Email Marketing: Use Your CRM to Get Relevant and Personal

If you've written off email marketing as being ineffective, you may want to think again. Email is one way you can stay in touch with your real estate database and remain "top of mind," quickly and easily. It's much more cost effective than many other marketing channels, such as direct mail and print advertising, and much of it can be automated. Studies have shown that people 1) want to receive email from individuals and companies they're interested in, 2) use email to share information, and 3) check email every single day.

When it comes to email, relevancy and personalization are not only important, they're a must for smart email marketers. Without them, the likelihood of your email marketing goals (such as leads or sales, for example) being reached are slim. In this article, I'll discuss the meaning behind relevancy and personalization, just why they're both so important, and how to leverage your real estate CRM to execute effective email marketing.

Email Personalization: Making It "Feel" Like It's Just For Them

A personalized email is one where everyone receives an email that's addressed to them. And of course depending on your relationship with your client or prospect, you can choose to address them with a "Dear," a "Hi," or anything else you choose that reflects the nature (or formality) of your relationship.

You'll also want to insert the contact's name throughout the body of an email using your CRM's mail merge functionality. That way, it looks and feels like the email was written just for them, when in reality, you may have sent the same email to hundreds of people.

Email Relevancy: Bringing Your Real Estate Marketing to a Razor Sharp Focus

If an email isn't relevant to your recipients, there's a good chance they'll delete it without even thinking, or worse, instantaneously unsubscribe from your list. Emails that are relevant produce results and get people excited about your offer and future emails from you.

To send relevant email out, it goes without saying that you can't simply draft an email and blast it to your clients, or send a single drip campaign to all of your leads. You need to send targeted emails and campaigns to the contacts in your database based their interests, what type of lead they are, how you met them, and more.

It starts with using your CRM to place your contacts into appropriate groups, such as A-List, Former Colleagues, Hot Leads, Book Club, Bloorview Open House, etc. Of course, you'll have to create groups that make sense for you and your business.

Most great real estate CRMs will come with pre-loaded and customizable email templates and drip marketing campaigns for different types of contacts, such as clients, buyer leads, seller leads, etc. Again, make sure you use these resources and send out different emails and campaigns to the various groups in your database, depending on which campaigns are most relevant to them. Or create your own if you have some time.

Some people worry about using preexisting email templates because they think they sound "canned" or scripted. But in reality, a slight customization to some of the emails so they "sound" like you often solves this perceived issue.

One of the best things about a good CRM is that you can really drill down and search your database across many different criteria, such as religion (you might want to send your Jewish friends a Happy Chanukah card, for instance), group type, contact type, a date criteria (such as when the contact was added to your database or the last time you logged a call with him or her), original source of contact, and more. There's no reason why your email shouldn't be both personalized and highly relevant.

You don't need to be trained in marketing to be effective with email. All it takes is some good information (this article is a great start) and an easy to learn and use CRM that's designed for your business. IXACT Contact is a great choice for agents who are not very tech savvy or those who would consider themselves to be at the intermediate level (or who don't want to invest too much time learning a software). For those with a technical background, Top Producer may be the right system for you.

Should email marketing be part of your overall real estate marketing plan? Absolutely. Should you strive for relevancy and personalization? Certainly. And you shouldn't email without having both of these concepts in mind. Good luck!

To view the original article, visit the Ixact Contact blog.