Email marketing is still king. Although mountains of new technology claim to be the next email killer, email still plows on. Last year alone, over 215,000,000,000 emails were sent each day! And that’s a 5% increase over 2015.
While social, instant messaging, and other marketing platforms continue to grow, email marketing is still one of the best marketing tools available. Besides, sending and receiving emails is technically free.
Myth: Building an email list is your greatest hurdle
Truth: Effectively using your email list is your greatest hurdle
Anyone can send emails, right? After all, email marketing is just like a tool in your garage. The only difference between being really good at nailing nails and building a new deck is how well you can use your tools and how creative you are at your approach.
Drip marketing campaigns can revolutionize your email marketing efforts as an agent.
Drip campaigns are a blanket term which ultimately covers different marketing strategies. There are drip campaigns designed to target how users interact with your real estate website. There are also drip campaigns designed to capture users who have left retail shopping carts abandoned for a certain period of time (some of your favorite websites do this and even offer discounts – give it a try!)
Specifically, we want to look at how email drip campaigns will improve your business as an agent. Email drip campaigns will boost your engagement and conversion rate, but remember – email marketing is also a double-edged sword.
Why? Well, real estate email marketing is one of the worst offenders for email abuse and spam compared to other industries, according to ongoing studies conducted by Mailchimp. Too many agents, brokers, and even lenders are blindly blasting emails without a strategy in mind!
I’m tired of abusing my email lists! I’m ready to know more about email drip campaigns.
How do drip campaigns help real estate agents succeed.
In general, drips are perfect for all aspects of business and not just marketing. Some companies leverage drips for product updates, recommendations, specials, and even support ticket follow-ups. Email drip campaigns are great for agents who want to automate their lead nurturing efforts.
In it’s simplest form, lead nurturing is about warming up your prospects to your brand, individual style, target zip codes, and even hot properties. Drips are designed to help agents nurture their leads.
Nurtured leads are engaged, informed, and properly introduced to your brand, which is great for you. Leads nurtured through email drip campaigns can see 119% higher click rates, 50% higher conversion rates, and make 47% larger purchases.
Email drip campaigns are a series of emails which fire out to a predetermined segment of leads in from your email list. You can customize when the emails fire, what happens next when a lead opens or clicks a link in any particular email, the duration of the email drip campaign, and even the subject lines and bodies of each email. The customization options are endless!
Discover how to set up email drip campaigns using Chime.
Let’s talk about subject lines and bodies.
What sort of content you include in your drip email campaigns will ultimately depend on the quality of your email segments (that is, the types of leads you’ve curated in your email lists), the types of properties you or your team focuses on, and the amount of time you want to allocate towards planning your drips.
A few great examples we love include property recommendations, information on a community or particular zip code, and even industry news and market trends.
Lastly, don’t be afraid to share the same lists or even the same brand as Shane Farkar, CTO of The Agency in an interview with My Emma says, “Something we set out to do from the very beginning was to give our clients a really cohesive brand experience.” Sharing templates and even individual strategies will help you and your team members discover best practices based on your email lists.
Remember that your leads will also be opening your emails from their mobile phones, too. According to Litmus, mobile emails in 2015 accounted for 53% of all email opens! Web-apps like Gmail accounted for 30% while traditional desktop applications have steadily been on the decline. Make sure your email drips look
Reporting and analyzing your email drips.
In order to measure your success, it’s best to establish a baseline, also known as a benchmark. A benchmark will help you gauge your efforts compared to the entire real estate industry and even the overall health of email marketing across all industries.
In their 2015 email metrics benchmark study, Silverpop (today an IBM company) found that, as a whole, real estate emails saw a 22% open rate and a 2% click through rate. In addition, real estate emails also had a very high unsubscribe rate. Yikes!
Ultimately, email drip campaigns are similar to your other marketing efforts. Because of all the customization efforts, you’ll need to spend time to analyze your list and collaborate with your team to determine the best campaign for any given segment. You’ll need a bit of creativity, cohesion, and planning to set up a drip campaign. Even with our examples, your individual experience may vary depending on numerous factors, some of which are entirely out of your control!
In the Chime dashboard, you can your efforts in the “Drip Campaign Reports” tab. There you can see open rates and click thru rates for each email within the drip sequence.
If you’ve read this far and wonder, “how do I know my email marketing efforts are effective,” don’t worry. Our in-house tech expert Karl Fezer will guide you through advanced analytics, tracking, and reporting in the near future. Stay tuned!