Effective Real Estate Drip Email Campaigns

While a real estate drip email campaign can be highly effective in marketing your business, you want to be sure you don't drown your prospects in emails of little to them. You also don't want to contact them too frequently. The four-step email process begins with you understanding your prospects and how to word your emails.

Setting up an Effective Real Estate Drip Email Campaign

Pre-designed real estate drip email campaigns you can buy or that come with your website template are not the best option. Some are OK, particularly if produced by creative writers, but you still need to read every email because you need to consider how the prospect will respond. Fremont, you don't a buyer or seller to hit the "unsubscribe" link.

Your prospect, especially if it's early in their research, is likely receiving emails from more than one agent. If you're sending prospects the generic "How to Make Your Kitchen Smell Great for Showings" email, then your prospects are getting the same email from your competition. 

In this step-by-step series, you'll see exactly how to word your emails and point the recipient to content or pages on your website that will be of value to them. They'll appreciate receiving them, and they'll stay on your list.

How Often Should Emails Be Sent?

Agents often wonder if they should send out an email every day, once a week, or every month. The protocol regarding this varies depending on the current speed of your market and the type of market and properties you represent. If it's a fast market, you may want to keep your emails at the beginning of your real estate drip email campaign closer together. Slower markets let you spread them out a bit.

That said, the frequency of emails will drop off as you move further into your campaign. Very successful longterm real estate drip email campaigns usually only send out one email about every three months once the first few are distributed. This non-automated (or non-drip) system is explored, with examples, in this series.

Email #1, 2 Days After List Entry

This real estate drip email campaign is for buyers but, with tweaking, can be used for sellers.

Remember, when received, prospects have already received one email prior to this, the auto-responder. Most agents find prospects from forms they filled out on the agent's website site when seeking a special statistical or market report, or an eBook about the local market. Hence, prospects received one email that delivered that document (or a link to the information) along with your thank you. That first email is immediate. This email is sent two days later.

There are two things to accomplish with this email:

  • Tell them what's going to happen -  In the first paragraph, you can see that the prospect learns this is the first of four emails they'll receive. This is important because agents often report a 50 percent drop in their unsubscribe rate if they use this sentence in. That's because prospects know immediately they won't be inundated with a lot of emails in a short time.
  • Give them a link to valuable information - This image is only the first two paragraphs of the email. The third paragraph gives prospects links to the area map and area descriptive pages mentioned in paragraph two. That's because this agent covers an area larger than just our county and people get confused about all of the area names used in the MLS. This may also be the case with you.

The wordage in this email produces a high click-through percentage and low rate of unsubscribers. However, when you get to the fourth email, you'll see that while you'll be emailing them forever, the process is introduced in a way that'll keep them on your list.

Email #2, 5 Days After List Entry

The first email in the real estate drip email campaign introduces the prospect to the MLS area maps and descriptive information. This second email lets them know that they can quit doing manual searches and receive automated email alerts with new listings and price changes for listings that match their property criteria. They know the areas now and can use that information to tailor their searches.

Most buyers that end up getting to closing, spent some time in this automated email listing alert system. That's because they tend to set up a search when they're getting serious, which is when you want automatic listing alerts to be hitting their inbox on a daily basis.

Email #3, 8 Days After List Entry

Because a significant number of prospects aren't yet ready for the automated listing reports, it's advisable to take them back to your IDX search page and show them how to get a lot more detail on each listing that isn't displayed in the IDX results.

This way, they'll return to the site repeatedly and can request expanded listing reports. The reports will be manually created by you and emailed to prospects, which gives you a chance to comment on the listings as well. It's all designed to present yourself as a market expert and offer market expertise on a regular basis.

Email #4, 12 Days After List Entry

The last automated email thanks prospects for sticking with you, and it tells them that they're still important and on your follow-up list for quarterly sold property statistics reports.

In the boxed portion of this partial email image, you see that prospects are informed about future statistics emails. Prospect's continued interest in the market, as well as knowing they'll only receive four emails a year, keeps them interested enough to stay on the list.

Long-Term Follow-Up

Just after each calendar quarter ends, go into your Paragon MLS system and generate a sold property statistics report by type of property (i.e., residential or commercial). It takes about ten minutes to produce it a PDF file and upload it to your website.

Then go to your email list and send out a blast email to the entire list providing a link to the report, as well as some commentary on the previous quarter and the numbers in the report. If you stick to this drip Email protocol you'll experience a low unsubscribe rate is very low, and in most cases when people do unsubscribe it's because they're no longer interested or have purchased a home in another market.