Email marketing

How to make your email marketing work way better than you ever imagined

June 9, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

Send something with monotonous regularity

One of the best ways to stand out from the crowd is to mail something at the same day and time every single week. We do this at Residential Settlements and in nearly every course I run someone will say how much they look forward to receiving the email every week. Make no mistake, sending a weekly email is hard work. My colleague Emily Murphy spends hours researching and interviewing and making sure of her facts before pressing the Send button. But every Tuesday morning at 10am the email is sent and every week a crop of new deals come in as a result.

Apply the rule of Ten Feet

The Rule of Ten Feet is simple: if you’re within ten feet of someone you should be asking if they’d like to join your email list. Applying this rule gives home opens, door-knocking and telephone canvassing a whole new level of intensity. The purpose of both of these activities should be to build a database of people who are keen to hear about what you have to say.

Have something worthwhile to say

Sadly, most agents equate email marketing with sending out their latest listings to an unsuspecting public. Don’t get me wrong, that has its place. In fact, if that’s the only thing you have to offer then go for it – but do it smarter. But there’s a better way to build credibility and relationship and that’s by writing some informed, insightful market commentary. In the short term target sending a monthly local market wrap. People who own property in your area will love your deeply nuanced understanding of what’s happening in your area.

The difficulty most agents have with sending a monthly market wrap is the time it takes but it’s an easy problem to solve. The answer? Think of the FAQs you get at your home opens or from your friends at a a barbecue. You know how you handle the “how’s the market?” question so now you just need to capture your thoughts and words on paper (or in a Word document). It will take you literally no more than 30 minutes to sit down and write your response and now you have something to send to your database.

And forget trying to sell. Focus instead on answering those FAQs. Imagine writing to your favourite customer. Give it all you’ve got. Pretty soon you’ll have something amazing to say. Keep sending this out to people in your local area and you’ll start building some serious credibility as THE person to know in the area.

Forget cold calling and start prompted calling

Many agents I know get their new people to tele-canvas. If there’s one job that’ll break a new kids heart and fill their day full of meaningless activity it’s this!

There’s a much better way.

Most good email marketing software provide lots of stats about the performance of an email campaign. These stats include the number of people that opened the email and the number of people who clicked on links contained within the email. These stats are just gold. So, if you’re sending out a weekly email your tele-canvasing activity should come from following up people who have opened or clicked the most. Choose the top 10 or 20 (or whatever number you want) and make a a follow up call. Use a simple script such as “Hi, it’s Sally Jones from Sally Jones Property. I sent you an email earlier today and I just wanted to quickly follow up to see if you had any questions.” No need for hard sell just give people the opportunity to tell you if they have an interest in what you sent them in the email.

My experience is that people will open up to you if they’re interested.

Email marketing: know what your customers want and get to the point

April 10, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

Know what your customers want and get to the point. That’s my number one piece of advice for email marketing.

Of course there are lots of ways to make your emails look great but looks are only important if your readers – not you – want pretty pictures.

To maximise the effectiveness of your emails, ask your readers. Get a group of prospects together and quiz them about what would help them through the purchase process. If you’re already sending emails, obsess about your readership stats. Find out what links people are clicking. What’s the common thread? Click stats are a source of great business intelligence.

Once you know what your prospects want, deliver it. Don’t beat around the bush. Get to the point. If your readers want info put that in the subject line. Make it easy for your readers to find what they want and need.

And stop sending out newsletters with generic headlines like March Newsletter. The punters don’t want a March newsletter, they want information or your latest product offers or a discount coupon. Give it to them. Right from the start and in every way possible.

Part of getting to the point is getting to the point about the action you want people to take. Even long-term relationship building emails should have a point. And that point is to give the prospect an opportunity to express an interest in completing another purchase. Make that easy through a clear, strong call to action.

So get to it. Grab the last bulk email you sent and review it. Is the key content clear from the subject line and all the way to the end? Does your email get to the point? Or are you waffling and trying to look good? If so, stop it and do something effective. And does your email contain a strong call to action? Your CTA should be the hero of the page. It doesn’t need to be big but it should grab the eye and draw people in.

Why letterbox dropping is the worst metaphor for email

August 26, 2013 by Peter Fletcher

Letterbox dropping is the worst metaphor for email.

I received another email from a real estate agent yesterday. Apart from one lead article, it was full of his latest listings. Unfortunately, the “lead” “article” was actually nothing more than a headline and a link to a website that wasn’t his.

What’s the problem here?

Well, the problem is I never asked to receive his emails. I suspect that he got my email address from LinkedIn or Facebook. Wherever it came from I didn’t give it to him.

Nor, for that matter, did I ask him to send me his latest listings. That was HIS decision, not mine. He was the one who decided that I’d be interested in his listings, not me.

About now you might be thinking: Peter, stop complaining. Just hit the unsubscribe button. Well, yes, I could do that – at least the email ticks that box. But that misses the point.

And the point is this. Too many agents look at email through the metaphor of a letterbox drop. If I stuff enough letter boxes with my flyers sooner or later someone will call me in to appraise their home. If it works with letterbox drops, it’ll work for emails.

And that thinking is right. It does work that way. Sadly, though, the letter box drop is the worst metaphor for email marketing.

Why?

For a starter, sending emails to people without their explicit permission makes you look like a spammer, and because most agents are doing it, it makes you look like most agents. When you look like everyone else you have no point of difference, nothing to distinguish you from the next guy.

In the end you end up competing on price. That’s a race to the bottom with no winners.

The other problem with the metaphor is that it robs the agent of the best that email has to offer. As Abraham Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

For agents that have only pamphlets, everything looks like a letterbox. That’s sad because it robs them of having cafe conversations, of having real relationships, ones that lead to repeat and referral business.

The opportunity here is for agents to redefine themselves as community reporters, as non-elected representatives, as concierges. Sure, there’ll still be people who want your latest listings. But for others not in the market to buy – and that’s me – being my concierge or reporter is far more valuable.

Your tips, your local knowledge, your advice about living well in your patch – my patch – would endear me to you, would make me want to get to know you more, and would give me a reason to tell all my friends about you.

Sound like better fun than doing letterbox drops?

This article was originally published on realestatetribe.com.au. Image by Michael Coghlan via Flickr.

How to maximise your email deliverability

April 5, 2013 by Peter Fletcher

If you’re sending mass emails but your phone isn’t ringing it may be that your emails are being caught by spam filters.

Here are a few ways to make sure your emails have the best chance of not being caught.

Avoid generic subject lines e.g. August Newsletter. Instead, create a subject line that sells the content without going overboard.
Don’t over-use images. Rather than using text, which can be read by spam filters, spammers often send a single large image. Reputable email marketing providers frown on people who have a high percentage of image to text in their emails.
Don’t send bulk emails with attachments. Besides creating a poor user experience, sending bulk emails with (usually PDF) attachments, is a sure-fire way of having your emails caught in a spam filter.
Avoid the over-use of promotional phrases and sales speak. Spam filters ‘listen’ for words like ‘free’ and ‘no-obligation’. If they hear them too often your email won’t find its way to the user’s inbox.
Don’t include the recipients name in the subject line. People don’t do this in real life and spam filters know it’s a trick used by email marketers to get their emails noticed.
Always include a recognisable name in the From line. This will help recipients connect the email with why they subscribed to it in the first place and that will boost your email open rate.
Don’t go overboard with punctuation. Spam filters eat “!!!!!” for breakfast! Even if they don’t, overusing punctuation looks unprofessional.
Avoid using ALL CAPS. Sure, I it will catch people’s eye but it also catches the attention of spam filters.

Apply these tips to your future email marketing campaigns and watch your readership and results increase.

Stop stressing about the size of your email list and start building relationships

February 27, 2013 by Peter Fletcher

David Risely says:

Email marketing should be simply about using systems to scale up your personal interactions.Talk TO them. Not AT them.Get them to talk back to you. And answer them.

He’s dead right. All too often, agents stress about the size—or lack thereof–of their email marketing list. It’s false thinking because it misses what email is really all about–relationships.

For those agents who understand that sales flow from relationships, the size of their list doesn’t matter. Instead of focusing on new subscribers, they add value and use their email marketing to both leverage and create real-world connections.

These agents know that email is a tool that can help them communicate with a lot of people in a short amount of time. Yet they also know that a great relationship should never stay online, so they create emails that invite and encourage people to reconnect over coffee, on the phone, or in a person’s home.

Five cool posts discovered in Google Reader

January 24, 2011 by Peter Fletcher

On 1000 Watt blog, Brian Boero offers some suggestions about writing blog posts based on content that agents already have. They’re sitting on a goldmine, he contends, and it’s time to step up to the plate and start delivering.

Right now you’re like a New York City department store with no windows, a Sushi place without the little plastic food in the window.

Hiding your goods from the marketplace. Failing to use their power to engage.

If you’re a brokerage of any size, you have tons of content to play with. You have access to an IDX feed. And, I would imagine, a camera.

There’s no excuse. No, not even MLS rules.

Come on agents, it’s time to get busy!

Max Kalehoff provides a short explanation of content delivery networks (CDN’s). They’re used to deliver web content faster. And with Google including page load speed as part of their ranking algorithm it makes sense to look at using one, especially for high traffic sites. According to Max:

A good Web hosting provider with dedicated servers and clean coding are critical to website speed. But so is a content delivery network, especially if your site is subject to visitor spikes and geographically dispersed traffic, and contains large multimedia files (like video). The largest online publishers have already made CDNs part of their online infrastructures.

It’s probably not something I need to look at for this site but I wonder what the portals, franchises and marketing groups are doing.

Jay Baer is right; we’ve seen this social media movie before. Where? Email marketing. Opt-in, subscribers, open rate, impressions, CTR: they all mean the same thing only just in a different setting. He concludes:

For more than a decade, the world of email has hoped to send messages of such vigor and verisimilitude that recipients would be compelled to click a “forward to a friend” button to send the message onward to their compatriots, who would surely benefit from its contents. That F2F rate has historically been tracked by email marketers, although it’s accuracy is poor since it’s easier to just click “forward” in your email software, than to click the button within the email itself.

In social media of course, this sharing behavior is the coin of the realm. Retweets, Facebook shares, Diggs, Stumbles, and now Linkedin shares are badges of honor, displayed proudly atop each blog post like family crests of feudal lords.

That’s a lot of similarities. Does anyone else feel like we’ve seen this movie before?

In short it’s time to stop thinking of social media as a special case. It’s not. It’s just a different horse in the same race.

On the Geek Estate blog Drew Meyers recommends blogging about local free wi-fi hotspots. It’s a cool idea. He suggests doing more than just grabbing information off the web but actually going to the place (café, library, restaurant) and interviewing the owner or manager. Then he poses the real kicker:

To really maximize your time and effort, don’t just write about wifi options based on what you find on the web — go there, talk to the staff, and write from first hand experience — and send the owners of those establishments the link to your blog post once you’ve written about them. Better yet, use that email as a conversation starter and convince the owners to blog for you on your local blog (that’s the holly grail)!

Great idea, huh? Bet there’s no-one doing that in your patch. Know what that means? You could be the go-to person and carve out a niche for yourself. Much of this post was written at Rifo’s in East Victoria Park. They have excellent free wi-fi and even better coffee. So what are you waiting for?

Finally, Kristin Rawski from Excite Media provides an analysis of the Oreo’s Facebook page. She explains that they could be more responsive about the content they share but praises their World’s Fan of the Week contest. That contest encourages fans to upload a photo of themselves in exchange for the chance to be featured on the page avatar. I wonder if they got Facebook’s permission to run that contest.
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What is Flowtown?

June 29, 2010 by Peter Fletcher

I have a confession. I only heard of Flowtown today. And it’s got me excited in a kind of “I know there’s something here but I’m not sure what” way.

Here’s a video that explains what it is and does. I think there’s some exciting ways agents will use it to craft highly targeted, relevant emails to their prospects and clients. I’m going to experiment with it and will let you know what I discover.