.png)
.jpg)
They say that for every $1 invested in email marketing, you can earn up to $40 dollars in return. But in the real world, it’s rare to see that kind of ROI on your real estate newsletters.
The reason is simple: Your email newsletters need to be extremely good to stand out above the noise.
Don’t get us wrong. Real estate email newsletters can be a game-changer for your business—but only if you’re really good at it.
If you have a hunch your real estate newsletters could use a little upgrade, you’re in the right place. We’re here to help you uplevel your conversion rates with seven top-of-the-line real estate newsletter templates to engage passive leads.
We’ll also show you why it’s crucial that you don’t stop there.
Because truly great real estate email marketing isn’t about blasting a listings update to your entire database and calling it a day. It’s about consistently engaging your contacts in relevant, personal ways until they’re ready to do business.
Let’s dive in.
Before we get into the various types of ideas and templates for real estate newsletters, we want to take a good hard look at one of the most classic newsletters used by nearly every Realtor out there: Listing Alerts.
Listing alerts are probably the most used —and misused—type of real estate newsletter in the history of real estate newsletters.
Which is also why they are the most misused type of real estate newsletter. In example #1 on our list, we’re going to take a good hard look at some fast and simple ways to personalize your listings updates to create a better experience for prospects. We’ll also show you how to follow up with prospective buyers to rapidly transform your listings newsletters into real world conversations.
As Realtors, we’re taught to see our listing alerts newsletters as a finished product in and of itself, but top producers don’t use listing alerts to sell properties—they use them to build relationships with future clients.
A high-performance listings update newsletter should do three crucial things:
But to get the most out of your listing alerts, they need to be as relevant as possible.
In this stellar real estate newsletter example from Template.Net, listings are grouped by home type to help leads narrow their search, while allowing them to self-segment according to their preferences. It’s also a great example of how you can build trust by educating your prospects since many people likely aren’t aware of the different characteristics and styles of homes.
According to a 2013 study by Experian Marketing Services, personalized emails generate 6X higher transaction rates than generic emails. And if you know how to play your cards right, there’s no reason you can’t achieve similar results with your listings updates.
First, gather as much info on your prospects as possible. And we’re not just talking about names or phone numbers. Do they need a yard for the dog? A pool for the kids? You need to know exactly what kind of property they want and why.
Here’s how to gather actionable data for relevant newsletters:
Whether you’re using Follow Up Boss or another platform, make sure all your lead data is conveniently organized in one place so you can instantly see what messages you, your leads and your agents sent and received, what properties your contacts viewed, and any other important data received after communicating with them.
Once you’ve got the right intel in your arsenal, you’re ready to start turning newsletters into appointments.
Okay, we get it. Personalized emails perform way better than your standard generic real estate newsletter.
But let’s be honest, manually sending highly-personalized listing alerts to every prospect in your database is NOT the best use of your time. For scalable ROI, you’re going to have to automate at least part of this process.
If you’re a Follow Up Boss user and you want to send relevant listings to prospects searching in a certain area, you can quickly select all the leads in said area. Same goes for personalizing your updates based on price range—simply filter and tag leads based on the price ranges of their most recently viewed properties.
You can also filter your contacts to automatically send personalized listing alerts to certain prospects based on their location, price, lead source, leads that came in during the past week—or any other intel you have.
Here’s exactly how to filter contacts in Follow Up Boss to make you always send the right newsletters to the right people.
Interactive content generates almost 2X more conversions than passive content, which is just one of the reasons smart marketers love quizzes.
As mentioned, quizzes aren’t just a great way to engage your prospects—they also give you important insights you can use to build relationships faster.
Here are three examples of real estate quizzes to try in your newsletter:
Structured as a quick ‘This or That’ exercise, Trulia’s quiz is a great example of how an engaging questionnaire can help you instantly analyze what houses your contacts are looking for, so you can deliver listings that match.
Once you’ve got your quiz set up, you can automatically tag incoming leads according to their answers so that you can segment your leads into specific groups based on their and send personalized newsletters based on their home buying preferences.
Anthony Malafronte describes himself as firmly “not a drip email guy.”
He and the other agents at My Tampa Agent send a once per week email newsletter to their past clients and SOI called ‘The Tampa Bay Weekend Bucket List’.
The newsletter gives prospects a quick rundown of eight to ten of the hottest events in the Tampa Bay area, from art festivals to dog shows and everything in between. And the really cool part?
Anthony’s leads actually engage with it.
“If they had something going on in their neighborhood, they would let us know about it and we would put that in there,” says Anthony.
The open rates were never a problem… until COVID-19 hit.
View the full Tampa Bay Weekend ‘Bucket List’ newsletter here.
Anthony and the team made a quick pivot to rebuild the list as a ‘Stay At Home Weekend Bucket List’ as a way to continue to provide value to their community, despite the lockdown.
“Those emails get opened. They know that’s us. We’re taking the time to put it together every week. They know I sell real estate. I don’t feel the need to tell them to use our platform to talk about how good or bad we are, it’s about building community,” says Anthony.
For Anthony, real estate newsletters aren’t about selling—they’re about making sure relationships stay strong.
So, how does Anthony keep the conversation going after The Weekend Bucket List goes out each week?
It’s simple, really. In the example of the Stay At Home Weekend Bucket List, Anthony set up an automated email to go out from the assigned agent to anyone in their database who opened that newsletter. The follow up email simply asked which of the newsletter’s suggestions were their favorite, so that he and the team know what content to continue focusing on.
From there, they send a second email to folks who opened or responded to that email to help start a conversation that feels natural, not forced.
Here’s another example of how Anthony’s team uses their newsletter to start relevant conversations:
“We don’t have to do the minutiae because it’s a process that works,” says Anthony.
He and his team now have more time to focus on making calls, sending cards, planning client appreciation parties and taking the kind of action that builds lasting relationships.
For more on how to transform your email newsletters into real conversations with prospects, check out our latest Labcoat Agents webinar where Anthony shares his complete strategy for nurturing and converting his past clients and sphere.
Point blank: market updates can be a magnet for seller leads—but again, only if you’re making the most out of them.
The challenge with market update newsletters is that almost everyone does them.
For success with this particular type of real estate newsletter, you’re going to need to find ways to stand out. A high-conversion market update goes above and beyond educating readers on the latest shifts and pricing changes.
The goal is to make sure that, after reading or watching your market update, your prospects are eager to stick around for more.
For example, if you’re using a video market update newsletter, you can easily link to other videos (or even text-based content) potential sellers might be interested in, such as tips for selling your home for top dollar.
But if you’re sticking with classic email, we like Matt Leich’s example of a real estate market update newsletter that’s both informative and user-friendly.
Sarasota Realtor Matt Leich personalizes his market updates with a simple table of contents that lets leads instantly find the latest info on the areas they’re most interested in.
Speaking of video updates, if you’re not using videos in your newsletters, you’re missing out in a BIG way.
Research shows that including a video in your email can increase click-through rates by up to 300%.
That means a simple one-minute video message of you or your agents sitting at their desk saying ‘hello’ to your new subscribers will likely get far more responses than a wall of text with the usual “Meet your new agent.”
But the cool thing about video newsletters (and all real estate newsletters for that matter) are that they can actually be used across the customer journey, including after a prospect has already become a customer.
Below is just a short list of the types of videos you can use in your email newsletters to engage your contacts, book more appointments and even collect more reviews after a deal’s been made.
Taylor Hack is an agent on a personalized video newsletter mission.
As of today, the River City based Realtor has sent over 5,000 BombBomb videos to help nurture better relationships, and close more deals in the process. Taylor uses videos to congratulate new customers, send personalized welcome emails, and even deliver “bad news” such as why a home seller should consider reducing the asking price on their home.
Here’s a perfect example of how Taylor uses video to deliver valuable information to sellers and service more listings in less time:
Most agents avoid sending personalized videos because it just feels too daunting. You need to buy recording software, record a video, edit it, compress it to a smaller size, and convert into gmail-friendly format.
(Only to realize you misspelled the customer's name and have to do it all over again. 🤦)
The right database integrations can make it a whole lot easier. At Follow Up Boss, our BombBomb integration lets you instantly record, preview, and add videos straight from your inbox, without ever having to switch in and out of different systems.
You can record market updates for a specific ZIP code and use Action Plans to automatically send your video newsletter to all contacts in that area.
The Follow Up Boss + BombBomb integration makes it easy for Realtors to send personalized video email newsletters in half the time.
As with market updates, open houses are almost never about selling the open house—they’re about extending and engaging your database of leads.
The more people fill-in your contact forms, the more successful the open house was—and same goes for your open house newsletters.
When you create your open house newsletter, there’s only action you want people to perform: register.
Here are some tips to get more leads from your open house newsletters:
Queen of open house lead gen, Monica Campbell didn’t let the coronavirus crisis keep her from engaging with her leads. The Covina-based agent and team leader of Agents Who Really Care sent a real estate newsletter announcing her virtual open house via Facebook Live to show up for prospects at a time when connection mattered more than ever.
Most people think newsletters have to happen on a rigid schedule—and the truth is, they can! There is something very powerful and persuasive about seeing a value-packed newsletter in your inbox at the same time every week or month. But there's also nothing stopping you from strategically sending some of your best-performing newsletters to new leads.
One of the great things about real estate email marketing is that, when you invest in creating high-value newsletter content over time, you can create a huge library of evergreen content you can then use (and re-use) to engage all types of prospects on an ongoing and as needed basis.
Advice listicles are a perfect example of such a newsletter. For example, you can create a newsletter about top schools in a particular area, rounding up ‘best of’ insights from long-time local residents, or offering home renovation tips from the experts.
By sending a new educational real estate newsletter every week or month, you’re providing value over time while giving yourself and your agents plenty of opportunities to engage passive leads. And the best part is, it doesn’t have to eat up a ton of your time.
For example, here’s a simple, minimalist real estate agent newsletter template from Venngage that offers valuable tips in less than 300 words:
Source: Venngage
No matter how pretty, a real estate email newsletter can’t convert leads on its own.
Enter: drip campaigns.
Let’s say you’re about to send a newsletter with information on your local school districts. You can follow up your newsletter with interviews with local teachers, and information about local events relevant to education, offering customized, value-first content to all leads who engaged with that particular newsletter.
In Follow Up Boss, you can then customize any follow up drip sequence using Action Plans to determine what emails will be sent, when they will be sent, and any other actions you want to perform automatically.
You can also integrate your database with Mailchimp or another email marketing platform to automatically add a specific tag to your prospects (for example: ‘school interest’ or ‘plans-to-sell’) to ensure that these contacts are automatically added to the respective email drip.
Here’s a quick glimpse at how it works inside Follow Up Boss.
At the end of the day, sending out real estate newsletters is easy. But sending a real estate newsletter that actually engages your prospects?
Well, that’s a whole lot harder.
The agents and teams that succeed in the real estate game long-term, will be the ones that don’t stop at an email newsletter. Winning brokers and agents take the extra time (even if it’s just an hour each week) to audit and optimize their entire email conversion strategy for best results over time.
Because the fact is, real estate newsletters are still one of the top lead generation and conversion channels for real estate agents, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.
If you need a high-performance sales platform to help you send relevant email newsletters in less time, try Follow Up Boss today.
Are you ready to take the next step?
