Real Estate Email Marketing! 101 Top Tips for Real Estate Agents

The Personal Touch: How Smarter Email Marketing for Real Estate Agents Makes a Difference

Email is one of the most effective channels for customer acquisition and retention for any business - and that includes the real estate industry. 

Why? Well, email marketing is one of the best ways to build a real relationship - if you do it right. There are so many real estate email ideas out there, and the benefits should be obvious, as email offers a direct line of communication with your clients. From that initial welcome email, to valuable email newsletters, to thoughtful real estate drip campaigns, you can gently guide prospective buyers and sellers through each stage of the customer's journey. 

So don't just create an email and hit send! Nurture every prospect instead into a loyal, long-term customer and use email marketing to its greatest advantage. This email marketing guide walks you through our recommendations for real estate agents who are ready to make email marketing work for them. 

We'll cover:

1. Email Marketing Techniques for Real Estate Agents: The Inbox is Sacred!
2. Researching and Mapping Your Buyer's Real Estate Sales Journey: Beyond a Template
3. How HubSpot Helps You Optimise The Sales Journey
4. The Key Tools You Need for a Full Email Campaign
5. Strategies for Successful Real Estate Email Marketing Sequences and Behaviour Tracking
6. Nurturing Real Estate Prospects by Tracking Customer Behaviours
7. Lead Scoring Systems for Real Estate Sales Success
8. Campaigns - HubSpot's Smart Way to Measure Email Marketing ROI for Real Estate

What Makes Email Marketing for Realtors So Different?

Many real estate agencies wrongly assume that traditional marketing methods will work just as well for promoting their listings or services. However (and as you well know!) the nature of real estate can be dynamic, flexible, and person-centred. The types of emails you send can have a huge impact on your prospects. To improve your real estate email approach, it's important to remember that the people who opened your email are just that: people.

Property purchases are inherently human - and your clients need real estate agents to take a different email approach. The right email to send might not be an email at all - but a phone call, instead.

When it comes to house-buying, or selling real estate, your prospect's touchpoints differ, and their needs change. Savvy communicators know that they'll need to get more creative with their sales and marketing software, lest another real estate agent swoop in and pinch your sale. From real estate listings to landing pages, and general ideas for engaging campaigns - remembering that everything you write and share will be read by a real human being can help to keep you focused. 

When it comes to maximising every single email marketing campaign, your business needs a platform that not only meets customers' needs, but keeps you ahead of the real estate email marketing game. 

Watch Short HubSpot CRM Demo for Real Estate Agents 🔽

The Rise of AI for Email Marketing

As we are all aware, artificial intelligence is poised to play an increasingly vital role in email marketing in the coming years. Using AI for emails is a great way to get a lot done in a short space of time, but it's important to remember that you get out what you put in. 

What will the impact of AI be on writing emails, creating templates, sparking sales conversations, and analysing future campaigns? At first glance, it's obvious that AI will become a go-to for smarter content creation and data analysis. 

Ahead of the curve, HubSpot recently launched its very own AI assistant, called ChatSpot. This AI tool is similar to ChatGPT, and can analyse CRM data in seconds. 

With this tool, marketers can ask ChatSpot to provide insights of all kinds, asking questions such as “Who are the 10 most engaged contacts who have recently clicked on marketing emails?”. From your email open rate, to the total number of email recipients, to your email design, even when you should send emails - an AI tool can take your strategy to a whole new level. 

This kind of AI-enabled analysis makes for infinitely more targeted and effective email campaigns, and can give you a serious competitive edge - from follow-up emails to the right number of emails to send. 

Gone are the days when a simple CRM would do the job. We're now at the dawn of the "Smart CRM", where AI can help take customer relationship management to the next level. In an industry like real estate, every email you send is a chance to double down on those all-important relationships, referrals, and recommendations. 

With AI capabilities for generating content and extracting actionable insights from data, email marketers will be able to improve campaign performance and extract more value, whichever Smart CRM platform they use.

Email Marketing Techniques for Real Estate Agents: The Inbox is Sacred!

Did you know that 89% of all business emails have the company name as the email sender, rather than a human being? We are all inundated by emails, almost every moment of every day. At AutomateNow, we believe that your prospective client's inbox is a sacred space - not a dumping ground for meaningless updates or transactional email messages - no matter how much you might want to take advantage of email. 

Given how important it is for companies to properly nurture their prospects, it should be easy to see where a lot of real estate marketing email campaigns fail!

Your team decides to send out a quick blast to your email list in the hopes of driving some engagement or sparking interest - sending the same message to everyone and treating every single prospective buyer in the same way.

Despite their best efforts, your team have probably caused some serious leaks in your marketing funnel. Yikes! How many of us have unsubscribed after receiving an email that was clearly a lazy attempt to make a sale? 

Your customers are no different. Email marketing makes it easy to get in touch with prospective buyers, but the best real estate email marketing experts know that they have to have a reason for doing so. 

The key is not to see your prospects as a transactional list of email addresses. Instead, you have to focus on the person at the other end of each email. Think of it this way: every interaction is a personal conversation.

You wouldn't show up to someone's house, shout at them constantly about how great you are for weeks on end, and expect them to buy from you, would you?

Instead, start listening. Get to know your prospects' pain points and goals. Talk to them like you would a colleague or a boss, with relevant, thoughtful content. Tailor what you do to where they are in their journey. This human-to-human approach is crucial for marketing real estate in the right way. 

That being said, we also know that competition is fierce, time is tight, and your team has targets to meet. This is why you need real estate email marketing software that blends personalisation seamlessly with automation. 

Researching and Mapping Your Buyer's Real Estate Sales Journey: Beyond a Template

The first step in effective property-focused email marketing is researching your audience's personas and mapping their typical buyer's journey.

Where are their pain points? What content do they need at each stage? How are you uniquely placed to help? Understanding all of these things is fundamental to running successful automated real estate email campaigns. 

Why? Well, this understanding allows you to meet subscribers where they are with relevant messages. For example, someone who just signed up for a free mortgage calculator might be ready to buy, whereas a return client looking to downsize might need a little more emotional support and encouragement as children fly the nest, for example. 

How HubSpot Helps You Optimise The Sales Journey

Nuance like this is where a platform like HubSpot is essential. Its purpose is not to replace the sales journey, but to optimise it so you can scale your success without compromising your integrity (or that of your customer relationships) - if you take just one thing away from this real estate email marketing guide, let that be it. 

HubSpot empowers real estate agents to take that personalised approach and scale it with specific email marketing software and market-leading tools that are directly integrated into your CRM.

Offering everything from a single email sequence to full-blown campaign analysis (how many people read your emails or reported your email as spam?!) you can map subscribers' journeys, identify sale-ready behavioural signals, and use that insight to deliver targeted marketing automation and an awesome customer experience. 

HubSpot makes it easy to spot and thoughtfully respond to customer behaviours and preferences. The platform automatically tracks key email marketing metrics, and engagement signals like subscription sign-ups, logins, and feature usage.

You can leverage this data to build detailed journey maps and develop appropriate content for each stage - meeting your prospects where they are.

The Key Tools You Need for a Full Email Campaign

We both know you’re here because you want to nail email marketing for your real estate business. To do that at scale, however, you’ll need some smart, specific tools for real estate agents, to make sure your email content is intelligent, effective, and customer-focused so you meet your marketing goals. Luckily, HubSpot has everything you need. 

Sequences and Workflows

HubSpot has two great tools for nurturing your prospective buyers and sellers at scale. These are called sequences and workflows. On the surface, they can look fairly similar, but they're two distinct tools and have key differences relating to different stages of the marketing funnel.

What's a workflow?

A workflow is a series of automated processes that move contacts through a set of predefined steps based on the actions they take. These actions can be things like opening an email, submitting a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. 

Think of this as an email that goes out in a one-to-many relationship, and usually from an info@ email address. You can use smart content to help build out the content of the email, too. So if you’re sending out an invite to an event, you can nurture paying customers by including a paragraph with a free/complimentary ticket via a link in your email that only they can see. Neat, huh?

Workflows automate repetitive tasks and communication with your contacts for effective real estate email marketing, and they can be sent to multiple contacts at a time.

And what's a sequence?

Unlike a workflow, which is more conditional and complex, sequences are like an automated drip campaign that's made up of a series of predefined emails that are sent in a set order.

Depending on your HubSpot license, your sequence can be triggered by a workflow, but even if you don’t have a license that has every function, your sales or marketing team can still trigger a sequence manually.

Contacts can only go through one sequence at a time, and they're more linear and straightforward than a workflow.

What’s brilliant about sequences is their ability to streamline personalised emails and follow-ups for your leads. Simply choose a list of leads you’d like to engage with and choose an email template to send from your personal email. 

But rather than hitting “send all”, sequences make it super easy to personalise each email so that you can ask about your prospect’s recent conference, their upcoming holiday, and more! As we’ve discussed, that personal touch is the key difference between a positive sales relationship, or making someone feel like they’re just a number in your head. 

Oh - and if a prospect replies at any point in a workflow or a sequence, then these tools automatically stop their flow, and let your team take over. 

Custom Behaviour Tracking

This handy-dandy tool helps you to track customer behaviours. It measures:

• What a prospect clicked on
  

• When they clicked on something
  

• When they logged in
  

• What they've downloaded
  

This stops your email content from just being content, and transforms it into a lens that helps you understand what a prospect is really intrigued by – making your follow-ups more specific and specialised.

Strategies for Successful Real Estate Email Marketing Sequences and Behaviour Tracking

There are so many email marketing tactics when it comes to nurturing leads, so let's explore a more detailed example that shows how you can use the tools above from a real estate sales perspective.

Picture this: your prospect signs up for a free trial of your insider "first looks" at the newest property listings.  Your email automation tool (in our case, HubSpot) then triggers a series of emails that provide more info, property purchase insights, and a wealth of tips for getting the most value out of their trial. 

You send a welcome email, saying how glad you are that they've signed up, and let them know that they'll be the first to receive your real estate newsletter that will update them on the latest listings each week. 

By using dynamic content, you can customise emails based on the prospect's specific behaviours. If a customer clicked somewhere specific in a previous email, you could reference that in a future message.

Every interaction is an opportunity to show your customers how much you care when it comes to realtor email marketing. 

To nurture prospects on this personal level at scale, it's essential to use the right email marketing software. This level of combined personalisation and automation simply isn't possible without a platform like HubSpot. We love to think about it this way: when email marketing is planned out in a smart way, you’ve created a 24/7, always-on digital customer service rep, who can educate and nurture your prospects. 

So how do you do this? Begin by setting up email workflows triggered by specific prospect behaviours that nurture them down a desired path. When they engage with an email, the automated sequence pauses so your team can continue the conversation. Your automated email marketing service takes care of nurturing your prospects even while you're out of the office - helping people feel valued 24/7.

Nurturing Real Estate Prospects by Tracking Customer Behaviours

Understanding the touchpoints a prospect encounters is one of the best email marketing recommendations we can make. 

From sending an onboarding email to creating a sequence of personalised messages that will be sent after someone downloads a specific eBook - you can create an automated campaign that is genuinely personal.

Once you've mapped the different user journeys and identified behavioural signals, you can use these insights to create a much more effective email marketing strategy.

You'll be constantly nurturing clients or "warming up" cooler leads - especially important for keeping your pool of prospects well-stocked. 

Lead Scoring Systems for Real Estate Sales Success

Of course, it's not enough to track behaviours - you need to make sure you're actually engaging with the right people, too.

Any successful email marketing strategy hinges on the email copy being read by the right person! It's no good tracking the behaviours alone - what if someone's VA is checking their emails for them?

This is where a lead scoring system comes in. HubSpot uses lead scoring to determine an individual prospect's sales readiness based on their actions.

Now, we know that sounds a little bit like Big Brother is Watching You - but it enables you to spot when someone is ready to buy, just by measuring the language in their email - words like "we" instead of "I" could mean your prospective buyer is ready to make a purchase as a family. 

Best of all, understanding customer behaviour at this level with HubSpot prevents you from doing things that could negatively affect the sale: from sending sales outreach to unqualified leads or neglecting qualified leads. 

Campaigns - HubSpot's Smart Way to Measure Email Marketing ROI for Real Estate

So you’ve set up your sequences and workflows around the prospect’s sales journey, you’ve personalised your automated email copy, you’re tracking behaviours and keeping an eye on a lead’s readiness score. Great job!

But with all of that going on, even in an integrated platform, it can be tricky to measure ROI and manage all your metrics at a glance as your marketing team will well know.

When you're time-poor, need to report on your email marketing quickly, or figure out the more widespread effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts, you need a tool that's designed to do exactly that.

If that sounds handy, may we introduce you to HubSpot's Campaigns Tool? This tool is heaven-sent and, in our view, captures the very essence of marketing.

How much revenue did your content marketing create? Are people more likely to engage you as their realtor after reading your emails? How many click-throughs, individual email opens, or downloads did you achieve? 

Let's say you have a campaign promoting an interactive eBook that teaches your seller prospects how to get their home photoshoot-ready for when they're listing it for sale. 

The campaign to get people to download and engage with the eBook includes everything from emails, to landing pages, social posts, ads, and more. How do you measure the impact of every element of your campaign? Well, with HubSpot's campaign tool, you can see things like:

• Sessions 

  • These track traffic to your campaign pages and assets, showing how many prospects visited your real estate landing page to download the eBook.

• New Contacts

  • This metric measures new leads generated from the campaign, attributed to the activity that directed them to your website for the first time.

• Influenced Contacts 

  • This handy metric measured new contacts who engage with assets like your emails or social posts - those who were "influenced" by your campaign.

• Revenue 

  • For gated assets, this shows closed-won revenue from influenced contacts who became paying customers, but might not be directly attributed to your campaign.

• Attributed Revenue

  • This measures revenue that can be directly credited to your campaign activity.

With these campaign metrics, you can quantify engagement, leads, and ROI for your interactive eBook, measuring the success of your email marketing efforts with a unified view of overall performance.

Make second-guessing the impact of your strategies for your email marketing list a thing of the past.

Wrapping Up Our Guide to Email Marketing: The HubSpot Advantage

With its unified CRM and marketing platform, HubSpot gives real estate agents an unparalleled ability to track prospective buyer/seller behaviours, build customer journey maps, align their marketing efforts, and gather meaningful insights. HubSpot has several email marketing tools to help your team nurture, engage, and genuinely connect with potential buyers and sellers as you grow your real estate client base. 

Email as a channel will only be effective if you connect the dots across your prospect’s sales journey, and manage your interactions accordingly. 

As we’ve explored, automated workflows engage prospects at exactly the right time with relevant, personalised content, while your awesome team build relationships with high-value leads.

If you’re looking for scalable growth powered by repeat revenue, HubSpot offers you the much-needed infrastructure to turn email from a static communication tool into an intelligent system that engages your sales potential buyers in a human, genuine way.  

If you're ready to transform the way you use email to acquire, retain, and delight your customers, let’s talk! Book a demo with us today to see how HubSpot can improve your email marketing. A smarter, automated, human-to-human approach is ready and waiting for you.