Email marketing has become a crucial tool for real estate agents to reach out to potential clients and keep in touch with existing ones in today’s digital age.

A drip email campaign is one of the most effective email marketing strategies for real estate agents. Still, it is often neglected, taken for granted, and severely underused.

This is a series of emails sent automatically to a targeted audience at specific intervals.

A drip campaign’s job is to stay in mind with potential clients, provide valuable information, and create curiosity and engagement that can help convert them into high-quality leads and, ultimately, customers.

Table of Contents:

I. Introduction

II. Step 1: Define Your Target Audience And Create Segments

III. Step 2: Set Your Goals

IV. Step 3: Plan Your Content

V. Step 4: Choose Your Email Marketing Platform

VI. Step 5: Create Your Email Templates

VII. Step 6: Test and Refine Your Campaign

VIII. Conclusion

A drip email campaign is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to build relationships with your audience, provide valuable information about the real estate industry and promote your properties basically on auto-pilot.

With a well-planned drip campaign, you can better qualify leads in your pipeline, increase brand awareness and authority, and ultimately close more deals.

A drip email campaign can last from two days to 365 days, and the choice is yours.

Usually, a good practice for a start is between 30 to 60 days.

Please note a good CRM will allow you to set rules and automation, which will automatically qualify your leads based on actions they took, i.e., opened an email, click on the link, visited your website, etc., and then notify you or your sales team to take further action, i.e., give them a call to book an appointment.

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Create Segment:

The first step in creating a successful drip email campaign is to define your target audience, and you want to create segments.

Who are you trying to reach? Are you targeting first-time homebuyers, empty nesters, or investors?

What is their budget?

Are they interested in a specific area?

Are they interested in apartments, houses, or villas?

After pinpointing your target audience and dividing them into segments based on their interests, you can create customized messaging and content catering to their unique needs and interests.

Let’s say you’re a real estate agent specializing in luxury homes in a specific area.

The individuals you want to target are probably high-net-worth and interested in buying a luxury home in that particular region.

Your goal for your drip email campaign would be to send them more similar properties in that area, more info about the area, and valuable information about buying and selling process of a luxury home.

Step 2: Set Your Goals And Automate Your Work

Setting clear goals is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign, including a drip email campaign for real estate.

With clear goals, you will be able to measure the success of your campaign and make adjustments to improve its effectiveness.

It would be best to track its effectiveness – the last thing you want is to send out content your potential clients want to avoid reading.

Before you start creating your drip campaign, take some time to define what you hope to achieve with it.

Are you looking to generate new leads, increase brand awareness, promote a specific property or service, or do something else?

For example, your goal is to develop deeper relationships and authority so you can create loyalty and increase conversions.

In that case, your campaign should focus on educating your prospects about buying and selling process so you can create value in their mind.

Suppose your goal is to promote a specific property. In that case, you might set tracking to see who viewed that property and then create automatic follow-back emails and SMS messages to those leads asking them if they needed more info about that property.

Also, at the same time, the system will send notifications to you and your sales team so they can call and book appointments and/or send more info about that specific property.

By setting clear goals, you can also ensure that your drip email campaign is aligned with your overall marketing strategy and that the CRM system will do the hard work for you.

This saves your precious time, so you can only engage with the potential buyers interested in buying one of your properties; high-quality leads.

This helps you stay focused and make better decisions about the content, timing, and frequency of your emails and on which leads you should spend your time or not.

Additionally, setting clear goals can help you identify areas where you need to improve your campaign.

Overall, setting clear goals is a critical step in creating a successful drip email campaign for real estate.

It will help you filter out the time-wasters, turn leads into high-quality leads, and save you a ton of time by only talking to hot leads.

Step 3: Plan Your Content

Once you know your target audience and set your goals, it’s time to plan your content. Your drip email campaign should include a mix of informative and promotional content which is tailored to your target audience.

I only suggest two types of content because they are dead simple:

a) promotional-specific properties which are sent to specific segments of your database (as mentioned above)

(example of specific property email drip campaign)

b) educational – tips for first-time homebuyers, buying and selling process, information about the local real estate market, you might include informative articles about the benefits of living in that specific area, tips for buying a luxury home for your ‘luxury’ segment, etc

(example of education email drip campaign)

It’s also important to plan the timing and frequency of your emails.

Avoid overwhelming your audience with too many emails. Still, you don’t want to leave too much time between emails, or your audience might forget about you.

It would be best if you were your potential clients with valuable info in front of your eyes.

Avoid JUST promotional, generalistic emails sending all property types to everyone in the database – that’s what everyone does, and it lowers the possibility for your emails to be open.

If they get opened, you’ll have a chance to sell your property.

You want to be that person for which your clients can’t wait to read the next email.

Refrain from wasting their time with generalistic stuff; be specific and detailed.

This will give them the impression that you know them better than they know themselves. They will respect that and thus be more open to answering your calls and booking an appointment.

As a good rule of thumb is to send 2-3 emails per week, two promotional and one educational.

This will keep your audience engaged without overwhelming them with too much information at a time.

Pro Tip: this sounds like a lot of work, but in truth, your team needs to set this up only once.

For example: when someone signs up for more info about a property, that person should be added to automation which will send automatic emails for about 4-6 weeks.

Emails should be a mix of more information about a specific property and educational content.

So all you have to do, your marketing team, is to send ONE educational email to the whole database and maybe one to two emails to specific segments.

This kind of automation can be duplicated with one click in good CRMs. All that needs to be done in the new automation is to change some emails for other specific properties.

The best part?

Your marketing team should do all this tech stuff, NOT you. You should be attending booked calls and selling.

Step 4: Choose Your Email Marketing Platform

There are too many email marketing platforms available that can help you create and send your drip email campaign. 

When choosing an email marketing platform, look for one that is easy to use for you.

 It should be used as your CRM (customer relationship management) too.

A good CRM should have these features:

• Marketing automation
• Email automation
• SMS automation(unless you are using some different product)
• Segmentation
• Pipeline(optional)
• Lead scoring
• Link tracking
• Event tracking
• Send newsletter
• Site tracking (tracks actions your potential clients from your database do on your website, then creates automation, reports, sends notifications, etc.)

These features are essential for saving time and turning leads and higher quality leads into HIGH-quality, hot leads

Remember: your CRM – the technology, should do all that heavy lifting for you; you should only engage with hot leads served to you on a platter by the CRM.

This task is almost impossible for a human to do, and you’d have to hire min three more people to do the job.

Without CRM like that, you are literally missing out on sales, doing a heck of a lot of work, leads falling through the cracks, and spending way too much money and time on time-wasters.

(Apologies for the spoiler alert.)

Step 5: Create Your Email Templates

Once you have chosen your email marketing platform, it’s time to create your email templates.

Your email templates should be consistent with your brand and include your logo, colors, and fonts.

In addition, make sure your templates are mobile-responsive so they look good on all devices, and include a clear call to action that encourages your audience to take action, such as contacting you for more information or scheduling a showing.

Use your brand’s colors and fonts for your email templates and prominently include your logo.

Don’t complicate; keep things simple.

Your team needs to be able to quickly create a new campaign using templates that are simple to edit.

Step 6: Test and Refine Your Campaign

Before launching your drip email campaign, it’s important to test your emails and make sure they look good and function properly.

To make sure everything is working as it should and test emails to yourself and colleagues.

Once your campaign is up and running, use analytics to track your progress and adjust as needed.

For example, look for opportunities to improve your content and timing to increase engagement and conversions.

In conclusion, creating a successful real estate drip email campaign requires careful planning and execution.

By defining your target audience and segments, setting clear goals, planning your content, choosing the right email marketing platform, creating effective email templates, and testing and refining your campaign, you can increase your chances of turning leads into high-quality leads and closing more deals.

The CRM and technology need to do the heavy lifting for you and qualify leads so you can eliminate time wasters and focus on hot, ready-to-buy leads.

80% of the work is done at the start to set things up – the system. From there, it takes minimal effort to maintain the system.

Spend time to set things correctly, and they will save you time and effort in the future.

Do you need help choosing the best CRM for you and your team? Do you need help with setting up drip campaigns?

Then click on the button below, and let’s chat to see if we can help you save time and get more high-quality leads and more deals from people already in your pipeline.