Learn the best practices for email marketing that keeps your members engaged and your association top of mind.
Real estate associations run on relationships. Your members joined because they trust the association to keep them sharp, connected, and informed.
The best way to deliver on that promise between events and between renewals is email marketing.
It doesn’t sound like the flashiest strategy. Email is practically old-fashioned these days.
But that’s part of the key to its effectiveness.
In the age of mass communication through social media, email feels personal. It’s the digital equivalent of steady eye contact and a firm handshake.
You can enhance that one-on-one feel by getting to know your members, and sending content that’s relevant to what they actually care about. And you can take advantage of tools that automatically analyze, personalize, and target email campaigns.
That’s probably why studies consistently show email delivering $10 to $36 in return for every $1 spent — with top-performing programs exceeding 50:1 — making it the highest-ROI channel in digital marketing.
Follow these best practices for email marketing, and you’ll be building a more engaged membership in no time.
What is email marketing?
Overview
Okay, so you’re convinced that email marketing can help your association serve members better. But what does that actually involve?
The heart of it all is the group of people who have signed up to receive emails from you. That pool of recipients is known as your subscribers or your list.
You can communicate with your list in a variety of ways, from event announcements and membership renewal campaigns to member milestone emails and industry updates.
Ideally, every email should include a call-to-action (CTA) – something concrete that the reader can do to deepen their engagement. Common examples include:
- Navigating to your website
- Registering for an upcoming event or webinar
- Downloading an industry report or member resource
- Renewing or upgrading their membership
- Sharing on social media
Newsletters
One great tool for real estate associations is a newsletter: an email campaign providing regularly scheduled content that’s relevant to members across the industry.
By providing members with value between dues payments, you build loyalty and credibility. And showing up consistently in their inboxes is a great way to stay top of mind.
Newsletters can also help you gather intelligence about your membership, by paying attention to how they engage with your content. Noting the types of articles members are clicking will give you clear signals about their interests and priorities.
Really? Newsletters?
If email sounds old-fashioned, newsletters sound positively archaic. But they get real results.
Email consistently outperforms other digital marketing channels on engagement and return. Some programs report open rates above 50% — and the associations achieving those numbers aren’t doing anything exotic. They’re just sending content their members actually want to read.
Not bad for something that sounds like that email from your aunt that you delete every Christmas.
Getting Started
Ready to put these insights to work? Here are some best practices for successful email marketing.
1 – Remember You’re A Guest In Their Inbox
Step one is always to get permission. Sending emails to people who haven’t signed up for them is generally worse than useless.
Many experts recommend using double opt-in to ensure that everyone on your list really wants to be there. Start with a concise, eye-catching signup form, emphasizing the value that your emails offer.
Once someone opts in, follow up with a welcome email asking them to confirm their subscription by clicking a link.
Next, you need to make members glad they signed up by following through with great content.
Fortunately, as a real estate association, you have a wealth of valuable insights to share. Anything a member might want to know about the industry, their career, or the regulatory environment is fair game.
Here are just a few topic ideas:
- Local and national market trend summaries
- Regulatory and legislative updates affecting members
- Professional development resources and continuing education highlights
- Upcoming chapter events and registration deadlines
- Member spotlights and career milestones
- Industry research and benchmarking reports
You might have noticed that I didn’t lead with membership renewal reminders or event promotions. That’s not an accident.
It’s crucial that you know when to promote your association’s programs.
That doesn’t mean you can never include content that highlights your events or benefits.
But you’re trying to build a relationship with your members. Don’t be that friend who tries to sell their homemade essential oils to everyone at the party.
A good rule of thumb is that about 90% of your email content should aim to educate and inform your members. Promotional content lands better when it follows value, not the other way around.
2 – Avoid Common Mistakes
There are a few simple things that can separate a good email from a bad one.
First of all, avoid bland or confusing subject lines. An email is only useful if someone opens it.
Your subject line should give a clear idea of what’s inside and why it matters – vague subjects don’t motivate clicks.
And special characters, all-caps, or extravagant promises can cause your email to be dismissed as spam.
One simple but effective option is to use the title of your lead article. “Five Trends Reshaping Commercial Real Estate This Quarter” is better than “Important Industry News Inside” – and a lot better than “Don’t Miss This!!!”.
This advice also applies to your CTAs. Specific invitations like “Register for the Annual Conference” drive more responses than generic ones like “Learn More”.
Use images sparingly. Too much visual content will trigger spam filters, and many email clients disable images. Your email should be legible even without graphical elements.
On a related note, make sure your emails are optimized for mobile. Nearly half of all emails are opened on smartphones or tablets.
Keep it brief. Don’t make members scan endlessly – somewhere between 3 to 6 items is the sweet spot.
If you have more than one full-length article, stick with catchy headlines and subheadings within the body of the email. Let interested members click through to your website for the full text.
3 – Use An Autoresponder
How do you follow up when your members begin responding to your well-crafted calls to action?
You could keep track of everyone who downloads a resource, registers for an event, or otherwise signals their engagement, and personally follow up with an email.
Just kidding! You can’t do that if you want to get anything else done in your workday.
You’re much better off using an autoresponder – a digital tool that can send a pre-written email, or sequence of emails, when a subscriber takes a specific action.
Let’s say a member clicks on an article about fair housing legislation. The next day, your autoresponder surfaces your upcoming advocacy webinar on the same topic.
They register for the webinar. Three days later, the autoresponder invites them to join the association’s government affairs committee. They reach out to get involved.
That member just moved several steps deeper into the association, without you lifting a finger.
Autoresponders also help you maintain engagement with your list. Use them to schedule membership anniversary messages, renewal reminders, or re-engagement emails for members who haven’t been active in a while.
4 – Analyze and Segment
If you’re new to email marketing, your first campaign won’t be perfect. You’ll need to track how your members respond to your content so that you can improve it over time.
Key indicators include:
- Open rate – how often are members opening your email?
- Click-through rate – what percentage are engaging with your content?
- Conversion rate – how often do readers follow through on CTAs?
- List Growth – how rapidly is your subscriber base expanding?
When you spot a need for improvement, follow up with A/B testing. Send out two versions of an email with one and only one difference, and observe which one gets better results. This lets you test the effectiveness of things like subject lines, CTAs, and article titles.
As you learn more about your membership, you can begin to segment your list into categories, and tweak your content to fit the recipients.
One useful starting point for real estate associations is dividing your list by member type: residential agents, commercial brokers, property managers, appraisers.
Let member behavior drive further segmentation. Is a member consistently clicking your continuing education content? Surface more professional development resources for them. Clicking everything related to legislative updates? They’re your advocacy-minded members. The more your content reflects what individual members actually care about, the stronger your case for renewal.
Segmentation is a solid starting point — but it still means treating groups of people the same way. A commercial broker and a residential agent might be in different segments, but they’re still each getting the same email as every other member in their bucket.
The next step beyond segmentation is true individual personalization — where every member’s email is assembled around their specific engagement history, not their segment assignment. That’s what AI-powered tools like rasa.io are built to do: learn what each member actually clicks, and build their email around it automatically. No manual rules required.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully all this talk about click-through rates and calls to action hasn’t obscured the key point about email marketing:
It’s all about relationships.
When a member opens your email, it’s a signal they still believe the association is worth their time. Don’t waste that signal with generic content. Take the time to understand what they care about, and show up with something useful every time.
If you do it right, you won’t have to remind them to renew. They’ll already know why they’re there.
Find great tools to power your association’s email marketing at rasa.io.
