What will fill your marketing editorial calendar in the months ahead? It can be daunting to lay out writing assignments for your marketing efforts, but it does not have to be. With a bit of forethought and planning, you can tap into writing inspiration on a regular basis.
Focus your real estate newsletter writing.
Your first step should always be to consider your audience. To really craft meaningful lead-generating content, you need to focus on your target market. The goal is to keep your readers’ needs in mind while also keeping your business growth goals in mind when writing marketing content.
What are your goals?
Map out a hierarchy of what is most important to building you pipeline.
Are you trying to build up specialty areas, such as vacation properties or retirement properties?
Looking to generate more new opportunities overall?
Seeking to improve client retention and nurture existing relationships?
Want to stand out in a competitive marketplace?
Growing a base of referral sources?
Lead generating content has a pain/gain approach. It is important to consider your goals when you begin building lead-generating content. Your articles should provide a path toward solving a pain point so readers naturally follow that path to seek out your services.
Think about how your services could tie into an article and offer an obvious connection back to you for help. Focus on providing just enough relevant advice to give your prospects the confidence that you are the expert source who can address their real estate needs.
The next natural step for your readers should be to connect with your firm to solve their needs.
When you have key articles focused on generating new opportunities and leads integrated into your strategies, be sure you’re setting lead alerts so you can follow up on new warm prospects.
What should you write?
Inspiration can originate partly from preparation and partly from borrowing existing ideas. It’s always good to have a stockpile of starting-point themes to fall back on when writer’s block inevitably strikes.
“Inspired” Ideas for Your Next Article
Interviews
Case Studies
Client Features
Q&A – Or “Dear Abby” Approach
This vs. That Strategy Comparison
All of the ideas here could come from a single interview with a client. If you sat down and interviewed a client for just 30 minutes, you could get all the information you needed to create five articles with each of the above approaches. If you did this with just several clients, you could stagger that content out and have a full calendar of meaningful content for a year.
More Ideas to Inspire Creative Content:
Trending Topics Following Current Events
Common Mistakes and How To Avoid Them
Spotlight Your Team Members
Feature Events and Philanthropic Involvement
Don’t forget to invite a bit of the human element into your content marketing to help readers develop brand loyalty and keep your audience engaged. People stories for fun, and features focused on your staff members’ pets, babies and activities can be a delightful addition to your marketing.
Fun Topics to Consider:
A dog day at the office
Match the staff member with the baby photo
Birth announcements – tiny tee shirts with your brand logo on new babies
Take Your Child to Work Day
Holiday or seasonal themes
Office family picnic highlights
“Where’s Waldo” theme following staff members on vacation snapping a photo at a noteworthy spot with your company mascot
When does timing impact my writing?
You should be following deadlines and seasonal trends to develop an annual content calendar for your firm. Take note of holidays and changing seasons to inject timely, fun themes into your writing. Incorporate these strategies to keep your content marketing fresh and engaging.
Deliverability is generated by algorithms using a wide variety of signals to determine whether an email gets through to an inbox. In order to increase the chances that your emails are getting consistently delivered to your readers, it is important to maintain a good list.
When your subscribers open your emails, click through your email content or have some other positive responses to your messages, this helps your deliverability.
If readers simply delete your emails without opening them or mark them as spam, they are sending negative signals that can hurt your deliverability.
Here are three tips to help you keep a squeaky-clean list and improve your deliverability.
1. Remove or fix bad email addresses.
Some email marketing platforms will automatically suppress bad email addresses for you. If they do not, make sure you are taking steps to manage bad email addresses. A bad email address will be marked as such by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) because it has one of the following errors:
Bad format—A format error could indicate that an email address is missing a period, contains a misspelling, or has other incorrect or duplicated characters. This type of error could simply be a typo that needs to be fixed. When the format error is obvious, like a double period, this can be corrected by making a small adjustment to the email address in your subscriber record.
Bad domain—Sometimes domain names are changed, merged with those from other companies or are simply deleted. When this happens, it renders the domain portion of your email address (or everything after the @ sign) ineffective. Watch out for company name changes, mergers, email service provider domain name changes and other domain name issues in order to avoid bad domain issues in your database.
Bad account—When an employee leaves a company, his or her email address often becomes invalid after a certain period of time. For example, jsmith@abccompany.net may have retired. In the case of professional office environments, staff emails might be forwarded to a third party for a period of time before they are rendered invalid. When this occurs, there are often auto-response emails sent out asking you to delete or update a former employee’s contact information. Pay attention to these auto-response messages and take action to update information in order to avoid bad account issues.
On occasion, it will be impossible to tell why an email was marked as bad. If you have attempted to remedy format, domain and account issues, and the email address is still being marked as bad, it is time to either suppress the contact or remove the record from your database.
2. Remove generic email addresses.
When an email address is publicly available, it can often be harvested by unethical list sellers. Because of this, generic email addresses are often heavily policed by spam traps. Unless you absolutely know that the person or people behind a generic email address expressly consent to receiving your messages, you should remove any of the following generic email addresses from your account:
accounts@
admin@
billing@
billings@
contact@
help@
info@
inquiries@
manager@
sales@
subscribe@
support@
webmaster@
welcome@
Additionally, generic email addresses often have low open rates and low engagement, which also negatively impacts your deliverability.
3. Remove inactive subscribers.
To keep up to date with email deliverability best practices, we consult with some of the top delivery and anti-spam engineers from major mailbox providers, as well as senders that are like our company, in order to coordinate better ways to get wanted emails to the readers.
One of the most important email marketing best practice trends we identified is to track user engagement and remove inactive subscribers. Engagement means that your readers have opened, read and/or clicked a link in your email. The major mailbox providers such as Gmail, AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo all track how long a message is open and whether the links within it were clicked. They take note if a message was deleted without opening it. They also detect when messages are sent to accounts that no longer check email at all.
Clean up dead weight
A common suggestion for cleaning an email list is to remove all disengaged or inactive subscribers. What this means is that you will be determining all the people who have not opened or clicked on one of your emails in a given period of time and simply removing them from your list.
Why does this help?
You may feel like it stings a bit to remove a bunch of people from a list that you’ve worked hard to grow, but if they are sitting in your database in an inactive or disengaged status, they are actually hurting your sending reputation. A bad sending reputation means you’ll be less likely to be successfully delivered to those who really want to hear from you.
Improve your reach
If there is no engagement for a large portion of your list, then it is more likely that your marketing emails will not reach a majority of your audience. To increase the chances of reaching inboxes and not getting filtered out, take steps to remove all list members who are not engaged.
Take a tiered approach
You can begin removing people in waves. First, remove those who have not clicked or opened in the past two years. Then change your email strategies to see whether you can boost engagement among your existing members. When you see open and click rates improving, take some time to do a second purge of all those who have still not engaged within the past year. You may also repeat this process as a last step, and look at all those who have not engaged within a six-month period as your final purge.
Purging long-term inactive subscribers also means you’re much less likely to end up in a spam trap. An extremely inactive list with long-term disengaged members can be “gravestoned” by ISPs. This means that ISPs will flag your messages as irrelevant or meaningless to your subscribers, thus negatively impacting your deliverability.
“Healing” your deliverability
Even though this process will cause the number of active list members in your database to go down, you will receive the benefit of better delivery rates among those recipients who enjoy your messages. When you view your metrics and reporting, you may notice that the number of opens and clicks will remain steady, but since fewer inactive email addresses are on your list, the open and click rate percentages will gradually increase as mailbox providers begin to recognize your improved sending reputation.
Over time, this process will result in more emails getting into the inboxes of your recipients, producing higher traction and engagement with fewer complaints and filtering issues. When the mailbox providers detect the higher percentage of recipients reading and clicking on links, they will tend to give those messages more favorable treatment by keeping them out of the spam folder. The absolute numbers of clicks and opens will likely go up as well, based on experience from testing this strategy with our existing customers.
Time to Grow
Now that you’ve cleaned the dead weight out of your database, you’ll have room to add more engaged, happy subscribers to your list.
When growing your database, avoid purchasing email lists. Typically, these lists are expensive, have inaccurate contact information and encourage opt-outs since the individuals don’t have a context of how they got on your list.
A good way to ensure that your list is always healthy and full of readers who really want to hear from you is to give individuals the opportunity to opt in.
Provide new prospects with opportunities to opt in to receive your email newsletter:
Add an email newsletter sign-up call to action to your website and social media pages.
Invite blog visitors to sign up to receive your newsletter.
Design CTAs so they stand out from the rest of the page.
Where to place newsletter sign-up CTAs:
On more than one page (test multiple pages to see which gets the most traction).
Above the fold (the part of the webpage or email you see without scrolling down).
On your high-traffic pages.
There are many other digital resources you can leverage to gather up new subscribers.
Here are some ideas to drive list growth:
Include a “Sign Up for My Newsletter” link in your company’s standard email signature.
Regularly post reminders for your social media followers to subscribe to your email newsletter.
Post email newsletter articles to spike the interest of your contacts on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn with an invitation to receive similar information if they sign up for your newsletter.
Include your newsletter sign-up URL on your business cards as well as your direct mail and/or print marketing materials.
Create newsletter sign-up sheets and distribute them at seminars, conferences, trade shows and events.
Encourage current subscribers to share or forward your email newsletter content.
Promote an online contest that includes signing up for your newsletter as a contest entry requirement.
Place content on your website for visitors to download, making email opt-in an option for those who access the content.
Host online webinars, and let attendees know how they can sign up to receive your email newsletter during your closing remarks.
Use word of mouth — don’t forget to simply tell new contacts about your email newsletter. During in-person meetings, ask people whether they would be interested in receiving your newsletter and show them where they can opt in.
Look to collaborate with influencers or business partners in your community. By establishing reciprocity with one another, you can ask them to promote your newsletter on your behalf while you do the same for them.
There are many creative ways to grow your email marketing database. The key is to get creative and always be looking for opportunities to add more valuable, engaged subscribers to your list.
In order to get leads flowing in through your digital marketing, you must first make sure you have set automated lead alerts on key content. You should also check your click-through reporting to monitor prospect click activity.
“Great! I have a lead… Now what?”
Once you start generating leads through your email marketing, implement a strategy for converting click-through activity and lead alerts into new clients. Lead tracking is a key component to your success. Lay out a basic and intuitive process for monitoring and responding to leads.
STEP 1: Look at What Generated the Lead Alert or Click Activity
Check which article or banner piqued your readers’ interest, and make a note of the topic that generated the lead.
STEP 2: See Who Responded to Your Lead
Look at the individual’s contact record in your database. See if they have also been clicking on other content in the past. If you notice a trend, you definitely have a warm lead in-hand. If this is the first click, you may still have an opportunity to convert your lead into a client.
STEP 3: Follow Up on Your Leads
Send a personal email with a follow up message to your prospect. Say something like, “I noticed you recently read an article in our newsletter about [topic here]. Is this something you’re thinking of exploring? Feel free to email me at contact@mybusiness.com if I can help.”
After one or two passive emails like that, take the next step and call your warm lead with a friendly approach to feel them out on their level of interest. Even if they don’t access your services at that time, you have successfully reminded them that you’re available if their needs change in the future.
STEP 4: Track Your Leads
Creating accurate and comprehensive records of your lead follow-up is a vital aspect of successful lead conversion. Make a record of your phone calls and follow-up emails either in your email marketing platform, CRM tool or tracking system of your choice.
STEP 5: Act or Release
If your prospect shows interest, schedule an appointment for a consultation or take appropriate next steps. Be sure your team is aware that you will be connecting them with new prospects generated by your email marketing.
If the lead does not show any interest after a couple emails and phone calls, step back and wait for future interactions. Review your follow-up records to make sure your team is not saturating the prospect with sales calls. As long as your prospect is subscribed to your email newsletter program, there will always be another opportunity to connect.
Do you have a great email article that is just begging to be shared on your social media business pages? You may be able to easily share your email articles directly from your marketing newsletter. Many email platforms allow you to post your email newsletter articles with just a few simple clicks.
Quick Tip: Create a Guest Record First
In order to produce links from your email articles to be used in social media marketing efforts, consider creating a “Guest” contact record. Use the first name “Guest” and the last name “Contact” (or something similar) and your info@ or contact@ email distribution to set this record up. Additionally, you may complete the record with your business address, phone number and any additional contact information you would like to share to route interested prospects to your company. This way, any links or articles you use from your email marketing on social media can be tied back to your guest database record and your business contact information. Another benefit of this practice is that any personalization you may have used in your email will simply display as “Hello, Guest!” or a similar generic greeting. This will add a universal appeal to your emails when you forward your newsletter to interested parties, post the latest edition to your website or share articles with your social fans and followers.
Next Step: Start Sharing
The social sharing function of an email article varies between platforms but is usually a straightforward process. To give you an idea how an article can be shared, here are the steps you would take if you posted an article from this newsletter to Facebook.
1. Click through to the full article. At the top of the article you will see a “Share” option. Click to share.
2. Choose which social network you prefer. At the bottom of the social sharing tool window, you will see an option to share the article to one of the four major social networks. Click the icon of your preferred social network.
3. Choose whether you’d like to share to your personal or business page. In the Facebook example we’re showing here, you’ll have the option to share to your own timeline or to a page you manage.
4. If you manage multiple business pages, choose a business page. Pick from a possible list of business pages you manage, and then click the “Post to Facebook” button.
Success! Your post will now be on your social media site for all your fans and followers to read.
Using a social media management tool? Platforms like Hootsuite and others allow you to post to multiple social networks simultaneously, and also schedule out future posts. If you’re using a social media manager to schedule your posts, simply grab the URL from your full article (once you have clicked through to the full article view) and schedule your article to multiple networks as a link post.
Posting a Newsletter Article to Your Blog
Posting an article from your email newsletter to your blog can be as simple as copying and pasting the text from your article into your blog. You will need to take some additional steps to format the article to look appealing on your blog. You will also need to make sure you have the right to distribute any purchased content you may have bought for your email marketing on your blog and social media sites. HomeActions does allow our users unrestricted use of content on social media and blog sites, but each marketing provider differs in that respect.
Additionally, you can make your newsletter articles more SEO-friendly by changing 100 words of the article to be unique to your company’s blog. Google and other search engines will look at your content as original if you change a portion of it and put your own stamp on the article.
You should also add keywords to your blog post. In the first article of this newsletter, Is This Your Situation? “I Need To Get The Word Out About My Ancillary Services…”, we list four ways you can add relevant keywords to your blog posts to help get found in organic search results:
Do some keyword research
Add keywords to your blog’s title, URL and subheadings
When using images, add keywords in the image file name and alt and title tags
Also use links to outside resources in your posts to increase your likelihood of receiving backlinks in return
Don’t forget to connect blog readers with your email newsletter. Once your newsletter article is posted to your blog, add a closing call to action that says something to this effect: “Do you like what you see here? SIGN UP to receive more tips from us every two weeks. SUBSCRIBE NOW!” This will give organic blog visitors a chance to opt in to your email marketing program.
This marketing best practices strategy is an excellent way to repurpose content across multiple channels to maximize the value and life of your marketing articles. Stay consistent in your efforts. Set up a social media and blog schedule that follows your email launch schedule. With these simple steps, you will be well on your way to increasing the exposure of your email marketing content by sharing it to your blog and social media sites on a regular basis.
The open rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered newsletters were opened by subscribers. The click rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered newsletters registered at least one click.
Why Open And Clicks Are Important
Open and click rates can give you a good idea of how your newsletters are performing with a particular list. If an open rate is strong, it usually means your subject lines resonate with your audience. If your click rates are good, the message content is relevant to subscribers who open the newsletter. So, how do you know if your rates are good?
According to a leading email delivery source, the average open rate for the Real Estate industry is 22%. The average HomeActions subscriber far surpass this rate with an average open rate of 30%. (based on 3 million e-newsletters sent per month). HomeActions knows Content is King.
How To Improve Open Rates
A low open rate generally indicates:
Your subject line is not relevant or interesting enough.
Your member list is outdated or contains a wide variety of subscribers unrelated to your target.
You may be sending too many or too few campaigns.
Test Your Subject Line
The best way to know what resonates with your subscribers is to try different things. An effective subject line clearly describes what’s inside your campaign, but you’ll want to test a few variations to find out what works best for your list.
Draft two subject lines that differ slightly, for example, “News you can Use for {date}” and “Homeowner Tips for {date}”. We recommend only testing one variable at a time, in this case the subject line, so that your report data is clearly linked to just one change. Then send out your newsletter one time using that subject line, then the next launch, choose the other. Then compare what subject line delivered better open rates. Keep testing/modifying to your get the results expected.
How To Improve Click Rates
Your click rate essentially tells you how many of your subscribers find your newsletter content useful. To improve your click rate, you’ll need to create content that’s useful to more subscribers. Try these suggestions:
Embed more links – your newsletter offers 6 personal + 3 social media links, use them all.
Insert a Banner from our Library then embed the URL link to take your reader to an interesting site (example-“What’s Your Home Worth?)
Include articles on your Open Houses and New Listings – then set a Real-Time Alert to get warms leads right to your Inbox.
In real estate, you can’t avoid unhappy or dissatisfied customers. Buyers with wish lists twice the size of their budget and sellers who demand you find a buyer willing to pay more than fair market value create stress for even the best agents.
Here are nine ways to stay upbeat in the face of negativity:
1. Always visualize a large $ stamped on your unhappy customer’s forehead.
Your customers pay your bills and feed your family. An unhappy customer may cost you this job and lose you a future referral. A happy customer creates a happy pay day for you.
2. Skip the news before work and listen to music or motivational talks on your way to work.
How you spend the first part of your day influences how the rest of your day unfolds. Don’t watch negative newscasts before work. Listening to music that pumps you up or motivational talks prepares you to tackle problem people or situations.
3. Find something to like about every customer.
Maybe your client has great eyebrows or good taste in ties. During unpleasant encounters, keep your focus on the 5% you like about them and your focus off the 95% you dislike.
4. Use Daily Affirmations to support yourself such as:
“I’m doing the best I can!” “I am a winner!” “I trust myself!” “I can handle any problem!” “I deserve this job!”
Affirmations keep your mind focused on a future positive outcome rather than the negative situation at hand.
5. Always reward yourself for a job well done.
When you successfully make it through a difficult day, show yourself some appreciation: Spend more time with family, get a massage or go out for a nice dinner.
6. Keep a Glory File of thank you letters and compliments. Review it often to remind yourself how fabulous you are.
When you have to deal with a tough customer, balance your self-esteem with a trip through your Glory File. Reminding yourself of your past successes and how much customers love you can motivate you to keep going.
7. Avoid gossiping about negative customers.
Retelling the tale of your terrible encounter intensifies your anger and negativity. Instead, do your best let go of the negativity as soon as the customer leaves your space. Until you can let go, the customer owns and controls your thoughts.
8. Avoid complainers, criticizers and whiners in your office.
I hope there’s still someone left in your office to talk to when you avoid all the complainers, criticizers and whiners. Their negativity can cause your productivity to falter.
9. Make a list of reasons you must appreciate your customers and thank them.
“I appreciate you giving me the privilege of serving you.” “I feel lucky, honored and blessed to have a job I love.” “Thank you for choosing me to do your business with.”
Most of all, never for one minute believe that your broker pays you. Your broker only supplies the check. Your customers fill in the blanks. Be grateful to them.
The original Mona Lisa is priceless, but you can buy a $10 version from any poster shop because mass produced items are always cheaper than their one-of-a-kind inspirations. The same value proposition holds true for your email marketing.
Do the emails you send to stay in touch with clients have unique value or are your competitors sending the same email or robo-blog post to your clients?
In today’s real estate market, much of the “stay in touch” emails used to build relationships with clients and prospects follow a me-too formula.
It’s usually a campaign of drip content set up via the broker’s intranet and shipped out once a month by every agent in the office. If you share a prospect with the agent across the sales floor or across town, your clients may get the same email on the same day from another agent.
The client instantly realizes the content isn’t special and isn’t really from you.
Additionally, you can make your newsletter articles more SEO-friendly by changing 100 words of the article to be unique to your company’s blog. Google and other search engines will look at your content as original if you change a portion of it and put your own stamp on the article.
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