Email marketing is becoming one of the primary ways of connecting with potential clients. How can you create real estate newsletters your clients will love?
Content marketing in all its forms has become a lifeline for real estate agencies to reach new clients. Among these marketing methods, email marketing has been gaining traction in the past few years, particularly in the world of real estate.
According to Hubspot’s marketing statistics, real estate newsletters tend to have some of the highest open rates. If your agency is using newsletters, you will definitely want to look at making them as appealing as possible to meet industry standards.
Though some agencies have in-house graphic designers to make newsletters, this is not a luxury most real estate agents can enjoy. Fortunately, there are online tools that offer a variety of customizable newsletter templates that you can use instead.
Once you have a template that you like, here is what you need to do to ensure your real estate newsletter achieves high open and click rates.
Choose Your Color Scheme
There are numerous ways to incorporate color into your newsletter to make it look more attractive to readers. You can choose a color overlay, that will give the newsletter an overall cohesive look and feel.
Overlays are easy to add in templates—all you need to do is create a rectangular shape and fill it with your color of choice. Change the transparency so it isn’t saturated, and you have yourself an overlay, as you can see in the example below.
Alternatively, you can also use contrasting colors for certain elements of your design—like the headline, bullet points, links, or buttons. Contrasting colors will call the reader’s attention to important information.
More than anything else, when it comes to color, you need to ensure that your newsletter color scheme is in line with your branding. Email marketing is a gateway to connecting your agency to your audience, and putting your brand front and center is a step you should not ignore. For more on branding, take a look at this brand-building guide for tips.
Customize Your Header
The newsletter header is the first thing your reader will see, so make it a good one. While it may be tempting to use one header in all your newsletters, you should actually be customizing it according to your content.
If your newsletter this week is about new listings, use an image of your top listing as the header. You could also look at using popular images from your social media accounts as header images. You can read more about sourcing Instagram images here.
This method will tie your email marketing into your overall promotion strategy. It will also create a feedback loop that will encourage more users to follow you and subscribe to your newsletter.
Tailor Your Text to the Reader
Email marketing has become focused on relationship selling. While not so long ago, emails could concentrate on selling products and services, that simply doesn’t work anymore.
When creating your headline and body copy for your newsletter, put yourself in your clients’ shoes. What do they want to see and read?
Remember, your clients are receiving numerous emails throughout the day. Even if you hook them in with a strong color scheme and custom header, your content still needs to be engaging enough to keep them reading.
Don’t be overly sales-focused, or emphasize your brand. Give your readers an overview of the industry or incorporate curated content (which has been proven to generate leads).
Your newsletter should be educational, as well as entertaining. Your readers are being advertised to all day long—stand out by giving them more than just a newsletter about your agency.
Incorporate Icons in Your Email Marketing
Icons are an excellent tool to incorporate across your visual strategy, particularly in your email marketing. Icons have the ability to share a wealth of information at a single glance. Which is often all your newsletter might get from busy clients.
Ensure that the icons you use are consistent throughout your design—that the colors and sizes are the same—and your newsletter will look far more appealing. You can read more about using icons in graphics here.
Add Graphics to Your Newsletter
As we have stated, your clients are busy people. They won’t often have time to read through your entire newsletter. Instead, you can expect them to skim the text and decide within seconds whether or not to delete your newsletter.
One major workaround for this is to use graphics alongside your text. If icons pack in large amounts of information, graphics can convey even more.
There is a lot of data generated in the real estate industry, all of which is relevant to your audience. Share it with them in your newsletter. Data visualizations about rent resources, like this example from ABODO, can arrest the reader’s attention and give them a reason to continue reading.
You should also use illustrations, relevant images, GIFs, and charts to tell your readers what to expect in the newsletter. This will encourage them to read your newsletter, and not just skim it.
Make the CTA Clear
Your call to action, whether it is a new listing, a discounted rate, a downloadable report, needs to be prominent. This is the pièce de résistance of your newsletter, so why hide it?
If you have a particularly long newsletter, ensure your call to action is prominent at the top. If your newsletter only consists of one section, you can include it at the bottom of the newsletter.
You need to ensure that the call to action can be seen without your reader having to scroll down, particularly on mobile.
Don’t make your call to action too complicated. Use no more than three words, as that will ensure your readers can quickly absorb what is needed of them.
Your calls to action across your email marketing need to stand out. Use different colors, textures, and typography to make them more visible in your newsletter, and you will see your click rates increase.
Conclusion
Optimizing your email marketing will be massively beneficial for generating leads and building relationships. Additionally, newsletters are an important repository of data, that will improve your innovative marketing strategies, leading to more engagement and clients.
With a newsletter template as your base, you can choose colors that stand out, alongside attractive graphics, icons, and a strong call to action. Remember to keep your text informative instead of sales-focused, and your newsletters will bring in more clients.
