Your real estate email address is often one of the first points of contact a lead has with your brand.
Which is why it shouldn’t be overlooked.
In an instance, your email address can either communicate professionalism or amateurishness.
In order to properly harness email as an effective lead generation tool, follow this list of do’s and don’ts, and get our professional real estate email address ideas and recommendations!
Don’t Use A Personal Email
If you’re still using a personal email that ends in hotmail.com or gmail.com – your first order of business should be changing that!
It’s time to start keeping business and personal separate.
Real estate agents constantly tell me they want to be treated like true professionals.
But let me ask you this…
Would your doctor send you emails from an email address that says “drjames99@hotmail.com”?
I’m willing to bet if your doctor emailed you from that address you’d feel a little concerned.
Using a branded email is a great way to make a killer first impression and build trust with clients right off the bat.
Your real estate email address doesn’t just affect your professionalism.
It also affects your email deliverability.
Your email has a much higher chance of ending up in the spam filter. You’ll also limit your ability to scale your real estate business’s email marketing – as you won’t be able to use an email marketing platform.
Email marketing software such as Follow Up Boss or ActiveCampaign will require you to use a branded, domain-based real estate email address.
Don’t Use A Brokerage-Owned Email
The second thing I need to address when it comes to email addresses for real estate agents is using brokerage-owned email addresses.
This is an incredibly common real estate email mistake and I’ve seen it ruin businesses.
I’ve seen agents who have worked at brokerages for 10 or 20 years, relying solely on their brokerage-based email to conduct business.
When they finally decide they want to make a change – whether that’s switching brokerages, or whatever else it may be – they get totally screwed over.
Why?
Because they don’t own any of their data.
They lose ALL of their email addresses, contacts, past conversations, attachments…essentially, their entire database.
Not only that, but their clients don’t know where to find them once they’ve left.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t *think* you’ll ever leave your brokerage.
It’s just not worth the risk.
Why would you make yourself vulnerable to losing everything and having to start from zero?
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been an agent for two months or twenty years.
Everyone should own their own domain.
Go and buy your first name + last name .com or .ca, or your first name + last name + realtor.
That way, you’ll look like a legitimate business…
AND you’ll be in total control of your data and contacts.
Don’t Use A Heavy Real Estate Email Signature
I’ve seen so many agents sabotage their real estate email marketing efforts with this mistake.
Your real estate email signature shouldn’t be bulky.
You don’t need a ton of information, photos, or attachments.
And you certainly don’t need a 40-page disclosure statement on wire transfer fraud at the bottom of your email. (Yes, I’ve seen this more times than I can count).
Of course, you want to follow all local laws and regulations.
But deliverability should always be your #1 focus.
When you have a bulky, heavy email signature, two things happen.
- Your emails don’t load properly, because they’re taking up too much space and using up data on people’s mobile phones.
- Your emails are getting filtered into spam or promotions because they’re not simple, plain-text emails.
Your real estate email signature doesn’t need to be fancy.
The most important thing is to make sure your phone number is clickable.
Make things as easy as possible for your clients.
Don’t have a picture of your business card, because your phone number won’t be easily accessible – people will have to physically type it out.
Your name, title, website, and phone number are really enough. Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be!
Don’t Choose A Complicated Website Domain
The other real estate email address mistake actually has to do with your website domain name, which in turn affects your email address.
You want your website domain to be three things:
- Short
- Easy
- And memorable
Say your name is Jane Smith, and you buy the domain name:
“Janesmithrealestateaustintexas.com”
That is impossible for your ideal clients to remember!
They’re going to misspell something and send their email to the wrong address, resulting in a bounce back.
So now that we’ve covered the biggest real estate email address mistakes that agents are making…here’s what you should do instead!
Real Estate Email Address DO’s
The very first order of business if you’re looking to embrace email marketing as a real estate agent is to go out and buy your domain.
You can do a domain search on any popular hosting provider such as GoDaddy or Bluehost.
I recommend keeping things simple and buying your name.
Buying up any domains you can envision yourself using in the future is a critical step to protect your business.
Again, it doesn’t matter if you don’t envision yourself leaving your brokerage.
You never know what could happen.
Think of owning your domain and associated email addresses as a form of insurance for your business.
Your real estate email address matters a lot more than you think it does.
You need to start thinking about everything you’ve collected in your business as an asset.
All of the phone numbers, email addresses, contacts, conversations…
Make sure you’re protecting these things and treating your business like a real business.
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