A mistake even the most experienced real estate sales reps make is assuming (not knowing) today’s information needs of its target audience. So use your Welcome email sent to people joining your mailing list for asking your prospects about the types of information they want to receive from you. If you provide a few basic categories you could help them with they’re more likely to answer than if you leave the question wide open with no suggestions. If you don’t use opportunities like your Welcome email for asking people what information they want to receive, you’ll run the great risk of spending lots of time and money creating newsletter and website content that isn’t of much interest to your target prospects. The result: people will be steadily unsubscribing from your mailing list in large numbers. Continue reading
Tag Archives: email inquiries
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 5
Your Welcome Email
When someone signs up for your mailing list, the subscriber often expects that they’ll receive a Welcome email from you. First, the new subscriber wants to confirm they were actually added to your mailing list, and the welcome email does this. Second, they’ll anticipate a thank you for signing up and want an introduction to the services you offer.
In fact, it’s been proven that a welcome email (if sent) has a much higher open rate than virtually any subsequent email you’ll ever send to your subscribers! The open rate for emails is normally 15%-20%, and it’s been reported that welcome emails generate 4 times the number of opens and five times the number of clicks as any subsequent emails! Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 4
Utilizing Facebook For Acquiring New Mailing List Signups
You can utilize Facebook for members who are currently signed into their Facebook account for getting new subscribers and more information on each person than you’d normally get from them. When people are logged into Facebook, certain basic bits of biographical information from their Facebook profile are instantly available to other applications on your computer. For instance, if visitors to your website are also signed into Facebook, your site (with the visitor’s permission first) can grab the basic contact information from the Facebook profile for your subscription form and automatically populate the form with the correct data in the correct spots so that they don’t have to type it out themselves. Having this in place ensures you can get lots of contact info for each new subscriber and not risk having them abandon filling out the form because too much and/or too personal information was asked. Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 3
Here are a few Call To Action phrases you could use for getting more people joining your real estate mailing list:
“See New Listings Before The General Public”
“Get Updates On How Much Homes In Your Area Sold For”
“Get Notified First About Upcoming Local Open Houses”
Ebay is a classic example of a company using mailing lists for improving customer retention. Whenever you do a search on eBay using either Basic Or Advanced criteria, if you’re unable to find what you’re looking for, you can use eBay’s Saved Search option. This means your search criteria is saved by eBay and then eBay does daily searches automatically for what you’re seeking and then sends you an email if anything matches your search criteria is found. You can have dozens of these Saved Searches happening simultaneously and each lasts as long as you want. Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 2
So why do some websites have huge, ever growing mailing lists, while other websites struggle to get new signups to their email database?
In the scenario we visited in the past article we used the example of you looking online for a rare book. The one rare book site whose mailing list you signed up for likely had on the landing page a very clear call to action: very prominent positioning of words suggesting you sign up for their mailing list. They may also have included persuasive reasons for joining their list such as “Can’t Find It Today? We’ll Keep Looking For You! Sign Up For Our Mailing List To Receive Our Inventory Updates Including The Books You Couldn’t Find Today”. Continue reading
All Roads Lead To Building Your Email Database Part 1
There’s a saying: “All roads lead to Rome”. It refers to the fact that in ancient times Rome, the capital city of the vast Roman Empire, created an excellent road system for the entire Empire with all roads radiating outward from Rome to the furthest reaches of the empire, much like the spokes of a wheel all radiate out from the wheel’s hub.
In the same way, all your online and offline marketing efforts should have one common goal: building your email database of prospective clients. Everything you do in your business should in some way support that central goal. Continue reading
Don’t Forget Email Marketing! Part 3
Email is constantly and changing and so you need to take into consideration a few key things when doing your email marketing nowdays: Continue reading
Don’t Forget Email Marketing! Part 2
Any talk of email being “out” or “old school” is total nonsense. Just take a look around. Nowadays, wherever you go, practically everyone is using a Smart Phone. If they’re not talking on it they’re either texting or (if more appropriate) sending and receiving emails on it. When people get new messages from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, they get notified via email. If they are using these sites regularly, and get notified by their phone of each new message arrival, that means they’re looking at their email accounts more frequently than before Social Media became popular. If anything, recent advances in technology have made email usage even more pervasive than ever! Continue reading
Don’t Forget Email Marketing! Part 1
With all the hype about Social Media in recent years, it was perhaps inevitable that older forms of online communication such as email would take a drubbing in the media and be declared “has beens”, kind of like the Mac’s increasing popularity vs. the PC: the new, cool thing replacing something only business people, nerds or your parents use. Continue reading
Build Your Email Prospecting List
Real Estate Email Tip #1: Building Your Email Database With Qualified Prospects
Building your email database of buyer and seller prospects is the most inexpensive way of advertising your real estate services and listings to huge numbers of qualified prospects. The quickest way of building your database is finding out where these prospects are online, emailing them with a few questions with the goal of getting their permission to add them to your mailing list.
One of the best sources of finding For Sale By Owner (FSBO) homes online is the hugely popular online classifieds site Craig’s List. There are currently about 50 new FSBO homes posted daily for the Toronto area on this site. One way of breaking the ice with these people is sending them an email asking, “I work with many buyers on a regular basis. Are you willing to pay a commission if I bring you someone who buys your home?”. If they answer “yes”, then ask them where they want to move to and if you can send them updates on new listings in the area. If they again answer “yes” then add their email address to your database.
If they become interested in some of the listings you send them then it becomes more urgent to sell their house quickly or face having to hold two mortgages. This makes them more likely to list their home with you as well as sign a Buyer Representation Agreement.
In my Awesome power of Email 4 credit Continuing Education course, I train real estate professionals on everything they need to know on driving traffic to their website, getting people to sign up for their email lists and how to engage different types of prospects via email and convert these leads into clients and much more.
For available dates for this course, Click here to find out.
Cutting Edge Online Advertising Tactics Part 11
This ad verges on being comical when in the next sentence there’s a spelling error (‘proces’). There is absolutely nothing interesting (let alone compelling) about how this person has presented themselves so you can bet they’ll get few or no responses from this.
Here’s another dull as oatmeal ad: Continue reading
Cutting Edge Online Advertising Tactics Part 10
Jobs > Real Estate – This is a great place to recruit new people to your team or brokerage. It’s also a great place to see what other brokerages are offering nowadays to new or experienced reps. You may find a real estate brokerage here that fits your business better than your current one, saving you thousands of dollars per year. It’s always a good sign when a broker is advertising for new reps online because it’s a good indication they’re more tech savvy than many other brokers.
Use Eye Catching Ad Headlines – it’s easy for your ad to get buried and not stand out on Craig’s List as 100 ads are shown on each page and there’s no option of paying them for boosting your ad’s prominence. However, there are clever little things you can do to really make your ad stand out. Here are some examples of ad titles on Craig’s List that got my attention and really stood out from the other ads: Continue reading
