To effectively engage and attract your audience, there are certain things your estate agency needs to be doing when it comes to email marketing. It’s a great way to communicate with those who are interested in your properties, so it’s essential that you’re creating campaigns that are going to be of your users’ interests. All of your subscribers may be signed up to your newsletter for a different purpose, which is why making sure they’re receiving content that’s relevant to them will improve your results. Here are 5 things that estate agents need to be doing with email marketing.
Email marketing is more dominant than it’s ever been in the world of real estate, and it’s only going to get better. Even with the eruption of new technologies, email continues to dominate as a dependable, affordable and top-performing digital marketing channel. For the last 10 years, email has been generating the highest return for marketers with a 4400% ROI. There are 3.8 billion email users worldwide, which is projected to grow by 3% until 2021. What’s more, 73% of millennials also identify email as their preferred means of business communication.
As promised, here are some email marketing tips that are designed specifically to help your estate agency grow.
Subscribers are most engaged when they have just signed up to a newsletter. They expect to receive something as a result of this, after all, they have given you permission to contact them! This is an opportunity you cannot pass up. Start things off on the right foot, introduce your brand, capture their interests and let them know what they can expect to receive from you.
Did you know…
Welcome email open rates are 42% higher than the average email
Welcome emails have 5x the click-through rate of a standard campaign
Email marketing allows you to send highly targeted emails to users who have provided information on what they’d like to hear about. This is the perfect chance to make use of the information subscribers have provided by sending them personalised newsletters. Knowing what subscribers are interested in increases the chances of your emails being successful.
Every subscriber is different, for example, not everyone in your audience will be aware of the buyer process. This is where email marketing comes in. Through educational content, email marketing can inform and provide knowledge to first-time buyers and communicate to them through each stage of the buyer process.
Through capturing data and targeting specific audiences, you can provide relevant content of potential properties to subscribers. When sending out newsletters, it’s important to encourage engagement from your audience. This can be done by prompting a response from the recipient or encouraging them to perform an action. Any email in which you receive replies from your audience can only help you. These replies can then lead on to conversations which, if dealt with correctly, will generate more sales.
Unlike many forms of digital marketing, email results are almost instant. It’s important to measure how emails have been performing and identify what is working well and opportunities to improve. If the results aren’t great, make changes! Test alternative variations and see what works best with your subscribers. Email can be extremely subjective, what works for one person may not work for another. The only way to confidently identify what works for your estate agency and what doesn’t is through measuring your results, implementing tests and refining campaigns.
Email marketing is an opportunity to present your brand in a positive way. This can be done through custom-branded email templates, engaging content and giving users the chance to provide feedback. Allowing users to provide feedback not only helps you grow and improve, but it gives you the chance to display positive feedback to potential buyers in order to generate leads.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room that is GDPR. To remind you, GDPR is the primary law regulating how companies protect EU citizens’ personal data, ensuring a more guarded protection of personal data across the European Union. For GDPR to apply to your estate agency, you need to be actively marketing or selling to people within the EU and collecting their personal data. To put it briefly, GDPR means you must be clear and informative and failing to adhere to the legislation can leave your business facing hefty penalties.
It has now been well over a year since GDPR was first introduced, and the catastrophic effects many thought it would have are now starting to come into light. In recent months, Google has been fined 50 million euros for a breach of GDPR rules, because of a “lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding ads personalisation”. According to French data regulator CNIL, some more of the world’s most successful companies such as Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify have also had cases against them, with potential penalties of 4% of the company’s global turnover, so in theory, Apple could potentially be fined £7 billion!
GDPR is not all negative! GDPR is a huge opportunity to concentrate on giving your customers real value and meaningful experiences. It allows you to focus on the quality of your data as it should now be at its most valuable. You should now only be contacting those who have granted you permission or shown you legitimate interest to do so, which means that your estate agency’s email marketing should now be nothing less than excellent! It’s usually a common thought that the bigger the database the better, when in fact it’s better to have a smaller engaged database rather than a huge database you don’t receive any return from.
The regulations state that you should be regularly cleansing data and recommend removing any data that hasn’t engaged for more than 12 months, which is why you should offer an easy ‘opt-out’ section. Although this may seem excessive, it allows you to get rid of the deadwood, minimising the number of emails going out to old addresses, unmonitored mail accounts and being picked up by spam filters. This reduces bounce rates and unsubscribes, and also has the potential to increase your open rates and the quality of customers your emails are reaching.
Currently, data flows without barriers between the EU and the UK, making it easy for businesses who rely on transferring data about their customers to sell goods and services, especially within digitally oriented industries.
After Brexit (if it happens) there are uncertainties as to whether the data protection rules of GDPR will remain the same. The UK is hoping for the EU to grant it a ‘special status’ that recognises the UK’s data protection regime as equal to their own, and allow for free flow of data across borders. Although, a transitioning period would be required lasting until the end of 2020, during which the UK would be under obligation to abide by GDPR rules with no disruption. If disruption did occur, this would affect the ‘special status’, influencing the free flow of data across borders, making it difficult for both UK-based companies and EU-based companies to transfer data across from one and other.
To confirm whether you are following GDPR regulations you should seek legal advice. However, here at Property Webmasters, we can provide you with some free top GDPR tips that your estate agency needs to be following!
If your estate agency is interested in email marketing and would you like to receive some free GDPR tips, get in contact with us today!
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