Marketing is an important part of building your brand and establishing yourself in the industry. Your marketing strategy should include your professionally designed website, business cards, yard signs, a social media campaign, and of course, email marketing. Each one of the facets of marketing should work together to build your brand and expand your network, but it all depends on knowing how to create a real estate newsletter that performs.
Email marketing, client newsletters specifically, help keep you at the forefront of your client’s minds. They are a consistent reminder of who you are, what you’re doing, and how you can serve them. If you’re building a client newsletter for the first time or just want to improve the effectiveness of your current strategy, check out these four tips.
Set a Goal
Before you choose a template or write your first article, you need to have a goal and a plan. Ask yourself: what is the goal of this newsletter? Are you looking to convert leads into clients? Are you trying to get more people to your website or stay connected with past clients to increase referrals? When you know your goal, you can create content based on that goal. Creating a newsletter with no clear focus will result in you feeling overwhelmed and disorganized–and your readers ignoring what you have to say.
Choose a Platform
Once you know what you want to say and who you want to say it to, you’ll need to choose a newsletter platform. A quick Google search will bring up dozens of options for newsletter creation, but you should be looking for a few key features to ensure your newsletter stands out:
- Automation- As a real estate agent, automation is your friend. Find a platform that will allow you to create a newsletter and then schedule it to go out at a different date. This allows you to create a month’s worth of newsletters and schedule them to go out at the same time each week without you having to think about it.
- Customization – Your client newsletter should fit with your brand, and the platform you choose should let you customize your colors, templates, fonts, and style to represent you and your values.
- Analytics – You can’t just send out a newsletter and hope for the best. You need a platform that allows you to check the status and statistics of your newsletter so you know what to do more of and what’s not working.
- Multimedia Capabilities – Make sure the platform you choose has the capabilities to host videos, high-quality pictures, and other media types to maximize your newsletter’s effectiveness. Double-check that the newsletter can be formatted to fit mobile devices, too.
Include High-Quality (Targeted) Content
If you’re going to spend time creating a newsletter, you want it to work for you. You want it to reach the right people with the right message to help you reach your goal. Real estate is a highly visual industry, so make sure to include professional-quality photos. In fact, your newsletter should be 80% text and 20% images, so those images need to stand out.
Keep an Eye on the Stats
Pushing “Send” and sending your newsletter into inboxes is not the final step in this process. Wait 24 hours and then check the statistics of your newsletter. Your platform should have the ability to show you how many people received the email, how many opened it, what links they clicked on, etc. It will also tell you how many people deleted the email or unsubscribed. With this information, you can take a closer look at which elements of your newsletter generated interest and which did not.
According to a study done by Campaign Monitor, “your average email open rate should be between 15-25%, your average click-through rate should be about 2.5% and your average click-to-open rate should be between 20-30%.” While you probably won’t see these numbers right off the bat, it’s something to work towards. You can tweak your newsletters and watch the number of opens and click-throughs increase.
Final Thoughts
Think of your client newsletter as a first impression. It should be easy to read and give your audience honest, accurate, and relevant content that they need during their home selling or buying process. Creating these newsletters and using them to reach your goals will take time, patience, and trial and error.
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