Tips for Mastering Email Marketing

Knowing how and where to invest your marketing budget for the greatest return isn't an easy decision to make. You need to attract new clients, keep in touch with your current ones and nurture your leads – all while building your brand and growing your business.

Email marketing is one of the best investments a real estate agent can make. It's a cost-effective, personalized touch point for each of your leads and clients in a place that most people have access to 24/7 – their inbox.

The power of email marketing – it shows in the data

• Email is a more effective way to acquire clients than social media – Emails inspire purchasing three times more than social media.
• Email marketing yields an estimated 4,300 percent ROI – For every dollar spent, email marketing offers a return of $44.
• Email marketing is the preferred way clients want you to communicate with them – 91 percent of U.S. adults would like to receive emails from companies they do business with.

How to make your email marketing effective

While email marketing is a cost-effective, high-impact way to keep in touch with your leads and clients, it isn't as easy as sending out emails now and again to your contacts. From boring subject lines and spelling mistakes, to broken links, and poor timing, it's easy to make marketing email mistakes.

It's about making every message count

While email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools for real estate agents, with hundreds of millions of emails being sent every day, agents need to make every message count. Today, clients expect personalized messages with creative content that is mobile friendly and targeted to their unique interests. It's impossible for a real estate agent to deliver effective email touch points, without taking advantage of marketing automation opportunities.

Here are three ways to make the most of automated email marketing:

1. Capture your clients' interest

Remember that building relationships with your leads and clients is all part of the decision journey customers go on before a sale. Email touch points are part of a series of interactions with your leads and clients that you need to make as meaningful as your in-person connections. People want to do business with people they like, know, and trust, and email marketing is one of the best ways that you can build brand credibility so that you're the real estate agent they want to work with when they're ready to make a purchase or sale.

Build brand credibility and capture your client's interest by delivering personalized email communications and newsletters that are interesting, engaging and educational.

2. Seamlessly integrate email marketing with your other marketing strategies

Your success with real estate email marketing largely depends on how integrated your email marketing is with the data in your email lists and your other marketing strategies. By using a real estate CRM to organize and segment your leads from your clients, their preferences and interests, and keep track of your touch points with each, you are always ensuring you that you are sending relevant information to the right contacts, at the right time.

Automating your marketing efforts can take a lot of work off your plate, and employing a "set it and forget it" approach with your e-newsletters means you have the benefit of leveraging professionally designed and written newsletters by real estate marketing experts – so it's easy to stay in touch and generate referrals.

To drive even more value from each email, connect every email with other marketing strategies you have on the go.

Use emails to:

• Let your clients know about your latest blog post
• Integrate social sharing buttons to connect with your clients through social media
• Let your clients know about your next open house
• Automatically nurture leads from your website through strategically timed drip email campaigns

3. Learn what's working and learn more about your clients

Email marketing is one of the best ways to learn about your clients. Through email campaign analytics, you can see exactly who opened your email, who forwarded it on to others, and who clicked on what hyperlinks—effectively highlighting hot leads hiding in your database.

You can also use campaign statistics such as open rates and click-through rates to understand what topics clients are most interested in, and what type of content you should continue delivering to optimize your email marketing strategy.

Email campaign reporting is a powerful tool for continuously improving your email marketing strategy and results.

Send better emails, nurture your leads, keep in touch, and sell more properties. Start realizing the benefits of real estate email marketing today.

To view the original article, visit the IXACT Contact blog.