The complete guide to email marketing for estate agents and property businesses

Email marketing is a cost-effective tool for reaching your target audience at all stages of the customer journey. Read our blog to find our more about how to utilise email for your estate agency or property business.

Email marketing is a cost-effective and helpful tool for the property and estate agency market. Estate agency is all about building long-term relationships with customers while they’re looking for a house and buying it or when they’re looking to sell their home and buy a new one. 

It’s a long customer journey, and it can take some people months or even years to find their perfect home. So, you need to stay top of mind and build a relationship with potential customers until they’re ready to use your services, rather than just hoping they’ll come to you when they’re ready. 

But, remember that effective email marketing is about more than just sending out a monthly newsletter. Get it right, and email marketing can help you connect with specific audiences and nurture them until they’re ready to become customers. 

In this guide, we’ll look at why email marketing is important for estate agents and how you can build a successful email marketing strategy. 

The benefits of email marketing for estate agents 

Email marketing can provide so many benefits because it gives you the time to build lasting relationships with your target audience and really personalise the communications to nurture leads until they’re ready to buy. Around 64% of businesses use email marketing but only 5.6% of these are estate agents. Here are some of the key benefits: 

Target the right people

Sending targeted email campaigns rather than just a catchall will provide much better results. Segmenting your email list allows you to target the right people with the right messaging, making them more likely to convert. 

Build relationships 

If you consistently send your contacts emails they’re likely to be interested in, they’re going to be more likely to read your emails and use your services when they’re ready.

Drive conversions 

Targeted email sequences can help you capture and nurture leads until they’re ready to book a viewing or a valuation. You can start by offering valuable information to show leads that you’re an expert in your industry. Develop a relationship by providing them with information that makes their buying experience run more smoothly. 

Top 5 tips for building an effective email marketing strategy 

1. Capture leads

The first step to email marketing is a list of leads you can contact regularly, full of people who are likely to use your services. Add a sign up form to your website to let the people who are interested in being on your mailing list to receive your updates. 

Ensure you give your website visitors a good reason to give you their email addresses. Let them know exactly what they can expect from your emails and how they will benefit them. 

There are two options when it comes to creating a list: buy it or create your own. 

Buying a list is great if you want to add to your list quickly. However, there’s no guarantee that the people on the list are going to be interested in your business. And, it might cause you a whole load of GDPR issues too. 

Ideally, you want to attract homeowners, investors and people interested in buying, selling or letting out a property. Building a list can take a huge amount of leg work, but it’s worth the time and effort. It allows you to send emails to people who are interested in your services and who are more likely to use you in the future. 

The people who willingly provide you with their email addresses are more likely to open your emails and eventually convert. 

2. Personalise your interactions 

When it comes to email marketing, personalisation is key. Make sure you segment your audience to provide the right people with the right message at the right time. 

The people who are buying a house with you have different needs and require different information to those who are selling with you. Likewise, investors will need different information too. Plus, if you target multiple areas, you’ll need to segment by location too so that you can send relevant property listings over.

3. Create targeted email campaigns 

Once you have segmented your subscriber list, you need to make sure you’re sending the right emails out. 

Create a mix of regular email campaigns and automated email campaigns. Regular email campaigns include:

  • Properties you’ve just sold 
  • New listings 
  • Current events in your local area 
  • Business updates 
  • Monthly newsletters 

These campaigns will help you to keep your customers engaged with your brand throughout their journey from awareness to making an enquiry. 

Automated emails can include: 

  • A discount or incentive email for joining 
  • A welcome email 
  • Relationship building emails - let your contacts know who you are and what you do over a series of emails 
  • New listing alerts in your contacts area of interest 
  • Follow up after a viewing 
  • Emails to people who haven’t engaged for a while 

Drip campaigns are perfect for nurturing customers and leading them through the sales funnel. Manually sending emails can be time consuming so automating emails at a range of touchpoints can save you time and resources. 

4. Build relationships 

When you’re sending emails out to your list, always remember that you’re building relationships. Bombarding your list with sales messages and instantly trying to push them towards a sale or conversion is an easy way to get them to unsubscribe. 

Focus on providing them with informative and valuable information and make sure they know what you can offer them when they need you. Share top tips and helpful information to showcase your expertise in your industry and build trust. 

5. Stay consistent 

When it comes to email marketing, you need to stay consistent. This means your list will know what communications to expect from you and when. They know that you’re going to provide them with helpful information that will help them on their journey and this will set you apart from your competitors. 

Regularly seeing your business pop up in their inbox reminds leads of your services and, even if they don’t need your services right now, an email serves as a gentle reminder to increase their chances of using your estate agency when they want to buy or sell a property. 

Key takeaways 

You can utilise email marketing for your property or estate agent business by using it to build relationships and trust with your subscribers. As we’ve mentioned at the start of this article, buying or selling a house is a long process so keeping prospects engaged throughout this time will really help you to drive conversions. 

If you’d like to find out more about how email marketing can help you grow your estate agency business, please contact us at hello@logica-digital.co.uk

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Blog written by

Lucy Forrest
Digital Account Manager