Building Relationships Through Email Marketing

Real estate professionals have always relied on tried and true marketing tools such as brochures, hand-outs, business cards, flyers, personal letters, billboards, bus signs, etc. to promote their business. These tools help imprint you as unique and successful on the consumers’ mind. A “must have” addition to your marketing arsenal is email Marketing.

Earlier this year, iHOUSE launched its first annual Real Estate Marketing Benchmark Survey. Overall findings from this survey can be found here. More than 60% of respondents said they planned to invest more in online marketing, and of those, 43% specifically targeted email marketing as their marketing focus. Email marketing can be an inexpensive way to help you grow your business by keeping an open line of consistent information flowing to (and from) your prospects and past customers.

In this issue:

• Using Email Marketing to Grow Your Real Estate Business
• MarketReach Email Marketing Enhancements
• iHOUSE Helps You “Fight Spam!”
• Email Best Practices Links
• iHOUSE Blueprint Monthly Poll

Using Email Marketing To Grow Your Real Estate Business

Email marketing can be an inexpensive and quick way of reaching a very large audience. While for many big companies, SPAM filters and email overload has made it increasingly harder to promote a business using email, the same does not necessarily hold true for real estate professionals. Given the nature of the relationships created in real estate, most real estate Email marketing is inherently permission-based marketing. Permission-based marketing means that your contacts have provided you with their contact details directly in some way, usually as a request for some information, and will likely expect to hear from you at some point.

Potential Targets for Email Marketing Communication

• Past and current clients
• Prospective clients
• Potential buyers
• Title company contacts, inspectors, other vendors
• Fellow agents
• Local press contacts

Even with permission-based marketing, just emailing general advertisements may be ignored by the recipient unless you strive to provide engaging, useful content. Short bits of information, such as main tips when buying/selling a house and local market trends are ways to keep your audience reading your emails. More…

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MarketReach Email Marketing Program Enhancements

Speaking of Email marketing, we’re always improving our products to make them more efficient and user-friendly for our customers. Recently, we’ve added a series of enhancements to our MarketReach Email Marketing Program to make lead generation that much easier for iHOUSE MarketReach customers!

Some of the new features include:

• New eCard Wizard
• New Property Flyer Wizard
• New eCard designs to choose from
• New Articles to send to contacts

iHOUSE Helps You “Fight Spam!”

As Email can be a main source of many leads on a daily basis, it makes sense to spend a little time understanding how you can keep your inbox as “spam-free” as possible. Here, iHOUSE provides a quick description of some of the most recent changes we’ve made to help you fight spam, along with a few tips on how you can improve your own spam filtering as well. More…

Email Best Practices Resources

Email Marketing Best Practices – E-Commerce Times

Email Marketing Tips, Tricks and Secrets – About.com

iHOUSE Blueprint Monthly Poll

This month, since we’re focusing on Email Marketing, we thought we’d ask you and your peers what effective forms of Email Marketing you use to generate leads. (Poll is now closed.)

In April, we asked about tools for successful listing presentations and we got a great response! We asked, “What is the most effective tool to showcase in a listing presentation?” The answers were as follows:

• #1 (50%) Comparative Market Analysis
• #2 (33%) Website Dedicated to the Property
• #3 (16%) Photo Brochure or Handout
• #4 (1%) Classified Ad