Real Estate Email Marketing Strategy : Drip Marketing Campaigns

Drip marketing is a common strategy employed in direct marketing. The strategy encompasses a constant flow of marketing comunications sent to customers over a period of time. This sequential communication helps create sales or in case of real estate, site visits & bookings through long-term repeat exposure of your brand and value offerings advertised. Drip marketing aims to deliver a steady stream of pre-written communication through a variety of platforms like emails, direct mails and social media, to prospective customers or buyers. The goal is to keep the product or service fresh in the buyers' mind and build strong brand perception.
 

Drip Marketing Through Emails

The digital world offers various messaging platforms but emails, even today is a preferred way to engage in drip marketing campaigns because of its low cost and easy automation. The objective of using drip marketing is mainly for developing brand recall where automated communications serve as a substitute for or supplement personal follow-ups. Thus drip marketing works as a lower-impact way of keeping top-of-mind recall for longer-tailed sales efforts.

Drip marketing campaigns enable you to be in touch with segments of people based on certain sales events like user sign-ups or after website visit. This gives you the option to personalize your communication according to the behavior and profile of these segments. It's all about communicating the right information at the right time to the right set of people. For example, if someone just filled an inquiry form, a drip marketing campaign could send a thank you email right away, and two days later, an email that highlights your product or services. The beauty of drip marketing emails lies in the fact that it's automatically based on triggers and user segments that you've defined.
 

How effective is drip marketing campaigns?

Email & SMS drip campaigns are a great way to nurture leads, communicate regularly with your customers, increase sales or re-engage lost customers. However, setting up a drip email campaign is so simple that you might wonder about the success rates of such campaigns. You will get a fair idea about how effective this email marketing concept is after you consider these ten statistics:

• Drip campaign open rates are about 80 % higher than single emails with the average click-through rates being three times higher.
• Nurturing emails receive 4-10 times the response rates compared to mass emails.
• Drip campaigns can generate 50 % more qualified leads.
• Drip campaigns emails generate 80 % more sales at 33 % lower costs.
• Companies have witnessed almost 20 % more sales after using lead nurturing strategy through drip campaigns.
• Businesses using marketing automation for nurturing prospects has seen a 451 % increase in qualified leads.
• Nurtured leads tend to make 47 % larger purchases than non-nurtured ones.
• Emails sent through drip campaigns drive 18 times more revenue than single emails.
• There is a 45 % increase in lead generation ROI for businesses that nurture their leads as compared to businesses that don't.
• Automating the lead nurturing process through emails has resulted in at least a 10 % increase in revenue in 6-9 months.

• Drip Marketing for Real Estate

  As a real estate marketer, do you keep in regular touch with your database, reminding them that you're available when they're ready to buy a home? Your day is busy and your time is important. Consumers need clear brand perception or to know who you are, what you do and what does that mean for them. If you think it's too much of a hassle trying to keep in touch and build relationships with your leads, then drip email marketing offers one of the easiest and most effective ways to do so.

   

  For a product as unpredictable as real estate, it can be tricky while reaching out to the right audience. Especially when taking to millennials, it is important to utilize innovative ways to reach them. The problem lies in the fact that most real estate businesses are still using the spray and pray method in email marketing to reach their potential home buyer. Consequently, the responses received from such leads to this approach are dismal as well. That is exactly why there is a need for real estate marketers to make a much needed change to their email marketing strategy and techniques. Using trigger emails to send the prospects exactly what they need at that point of time is what is required.

  For real estate email marketing, there are four important elements to keep in mind.

  Target: Who would get your emails?

  Timing: When do they get your emails?

  Frequency: How often do they receive these emails?

  Content: What do these emails say?

  Target: No one appreciates being flooded with random emails. Before you start shooting off your emails to random databases, take a step back and think about your target audience and why should they be getting these emails. Building a valid email list is all about perfecting your lead generation strategy. When you have a steady flow of incoming leads, you can segment them into lists and accordingly, start setting up relevant real estate drip campaigns.

  Timing: Since the real estate buying cycle is usually much longer as compared to other industries, sending out right emails at the right time makes all the difference on your business sales bottom line. Tracks lead activity through an automation platform and subsequently setting appropriate triggers, let you easily figure out what your lead is interested in. So in order to push the scales in your favor, send them relevant content like property pictures, or site visit incentives, immediate after-event mails, etc.

  Frequency: Figuring out the right email frequency can be tricky. While highly frequent emails can lead to an increase in brand recall, sending too many emails can backfire and create a negative impression. Studies conducted on the preference of email frequency revealed that most people preferred ‘at least monthly' followed by ‘at least weekly' mails. The key to finding the right frequency for your list can be perfected with experimentation. Find out what works for you, without being too invasive.

  Content: No matter how diligently you follow the above factors, the key to creating an effective drip email campaign involve the content of your communication. The mails you send won't make much difference if the content doesn't resonate with the user. Whatever be your content, from newsletters, promotional offers, videos to even surveys, the more targeted they are, the higher the chances that the prospect will relate to it.
   

Sell.Do – The Real Estate CRM

Back in 2014, while working on multiple real estate campaigns we realized there is a huge gap between the sales and marketing activities in the real estate industry. There was no view on the sales activities on each lead and it was difficult to track marketing ROI.   Understanding the key pain point and other challenges faced by real estate sales and marketing teams, we designed exclusively real estate CRM to solve all those challenges and enable real estate companies to sell more homes quickly and smartly.

Besides the obvious (open rates and clicks), measure the impact on your bottom line and the total clicks on your landing pages. If you want to drive traffic to your sign up page, measure the total traffic you got from the drip campaigns to the desired page and look at the conversions.

Your sales and pre-sales teams should maintain a consistent messaging defined by your marketing team. This will promote smarter messages and prevent mis-selling. Your marketing team should create email/SMS templates to be sent at a different stage or action point as per the consumer cycle. These templates can be installed in the system and enable the sales team to send them with just one click.

• Set up a drip marketing campaign in no time with Sell.Do

  Sell.Do helps you set up your drip marketing campaign effortless and without wasting any of the valuable time, time which you can better utilize at reaching hot prospects and trying to convert them. Take 30 days free trial and see how you can set up drip campaigns easily with Sell.Do.
   

Conclusion

The key to staying on top of your prospects' minds and keeping in touch with them can be an uphill task for most real estate agents. Drip marketing communication streamlines a well-timed flow of highly-relevant information to your contacts, without you having to do a thing. By staying on top of the mind with past clients and new leads, you make sure so when your leads are in need, one name jumps to their minds – yours! Drip marketing helps you reach with all your contacts in a way that feels personalized and unique to them, without you having to take time away from your busy schedules.