Drip Marketing 101: Put Your Real Estate CRM to Work

Without a real estate CRM, the process of tracking and segmenting communication with various leads manually can be painstaking. Because successful agents know that they need to stay productive in order to be profitable, the task of sending a series of emails often gets pushed to the back burner. And drip email marketing for busy real estate agents isn't easy. Along with each message, you have to think about things like open rates, click-through rates, and personalized templates.

However, when done effectively, drip marketing has been shown to increase sales opportunities by an average of 20%.

What is drip email marketing, exactly? In a nutshell, it's an automated process of sending emails to specific segments of your email lists based on certain actions they take. These messages land right where they're supposed to go, over time, with minimum waste (or at least that's the intention).

In order to get the most out of your efforts, you'll need to set up drip workflows — the order in which emails are sent — in your real estate CRM based on two criteria: 1) Where leads are coming in from and 2) What actions were taken on your website.

An automated real estate CRM is essential to conducting email drip campaigns and structuring your workflows. However, in order to achieve profitability with your email efforts, you need to be able to keep prospects engaged over time. Here are a few best practices for determining who should receive what type of email, and when they should receive that message.

Define Your Goals

What do you want to accomplish?

Before formatting your email messages, outline your goals of your campaign and identify success metrics. Do you want more traffic to a dedicated landing page containing info on a specific property? Then you'd want to set up a drip workflow for email lists who have shown an interest in buying in that neighborhood. Get to know your prospects before crafting your messages. What search terms did they use to find your site? What pages did they visit, and what did they download? Segment your lists by interests, geography, etc. and drip out content they'll care about.

Refine Your Message

What do you want to say?

Your message to a real estate lead that downloaded an eBook on your website is going to be different than a message to a lead that came in from Zillow. Customized templates in a real estate CRM allows you to personalize emails and text-messages with lead information.

Once you have chosen a template, focus on what message you want to deliver. Leads can take days — or months — to nurture, but they all represent qualified prospects that deserve your time and attention. Tailor your message as leads show they're getting closer to making a buying or selling decision and point them to content or pages on your website that will be of value to them.

Determine Your Timing

How often do you need to send messages?

It's never a good idea to drown your prospects in emails of little or no interest to them, and/or too frequently email them. Should you be sending an email every day for a period of time, or only one a week, or every month? This will be somewhat dependent upon the current speed of your market and the type of properties you represent.

Take a slow-and-steady approach, and ramp up messages as leads reach a certain stage in the sales process. Leads who have clicked through to specific listings on your site multiple times are further along in the process than a prospect who has clicked once on a blog post, so keep that data in mind when determining frequency.

Adjust Your Campaign

What changes do you need to make?

If your data shows one specific email isn't helping move leads through the funnel, or recipients are increasingly unsubscribing and/or reporting spam, it's time to adjust your messaging schedule. Keep in mind that your prospects may be receiving emails from more than one agent, so keep content fresh and original.

Look at ineffective emails as a test, not a failure. You'll no longer be wasting time on a message that isn't resonating with your prospects and you can focus on different subject matters that drive results. With time, you will discover what is successfully reaching different segments of your email lists.

At the end of the day, productivity = profitability. Your real estate CRM should be tied in with industry-leading email delivery to give you 98% email delivery rates and maximum exposure for your messages. This allows your campaigns to increase your click-through and open rates and achieve maximum impact with leads and contacts.

To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate blog.