Just when email newsletters seemed to be a thing of the past, in 2020 we saw them come back with full force. With people staying home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, email has become the preferred medium of communication between real estate businesses and their clients. Real estate marketing has to include email newsletters.
If you run a real estate business and wonder how you can take advantage of the revitalized email newsletter strategy, bookmark this article. We’ll go over the email newsletter best practices, four main types of email newsletters, and how you can use them to spread your influence across the web.
There are four types of real estate email newsletters used by agents to build a relationship with their email subscribers. Depending on the goal of your email marketing campaign, each type has advantages and disadvantages.
Before we dive into the four types of email newsletters, we should go over a quick rundown of good newsletter practice. There are a few ways you can increase audience engagement and decrease unsubscribe rates.
Here’s how you can achieve that:
Send 1 to 2 emails per week:
A 2013 study from Marketing Charts found that the main reason people unsubscribe from email lists is receiving too many emails per week. A 2020 study by Campaign Monitor found that the average person sends and receives 121 emails per day. That is a lot. The last thing people need is even more emails flooding their inboxes.
The research has shown that email newsletters from any industry earn the most engagement when they send a moderate 1 to 2 emails per week. This keeps the company relevant to the audience without flooding their inbox.
Additionally, there are ideal and less-than-ideal days to send out emails. Studies have shown that Monday and Tuesday yield the highest engagement for email. After Tuesday, average engagement decreases until hitting a low on the weekend.
However, in any email marketing campaign be sure to always test the frequency that works for you. As a real estate professional, the last thing you want to do is lose a potential prospect from contacting them too much or too little.
Send Emails at the Right Time:
People tend to check their email inboxes at the same time every day. Campaign Monitor’s study found that most people comb through their email inboxes from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM, then later from 1:00 PM and 4:00 PM, then lastly at 6:00 PM before logging off for the day.
To run a successful email newsletter as a realtor, you should combine both of these tips. Send two emails per week in the ideal time frame and on the right days to maximize the engagement of your email subscriber. The ideal time for a send varies from industry to industry, but you can reference resources like Moosend or Hubspot’s research on open rates and CTRs to help determine which is best for you.
You can also run your own experiments on your email lists by sending them on different days and times and comparing the analytics on your opens and click-through rates. It helps to test over a few weeks to gather data about your specific audience. Even within the same industry, your specific niche may have totally different email habits than another niche – intel on CTRs and other metrics will help you optimize your emailing. Make sure to choose an email marketing tool that can provide you with helpful analytics.
While these aren’t the only types of newsletters, they are the most popular and most ideal for those who are just starting out with sending a real estate newsletter.
Types of Email Newsletters
1. A Letter from the Editor
The first type of newsletter entry is a “Letter from the Editor” or a “Featured Article”.
It is ideal for real estate agents that are looking to create value in their newsletter, that want to take a stand on issues in their industry, and for those with loads of industry knowledge and need a medium to share it through.
Writing from the heart is essential for these letters. Creating content from a place of passion translates to authenticity and meaningfulness for your readers, giving them a more genuine and powerful impression of your expertise in real estate. Typically, these newsletter articles should cover a topic relevant to real estate, tell a story about your business, or provide real estate advice to your audience.
This type of newsletter is valuable because it asserts your authority to your audience, and reminds them that you know what you’re talking about. Letters from the editor are powerful newsletter entries but should be used sparingly.
Only deploy this type of newsletter when there’s something of importance occurring in the real estate industry or the world at large. If you use this format too often, the heavy impact that these articles have will diminish.
You could also use this format of newsletter articles at the end of each year or quarter to review the accomplishments you made or the real estate industry in general made in the past year.
Keep the length of these articles relatively short. A maximum of 500 words is enough to make some engaging points while preventing the entry from going on for too long.
An example of a real estate-related letter from the editor is Dreams Luxury Lifestyles: Letter From the Editor: Real Estate Issue 2019.
2. Curated Content or Link Style:
The second type of newsletter content is much easier to produce. Curated content is essentially a list of brief points or links to internal or external sources with a little bit of context.
These links should be relevant to real estate and to your business specifically. This type of content is ideal for those with little time or resources that cannot produce intricately crafted content.
Curated content emails can be made very quickly for very little effort. Some examples would be things such as “25 Interior Design Blogs To Help You Make Your New House a Home”, along with some links to each blog.
A more detailed list of examples can be found here.
3. Blog Style
A blog-style newsletter is relatively easy to create, can be engaging to audiences, and come with a few web marketing perks as well. A blog-style newsletter is a collection of blog posts – they can be your own blog posts or even link to external articles that you think your audience would be interested in.
When creating a blog-style newsletter, you can not only promote your listings but also keep subscribers informed about your real estate business, real estate news, local events happening in your area, new business developments, or schools – anything that’s relevant to your audience.
Blog-style email newsletters can either contain an entire blog post within them, or they can include an excerpt from your blog post with a link to the blog page on your website.
Incorporate graphics and images into the blog-style newsletter to make it more engaging to the audience. Nobody wants to see a plain wall of text in their email inbox twice per week.
Blogs are found everywhere on the internet, from personal blogs to those administered by fortune 500 companies. An example of a blog is the one you’re reading now!
Whether you write your own blog posts or not, tools like rasa.io have made creating a newsletter as a realtor easier than ever.
4. Hustle Style:
Lastly, the Hustle style of an email newsletter is the most difficult one to maintain, but those who can achieve it will look like the top dog in their industry – especially for those in real estate. A Hustle-style newsletter looks like a combination of a Letter from the Editor and blog-style newsletter, with graphics and compelling content leading to a perfect call-to-action for your subscribers.
Only real estate agents, developers, or brokers that have enough time and resources to make a truly spectacular email newsletter should even attempt to take on this style. Hustle style requires the brokers to produce a constant, daily stream of content to their subscribers – such as potential buyers or developers who are always looking for that perfect deal.
You must have a solid grasp of who your audience is, what they respond well to, and what they don’t. Hustle style makes your real estate newsletter read more like a stream of potential money-makers for your clients, with captivating, hard-hitting headlines and sharply-written articles all formulated for conversion to the website.
Wrapping Up Newsletter Creation for Real Estate Agents
The right email newsletter can help nurture a great relationship between your real estate firm and your client. Home buyers are looking to find the best real estate agent for the job. With the right style of newsletter, you can amplify your web presence to a great degree.
Take a look at the resources at your disposal, and consider which style is best for you, then commit to creating a newsletter for your real estate business with rasa.io.
