In recent years, e-mail has largely usurped the phone as the preferred method of communication in most industries. E-mail is mobile, immediate and easily used to transmit links, images and videos – and it is for these reasons that e-mail marketing has become a useful tool for anyone in sales. In fact, the average e-mail marketing campaign has been shown to provide a 4,300 percent return on investment, owing to the fact that it is free and allows you to reach a wide swath of clients with no overhead and very little effort. I’m always looking for ways to help real estate agents who are just getting into the business shore up their strategy for how to maximize their profits, and I strongly feel that the best vehicle for real estate marketing in 2016 is e-mail. Here’s why:
With e-mail marketing, you can advertise to many more clients with much less effort.
- Ease of Information Sharing: In the past, the process of sharing listings has been time-consuming and inefficient. Now, with the click of a button, an agent can broadcast new listings or ones that aren’t renting or selling to a whole listserve of past, present and future clients, increasing the number of eyes on the properties and generating more interest than he could ever expect to drum up using traditional methods of advertising. If you’re looking to promote your listings to as many people as possible, you cannot do better than an e-mail marketing campaign. I recommend sending out monthly newsletters detailing which properties you have available; you can even send out a few different blasts that are each catered to a different budget to accommodate more of your clients’ needs.
- It Lets You Stay in Touch: Your e-mail inbox and contact list contains the information of everyone you’ve ever exchanged messages with, which means that without even trying, you’ve already accrued an electronic rolodex of all of your past clients. Return customers are a great source of revenue; if you’ve worked with someone before and impressed them with your professionalism and competency, odds are, they’d be happy to work with you again. Set up reminders to e-mail your past clients exactly one year after you work with them to find out how they’re doing and if they’re in the market to move. You’ll be amazed at how many more clients you’ll be adding to your load without expending any extra effort to find new ones. In the interim, make sure to include them on your newsletter listserve so they don’t forget you!
- E-mail Provides a Record: One pitfall of telephone calls has always been that after you get off the phone, neither you nor your client has any record of what you discussed or agreed to during your call. E-mail, on the other hand, allows you to keep extensive records of your communication, and it goes without saying that having everything in writing will make your life infinitely easier. Gone are the days of “we never discussed that,” – now, all you have to do is search for an old e-mail thread in your inbox for a precise record of all of your communication with any given client, and this allows you to better manage your clients’ expectations.
As real estate professionals, promotion is everything, and using e-mail to conduct your marketing is a great way to leverage your business and take your accounts to the next level of customer service. So, then, I highly recommend establishing an e-mail marketing campaign strategy and adhering to it if you’re looking for a simple way to maximize your productivity and revenue.