Hopefully you’re harnessing the power of IXACT Contact’s powerful email marketing capabilities. You can do everything from send out a monthly real estate newsletter to set-up automated drip marketing campaigns to send out a beautiful just listed or just sold e-Card or e-Flyer.
In this blog post, we’ll share with you five email marketing best practices that’ll help you improve the effectiveness of your email communications. You want people to open your emails, read them, click on the links, and engage with you based on the email’s content.
1. Define Your Goal
Is the goal of your email to promote a new listing? Showcase some of the properties you’ve recently sold? Build rapport? Position yourself as a home expert? Make sure you know what your goal is before creating and sending any marketing emails. This will help you focus and ensure that you’re not “all over the place.”
2. Define Your Target Audience
You need to ask yourself “Is this email going to be relevant and useful to the people I’m sending it to?” Define your audience; all of your clients, all of your prospects, business-to-business contacts, past co-workers, people who’ve attended your last open house, people who belong to your country club, etc.
3. Know your Call-to-Action (CTA)
After reading your email, what do you want people to do? Give you a call? Fill out a form? Simply remember your name? Make it clear from the email what action you want your recipients to take and make it easy for them to do so. For example, if you want them to call you, make sure you prominently display your phone number (perhaps even many times throughout your email).
It’s important to realize that in order to maximize the chance of your recipients following through with your CTA, you need to give them a compelling reason to do so. For instance, if I’m asking people to call me, I’ll explain in my email what kind of valuable information I plan to give them during the call.
4. Measure Your Results
If you’re using IXACT Contact for your email marketing, measuring your results is easy. And you’ll want to measure your results so you can see how your emails are performing and improve, if necessary.
With our Email Campaign Reporting Feature you can see open rate, click-through rate, bounce back rate, as well as who read your emails, how many times they read your emails, and who clicked on the links. IXACT Contact is currently the only real estate contact management system on the market that has Email Campaign Reporting.
Here’s a tip: if you see that certain people are reading your email multiple times or have forwarded it on to somebody, this is an indication that they are hot leads. Make sure you pick up the phone and give these people a call right away 
.
Determine if your goal was achieved or if people followed through with your call to action. If improvement is necessary, experiment with the email and its content and try to improve on your next one.
We hope that these best practices will help you create and send out marketing emails like a seasoned pro.
Do you follow all or any of these best practices? Do you have any email marketing questions for us? Leave a comment below!