How Real Estate Agents Can Increase Sales By Leveraging E-mail Marketing Strategies

One of the things that bothered my wife and I the most during the few times that we’ve engaged a Realtor® to sell our house is that we often felt abandoned for weeks at a time — without any word from our agent. I suspect this is not a totally uncommon experience among clients even with the hardest working agents on the job. The client’s threshold of frustration with his or her agent only gets lower when the real estate market slows down and the house is not being shown to as many prospective buyers.

What is common with ANY customer is that he or she wants to be reassured — on a regular basis — that they made the right decision by doing business with you and that you are providing them with the best product or service possible. This is not Rocket Science, just human nature.

I read somewhere recently that the best salespeople were just “providers of quality information”. The quality, relevance, and frequency of that information will determine how the customer will respond to it. High quality, highly relevant, and frequently delivered information to the customer serves to deepen the relationship with the salesperson resulting in higher sales volume and higher customer loyalty. Poor quality, irrelevant, and infrequently delivered information achieves the exact opposite.

The truth is that regardless of what a person is selling — real estate, automobiles, stocks, or boiled peanuts on the side of the road — there is always a customer involved. Some would argue that a Realtor® has two customers — the seller and the buyer of a property. The real customer, however, is always the one who is being contractually represented by the Realtor®.

So, how can a real estate agent deepen his or her relationship with clients by delivering high quality and highly relevant information on a frequent basis — especially in a down real estate market? One way is to CAPTURE MORE INFORMATION from clients starting from the initial contact. A name and an e-mail address should be absolutely REQUIRED (unless, of course, the client is part of the 1% that doesn’t use e-mail at all). Those two pieces of information can trigger a virtually automatic — and low-cost — process of delivering quality information to anxious clients. This process can continue on a weekly basis for the duration of the selling cycle … and beyond. Delivered in the form of a well-designed, but simple to update e-mail newsletter, an agent can provide clients with weekly real estate outlooks for the local market that include trends, what price ranges are currently selling (and why), how local or national economies are effecting the market, and realistic forecasts that might effect the sale or purchase of a home in the area. This kind of information is usually available from local MLS services, boards of Realtors, chambers of commerce, and other sources.

Delivering information via e-mail newsletters is fast becoming the most desired method of marketing for two reasons. First, it is CHEAP! No postage, no paper, no ink, no delays, and virtually no mailing costs. Second, research has shown that customers appreciate getting news via e-mail more than they do by regular snail mail. Plus, it gives the information provider the advantage of appearing “state-of-the-art” in the eyes of the client.

If this sounds like an idea that you would like to pursue then I recommend that you get started today! There are a number of hosted (online) e-mail marketing services that will let you try the service for a period of time without obligation. I happen to use Constant Contact and can highly recommend that service. If you choose to continue their service after the 60-day trial period the monthly cost starts at only $15.00. Constant Contact makes it easy to design a newsletter by using professional-looking, pre-design templates. These templates also greatly reduce the time needed to get your newsletter ready to send.

All you need to get started with an e-mail newsletter campaign are three things:

1) A commitment to write a minimum of one page of relevant information each week on the topics that I discussed above.

2) A supply of e-mail addresses from current or past clients to get the ball rolling. These e-mail addresses should only belong to contacts that you have had a legitimate business relationship with in the last 12 months. Just sending an e-mail newsletter to everyone in your Outlook Contacts may only get you into trouble with folks who think you’re just spamming them.

3) A commitment to ask for the name and e-mail address from everyone to calls you to inquire about buying or selling a house. Simply asking for this information with the promise of being placed on your “real estate newsletter” is usually all it takes.

A weekly e-mail newsletter is a great way to keep real estate clients from feeling “abandoned” between visits by prospective buyers that the agent brings around. But what happens after the sales cycle has concluded? Fortunately, very few people live in the first and only house they ever purchased. If an agent wants to keep a client for life – whether they are in the real estate market or not – then there is no reason to stop delivering information to them. A savvy agent will continue to touch an inactive client at least one time per month because, as we all know, things change. A divorce, job promotion, transfer, or the “new house bug” can strike when it’s least expected and the Realtor® wants to be at the top of the homeowners’ mind when the time comes to list an existing home. An informative newsletter may even be responsible for sparking the desire for a new home in a new residential development in town.

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To summarize, delivering high quality, useful information to real estate clients and prospects via e-mail can distinguish you from other Realtors® who are unwilling to fully leverage technology in their businesses. Frenzied, old school methods of “churning and burning” clients to close deals only ignore the long term benefits of efficiently managing customer relationships by exploiting online marketing strategies.

MELCOOPER/CGM Technica specializes on online marketing strategies for retail stores and service providers. Our mission is to help brick-and-mortar businesses leverage such strategies to increase sales, profitability, and customer loyalty. The company can be reached at info@melcooper.com or by calling toll-free at (866) 695-8669.