mistakes to avoid and tips to grow your email lists, email marketing for realtors can be tricky.
Here are some of the most common questions real estate agents have about email marketing to help you clear up any lingering confusion.
How do you deal with unsubscribes?
Unsubscribes are a part of email marketing. There’s no avoiding them.
When your list is small, a few unsubscribes can feel like a drastic change. However, as you grow your list, those numbers will feel less significant.
The main point to remember is unsubscribes happen because of a lack of relevancy.
If your email content doesn’t resonate with your audience, they’re going to leave.
Your messaging needs to constantly be evolving. Understand your niche, stay on top of your market and the buying cycle, and adapt your content accordingly.
This helps keep your emails relevant which keeps YOU relevant to the people reading them.
Writing emails takes so long. How can you save time?
The easiest way to save time when writing emails is to repurpose your content.
Your top-performing content – particularly when it’s long-form – makes the best emails.
Don’t worry about your audience seeing the same content twice. People consume so much content on a daily basis that they won’t notice.
Pull from content you’ve posted to your Facebook group, Instagram, or blog. Think of anything that has generated high engagement.
Once you’ve chosen your content, the majority of it is already written for you.
It’s just a matter of rewording existing content into email format.
Put it all together to form a greatest hits collection of your best work to form your email nurture sequence.
Just remember to keep updating your sequence with fresh, high-performing content.
This way, your emails stay relevant and keep your audience engaged.
What’s The Difference Between a Database and an Email List?
Your database is made up of your past clients and leads you know personally.
Your marketing email list consists of people who have opted in to receive your emails. These are usually cold to warm leads who need more nurturing.
The way you interact with each of these lists will differ.
For your database, you can be more casual and more intimate as you slowly nurture them towards repeats and referrals.
But, with your email list, you need to take the time to slowly take them through the nine-point psychological journey – i.e. your real estate sales funnel.
Again, this is where relevancy comes into play.
You have to be intentional with what you choose to put in front of each group.
And if you don’t currently have an email list, this is your sign to start building one now.
Your database will churn 20% conversion every eight and a half years. Meanwhile, your email list brings new people into your following every day.
This is why bringing in new people and being omnipresent in front of new people becomes so important.
The Ultimate Goal of Email Marketing
The main goal of email marketing for real estate agents is to build a strong foundation of deals through organic marketing.
Then, when you’re closing enough deals you can start running paid ads.
Paid traffic will help your email list grow even faster while boosting your organic social media following, too.
Sometimes we’re limited to the size and quality of our audiences.
For example, someone with a complimentary audience of 100,000 followers isn’t necessarily going to want to collaborate with you if your audience is too small.
It won’t be an equal exchange.
People will ask about your email list size, how often you clean it, and your open rate.
These are the metrics people will want to know before even considering collaborating with you.
But with a larger following, you’ll gain access to bigger complimentary audiences to collaborate with and expand your reach even more.
The more you grow your email list, the more your audience growth compounds across all platforms. You open doors to bigger opportunities. You’ll start bringing in more deals as your momentum multiplies.
By maintaining and nurturing an intentional email list you will always be top of mind and relevant – both to past clients and potential prospects.
In The Listings Lab, we give our members an 12-month email marketing sequence. These templates are proven to maintain your omnipresence and make it easier to turn prospects into loyal clients.
Ready to master digital marketing so you can turn strangers into clients?
Join the thousands of agents who have taken control of their lead generation with our proven marketing strategy.
Click here to book a FREE call with our team and let’s chat about how The Listings Lab can help you dominate your local market and consistently land high-value listings.
