What do you do after you send a mass mail to your prospective home buyers or Realtors and brokers?
Chances are you put a lot of effort into the design of the email, then you spend time testing the email and then you send it. Right after you send the mass mail, you likely have a look at the quick stats to see how many people opened it, but what do you do next?
Often we see the regular blasting of a registrant list all with similar results over and over (in fact, sometimes with declining open rates). A 20% open rate is not bad, but we think you can probably do better with a few suggestions on what you can do after you send out the mass mail (or before you send out your next email!)
- Read and review the mass mail detail report in Lasso. You’ll see who opened the email, who clicked on a link, who unsubscribed, as well as who didn’t receive the email because of a failure.
- Learn what the delivery failures mean and update your registrants accordingly. If you see that an email address has bounced, pick up the phone and ask the prospect if they are still interested in receiving information. If they are, ask for a new email address. A great opportunity to touch base with potential home buyers!
- Make sure that the “From” email address in your mass mail is a valid address. Often when you send out email, you receive “out-of-office” responses and many times a registrant will reply with a query. It’s important that this email is monitored and someone is responsible for responding.
- Update invalid email addresses. These are the email addresses with a typo, such as “hotmial” instead of “hotmail”.
- Try resending your email. Yes, you heard me correctly. I’m suggesting that you send it out again. But this time, don’t send it to everyone, just send it to those who didn’t open it the first time. You may want to change the subject line to include “Update” or “Reminder” or “Last chance . . .”. We’ve had a number of clients use this approach (albeit, carefully – you don’t want to be sending email so often that you annoy people). They have seen a surprisingly good open rate the second time around.
- Have a follow-up email ready to go out. If you have a link in your first email about one-bedroom units and 75 people click on this link, have a follow-up email ready to go that provides further information and pricing incentives on one-bedroom units!
- Plan some human interaction. We get so caught up in email today; however, it’s important for a human touch. Use the mass mail reporting to follow-up with those registrants who haven’t opened an email in awhile, or maybe even those registrants who have unsubscribed. Some people just aren’t into email. It doesn’t mean they aren’t interested. Don’t ignore them!
Follow these ideas and you will find that your email subscribers are more engaged and your open rates are going in the right direction . . . up!! More appointments, offers and sales will follow.
Real estate project marketers need to have a wide variety of skills - whether it's the planning of the next big launch or event, designing and producing brochures and direct mail pieces, defining and developing the lead nurturing process, or the many, many other responsibilities that come with the job. Email marketing can play an important role in the marketing of a project, but often the resources to call upon to help create the email are scarce!
Have you ever been frustrated when creating an HTML email? One of the challenges I have, I'll admit, is that I'm not an HTML coder. I do a lot of the creation of email right in design mode or in an HTML editor, like Dreamweaver. Many will tell you that you really need to know HTML in order to create an effective email. No question, it does help and it may eliminate some grief, but take it from me it can be done - especially when there are templates available so you're not starting from scratch!
There are always many things to consider when creating an email. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that an HTML email cannot be created exactly like you would a web page. It's coded the same way, but you need to keep it REALLY simple. All the cool things you can do in HTML web pages today won't necessarily render properly in certain email providers. So you must test your email and test it again, and again! Focus on your message, not the creativity bursting within!
Here are a few things to consider:
- Use tables. Because email providers use different HTML rendering systems - it could be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or in many cases Microsoft Outlook, which uses Word to read the HTML code and can cause a lot of problems! Using tables allows you to control where the text and images are placed.
- Keep your emails to a maximum of 600 pixels wide. Design your emails for the preview pane. Most preview panes are no wider than this and much of the message will be missing if you don't confine your email to a 600 pixel table. What a recipient sees in their preview pane could determine whether they want to learn more, or not!
- Don't assume people are going to see the images. By default the majority of recipients will have images turned off. Look at the email you're creating in this mode - can a recipient still get the gist of the message?
- Browser-based email providers like gmail and hotmail will strip away certain code and CSS (cascading style sheets). And Microsoft is no different - there are even differences between Outlook 2003 and 2007 - for example, background images won't work in Outlook 2007. And sometimes background colours don't work so be cautious of using text colour that may not show up on a white background. Keep it simple!
- If you are contracting a web developer or designer to create your email, ask them to code it like it was for a website from 15 years ago - don't use fancy features that won't work and will only cause your recipients to be frustrated. Ensure there's a good balance of text and images.
For more email suggestions for improved design, development and delivery, view this email marketing white paper. Before you know it, you'll be creating HTML emails like someone who codes them!
Interested in getting trained in real estate email marketing? Contact Lasso Support - support@mylasso.com
Creating templates for email marketing can not only be time-consuming and require some design knowledge but it's also recommended to have an understanding of email marketing best practices to maximize deliverability and open rates.
At Lasso, we're pretty passionate about email marketing and helping our clients achieve success (we've written many posts in the past on email marketing best practices for real estate project marketing).
We recently announced a new enhancement to our integrated email marketing which will help real estate project marketing professionals. Now included with Lasso is an email template library.
This is a library of pre-built templates that gives you a starting point for your email marketing campaigns. Well-built email templates are an important start to creating great email marketing campaigns. A good balance of images and text is important, along with testing to ensure that the emails render properly in Outlook and the major ISPs such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail. Lasso has done this for you (although it's still important to test after you've put your own content and images in the template!)
Our goal at Lasso is to make using our Real Estate CRM easy for our clients. To start, the template library contains 10 different emails and we'll be adding more each month so keep checking back and let us know what you'd like to see . . . or maybe you have an email template that you'd like to share with other Lasso users - let us know!
The library includes templates for newsletters, events, announcements and letterhead. We've given you a great starting point to make it your own - add your images and your content and you'll be ready to go in no time.
Email marketing should be an important component to your marketing plan. Whether it's a community or construction update, it needs to be professional looking and follow good email best practices to maximize open rates.
If you have any questions about email marketing, contact Lasso Client Support, we're here to help.
What's a good open rate? Why don't our prospects open our emails? These are questions that are asked frequently at Lasso. If someone registered on your site why aren't they opening your email? How can you improve your open rates?
Following are email stats for the Real Estate industry from MailChimp:
Open
Rate
| Click Rate
| Soft Bounce
Rate
| Hard Bounce
Rate
| Abuse Complaint
Rate
| Unsubscribe
Rate
|
| 22.77% | 4.40% | 2.07% | 3.51% | 0.08% | 0.28% |
Well, first off, an open rate of 20-30% is actually pretty good. So if you are getting open rates in that range, pat yourself on your back - you're doing okay! If you're not getting that percentage or you want to strive to do better, here are a few tactics that are worth a try:
Timing of your email - experiment with the timing of your email. Morning isn't always the best time to send email, especially if you're sending to business email addresses. If it's a project launch event that's happening on the weekend, sending on a Thursday might be more effective than sending earlier in the week. Review who you are sending to and test what works best.
Image Use - ensure there's a good balance of images and text. Can the recipient still get the gist of the message even without seeing the images? An email may just be ignored if the recipient isn't sure what it's all about. Is there a clear call to action?
Catchy Subject lines - this is where being clever and even a bit witty are helpful. Ask yourself: would you open your email if you received it? Why should your recipients? Ensure that it's relevant and compelling. Spend some time on this and even test it out by trying out a couple of different options. Instead of a subject line of "Project Construction Updates", be more specific and try something that includes what's currently being worked on - maybe it's a specific comment about the unique flooring being installed or the environmental measures being taken.
Email Address - be consistent with your sender email address. There's always the debate over should it be a personal email address or a generic "info@" or "sales@" address. The most important thing: the "from" address contains the name of your real estate project or company and be consistent. Always, always, use a corporate email address - don't use a generic ISP email address or your Lasso email address.
Frequency - there's such a thing as too frequent and there's also such a thing as not frequent enough. If someone signed up on your website 3 months ago and you're just sending something now, they may have forgotten about you and not recognize your email. Conversely, if you're emailing brokers and realtors daily or even weekly with information that really isn't important to them, don't expect them to open the email!
List Quality - if you're sending an email to an old list, don't expect great results. In fact, be a bit wary of using it, you can get caught in spam traps and future emails sent to that ISP can be blocked. Don't keep sending to prospects who aren't opening your email. Pick up the phone and find out if they are still interested. It may look good and sound good to say you send out to a list of over 10,000 names but if you really only have a small percentage who are actively engaged, you're doing more harm than good by blasting to everyone.
Email Content - think about your own over-crowded inbox and the number of emails you get. What makes you open one email over another? Typically, home buyer prospects don't like to read too much - make it easy to read your email and have a clear call to action.
Email should only be sent to those who have requested it. If you're following that email marketing rule than you are halfway there. Always test your emails and monitor the results. Review your mass mail reports so you can see what works. Don't be afraid to sign up to receive updates from other projects and companies, so you can get ideas from those around you. Follow these ideas and you'll find your open rates and click-through rates improve!
We often get asked the question - which day of the week is best to send out mass email? Not an easy question to answer as it's really dependent on the type of email addresses in your database.
- Are they business emails or are they personal emails?
- Are you sending to realtors and brokers or are you sending to prospects and leads?
- Are you looking for a call to action?
- Is it a time sensitive event, such as an open house or VIP event on the weekend?
Regardless of the size of your database it requires some testing to see what works best for you. The day of the week is important, but the time of the day that you send should also be part of your strategy as often this can be more important than the day sent!
At Lasso, we recently did some testing and got some great results - one of the highest open rates for a mass mail. Following was the scenario . . .
It was time to send out our quarterly company newsletter - New Developments. The average open rate for the real estate industry is about 20% - anything over that is considered good, but we wanted to see if we could do better. Our database of clients, as you would expect, is home builders, developers, and real estate sales and marketing professionals. In the past, we've typically sent out emails mid-morning. This month, we decided to see what kind of results we would get by sending between 3:00pm and 3:30pm. A time, when for some, much of their work for the day is done and they may be looking for a quick break from work. We thought that maybe the recipients of our email have a little more time to open and read email at this time of the day. The result - a 35% open rate! Will we always see this kind of result? Maybe not, but the point is, don't be shy to try something different, and continually try to do better.
There's no question there are some basic email best practices that you can follow to improve open rates - a creative subject line, consideration given to who sends the email, a good balance of images, etc. - but there are other factors - day of the week, and the time of day. If you have a weekend event happening, Friday night may not be the best time to communicate this - but Thursday afternoon with a reminder on Saturday morning, may work. It's a common thought that it's ineffective to send email from about 10:00pm through to 9:00am. Mid-morning during the work week is not a great time either - most people are more focused on work-related activities than personal email. The late afternoon into the early evening may be the best time for business-to-consumer emails.
Think about when you open emails, or think of when you don't open them, and why. Don't be satisfied with average open rates, challenge yourself to see if you can do better . . . I bet you can!
The blog post from Seth Godin. . . Shocking Tiger Woods Video. . . really illustrates a great point.
Part of the content of his post is:
Is it better to get a click and then annoy someone, or better to only reach the people who care?
The mindset of the brazen copywriter is, "well, even if only 1% of the people I trick are actually interested in the content, that's worthwhile. After all, there are a lot of people out there, and offending 99 to get one one sale is good math."
The word I use for people like this is 'spammer'.
The mindset of the modern marketer is, "I can build a reputation in everything I do. If I teach people to trust me, then over time, I'll conserve their attention and build permission. That's priceless, particularly in a world that's getting more skeptical by the minute."
Over the past couple of years we are seeing a gradual and very definitely a positive shift to more and more new home builders wanting to go the ‘permission' based marketing route that builds a trusted relationship versus ad hoc mass emails and communications approach that basically says ‘let's toss it against the wall and see what sticks'.
We are here to help builders that are on the journey --- helping to equip you to capture every lead then target, nurture, communicate and close more deals with your prospects. Permission and nurturing also has a better chance of creating long-term loyal homebuyer to builder relationships.
Do you ever have days where you just want to turn back the clock and start over? I had one of those days yesterday - I sent out a mass mail. I was excited about it as it was regarding NewHomesDirectory.com's NHDBuzz (they have recently launched NHDBuzz.ca for Canadian Home Builders, Developers and Sales and Marketing Professionals).
I did (or thought I did) everything a good email marketer does - I created the copy, created the images, created the HTML following email best practices:
- added alt-tags and titles to the images
- used a good balance of images and text
- checked the hyperlinks to the images and double-checked that they worked
- performed a spell-check and sent to four people in the office to review
- Sent the email as a test to Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail accounts to see how it rendered
Where did I go wrong? Well, there was a strange background colour that I couldn't seem to remove so I asked someone in the office to help me with the HTML (HTML coding is not one of my areas of expertise). We tested it again and the blue background was gone; but here's where we (or really I) went wrong - we tested it for the blue background - we didn't check to see if there were any changes to the text. Everything appeared to look fine so it got sent out to 2,500 registrants in our database and then discovered that somehow the token for the registrant's telephone number got added smack dab in the middle of the text.
A sobering experience considering I've been known to turn my nose up at other's mistakes and make comments like "Oh, they obviously didn't test this first" or "How could you not catch that spelling mistake?"
Well, I did it and I'm sheepishly admitting that it's not the first time. It doesn't happen very often and I am pretty careful, but it's maddening to realize after the fact that it could have been avoided and that yes, it was in fact a "user error".
Lessons learned and perhaps I should review my own checklist of items before I send out in the future.
photo: istock
How do you go about crafting your mass mail messages? Are you thinking like a prospect when you're creating the copy and the images? What are you doing to entice the recipient to open the email and take action? Are you updating the message depending on the audience?
If you can answer all these questions, you're likely well on your way to successful email marketing! Often this is easier said than done and many factors come into play when creating your message. More often than not, email is created quickly and a lot of testing or time for proper messaging is not possible. It's happened to all of us - you're under a time crunch, there's an event happening this weekend and an email needs to go out today to let everyone know - copy is done quickly, the subject line lacks excitement and proper list segmentation isn't done so everyone gets the same message and yes, everyone gets the message, not just those who have asked for it.
This post won't solve all of these issues, but let's address a few key areas that will help when you're under a time crunch and you absolutely have to get that email out but you also want to improve deliverability and your open rates.
- The Sender - think about how you react to messages you receive and whether you delete a message, or not. If you don't know the sender, or it's not recognizable where they are from, the email likely gets deleted. Use a familiar email address. That may be someone specific, or it may be a generic email address that includes your company name as the user name. whatever you decide, be consistent.
- The Subject Line - we don't all have the wit to create emails like the ones from Marketing Profs (a favourite of mine), but here are a couple of things to point out. The subject line is important. This is the one line that will likely determine whether someone opens your email or marks it for delete. TYPING EVERYTHING IN UPPER CASE doesn't help (in fact, it will likely hinder your performance). Try to put your company name or project name in the subject (especially if your sender is a person's name - see above point). Make it relevant and enticing. Think about what compels you to open an email. Ask for help (and opinions . . . there's likely no shortage of these when you ask!)
- Don't be wordy. Keep the important part of the message "above the fold" (the top part of the email, before someone has to start scrolling) and avoid writing scads of text. Entice the recipient with words to get them to click to your website and save the detailed information for the website.
- A good balance of images and text. Ensure that the message can still be understood even if images aren't appearing.
- What's your call to action? What are you trying to achieve in the email? What's the purpose? Make sure it's clear to the recipient so you get the results you want.
- Tweak Your Messages - maybe you need more than one version of the email. Are you sending the same message to everyone? Consider modifying the email based on segmented lists. Send a different message to Realtors vs home buyers and perhaps different again to those who have answered specific questions. Yes, this takes a bit longer but could be well worth it from a success perspective.
- Ask your email recipients what they want to receive - setup subscription options so prospects can pick and choose what they want to receive. You may end up with a smaller list but it will be more targeted and I promise you higher open rates!
Before you begin your next email campaign, start by thinking like your prospect when creating the email and keep your message short and to the point.
So many real estate professionals are tapped for time these days. If this is the case for you, Lasso would be happy to help design email templates for your campaigns. Contact support@mylasso.com for more information.
We all know that email marketing is a powerful way to generate leads and build lists. Email marketing can also be used to increase conversion rates. I'm not referring to massive email blasts to everyone in your database, but rather a careful, thought-out email strategy that keeps your prospects engaged and moves them along the sales process.
Research has shown that many leads are not adequately followed up on and in market conditions where there is fierce competition over leads, many homebuilders and real estate marketing and sales professionals have developed, or need to develop, lead nurturing strategies that keep the prospect interested; and, importantly, build a system where leads are not able to fall through the cracks. We have come to accept low conversion rates for various marketing efforts. In the new home development industry, it's very apparent that marketing efforts like print advertising and sales center launches that may have worked a couple of years ago, are not as effective today. Using a Real Estate CRM system, like Lasso, can ensure that leads are being managed and consistent sales processes are in place for lead nurturing and targeted email campaigns. Marketing efforts can be tracked and analyzed and adjustments made as you learn what works and what doesn't work as well.
Prospects should be nurtured using email marketing (Lasso combines email marketing and lead management into one integrated solution). But an email marketing strategy does not consist of sending email after email to your entire database to see what sticks. Relevancy is the key to the success, along with timing and frequency. Segment your lists and put yourself in your prospects' shoes. What's important to them?
Lead Nurturing is a powerful strategy to be used with email marketing. Lead ratings (such as A, B, C, etc ) and scoring methods can be used while using email marketing as a follow-up communication tool. You can also review the ‘behaviour' of the prospects such as whether they have been opening emails, what they have clicked on and if they've forwarded the emails on.
Don't forget the human touch. What did we do before email? We made more phone calls, visits and used direct mail. Email provides a great mechanism to get information out quickly and at a fraction of the cost, however, it doesn't mean that human intervention is not needed. But if you incorporate effective email communication and take time to analyze and gain intelligence about prospect online behaviors such as website session tracking and email analytics, sales professionals can determine when they should pick up the phone and will be able to engage in home buyer prospect in a much more effective, relevant and personal way. And sell more at higher conversion rate!
Creating mass emails is relatively easy and quick. However, creating an enticing, interesting email may take a bit more time. The competition is fierce out there when you think of all the emails that are sent each day. Chances are high that your list of Realtors/Brokers and new home purchasers are receiving multiple emails from different developments and projects. What will make them open your email over someone else's? Before you hit the send button, review the following list and make sure you've checked everything off.