In real estate, customer retention is a long haul proposition. NAR reports that the average American moves once every seven years. Doing an excellent job for your client the first time is not enough. Even the best selling experiences fade with time. An ongoing email newsletter to your existing customers is a cost effective way of staying in touch. And it's cheaper than mailing out refrigerator magnets!

The three biggest challenges to sending a newsletter are: consistency, content, and delivery. I have suggestions in each area.

Consistency: I find consistently putting out a newsletter a great challenge. For me, procrastinating on working on a newsletter is the easiest thing in the world. I hate the thought of sitting down and facing a blank screen every month. Solution #1 – Don't send out the newsletter too often. Kinda obvious, but true. I suggest sending out a quarterly newsletter. There is a fine line between top-of-mind awareness and spam. Err on the side of not being spammy. Next, put the 'Sit down and write it' date in your calendar and treat it just like a meeting with a client. Just do it!

Content: Local gossip is good. I've included a partial list below of topics that you get new information about all the time. Much of it comes through casual conversation and you probably never give it much thought. You may take it for granted, but it is relevant to your clients. As you include relevant information about the local area, you establish yourself as the local expert.

Topics for Newsletters

• New retail stores coming to the area
• School district results
• Local Sports results
• Events and festivals
• Interesting properties for sale
• Quote the SmartBroker Report for sales and pricing trends

Recycle Content: The strategy we successfully use at BrokerCafe is to put articles and blog posts on the website. Then we excerpt the first paragraph as content for the newsletter. (Sign up for our Broker-oriented newsletter.) This write-once, use-twice strategy makes your hard work available to the internet via search engines and fuels your newsletter.

Delivery: All of your hard work up to this point means nothing if the newsletter does not reach the inbox. Damn those spam filters! If your real estate CRM system provides a newsletter feature, use it. Otherwise, use a reputable third party email company. These guys are pros that spend lots of time and energy negotiating with folks like Google and MSN to get your email delivered. Figure about a hundred bucks for ten thousand emails as a rule of thumb. DO NOT copy and paste all your contacts into the CC line of an email and send it out! That will make your email disappear so fast your head will spin. Worse than that, you could get all the email from your domain blocked for a period of time.

An email newsletter is a valuable drip marketing tool that can help you maintain top-of-mind awareness in your existing clients. Hopefully I have taken out some of the sting of producing a newsletter on a consistent basis.

To view the original article, visit the CoreLogic Broker Buzz blog.