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6 Tips for Creating Mobile-Friendly Marketing Emails

by Elizabeth Hines | Dec 5, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing | 0 comments

The majority of your prospective buyers and tenants are reading emails on their phones, so you’d better be sending mobile-friendly marketing emails.

My mornings are probably much like most of yours: As soon as my sleepy fingers can silence my alarm on my cell phone, I open up my email, before my feet even hit the floor. I will check my email again while I’m eating breakfast — and possibly a third time while I’m in line waiting for my coffee.

With the explosion of smartphones, more and more people are taking to their phones over their desktop computers to check email. It’s not hard to understand why; our phones are with us all day long. In fact, 54% of emails are now being read on a mobile device, a 40% increase in the last five years.

When a majority of your audience is reading your marketing emails on their mobile devices, it’s imperative that you’re creating emails that are optimized for mobile viewing.

Here are 6 essential tips for creating mobile-friendly marketing email campaigns.

1) Keep them short and sweet.

When writing copy or email, your content should be to the point. But this is especially true for mobile-friendly emails. Small screen size and increased likelihood the user is multi-tasking are just two reasons why efficiency is key.

Create messages that are easy for the eye to scan. Use bullet points or short paragraphs to keep the reader engaged. Strip out anything that’s not totally necessary, and drive recipients to landing pages for more information.

2) Less is more.

Not all mobile devices include your images. Android users, for example, will find their email images are off by default unless they change their settings. It’s also important to remember that large image files take longer to download. And nothing drives people away like slow load times.

What does this mean for mobile-friendly emails? Your content needs to be front and center, with less reliance on images. This can be tricky for real estate marketing, where the visual is key. But if your content is snappy and intriguing, readers will follow their curiosity and peruse images you link to.

3) Get to the point.

A typical desktop inbox displays about 60 characters of a subject line, while mobile devices show just 25-30 characters. Mobile-friendly emails place the offer or call-to-action at the beginning of the subject line where it’s more likely to be seen.

4) Get responsive.

We’ve all opened an email or webpage on a mobile device and had to squint to read it. Web content designed for desktop screens are barely legible when shrunk down to this size.

Try using a responsive template to ensure that readers are viewing your email the way you intended. Responsive emails use fluid tables and images to make content flow across different screen sizes.

5) Button it up.

I know it’s not just me and my fat fingers: Links are difficult to click on mobile devices! Instead try using buttons for your calls-to-action.

Make sure any CTA buttons are toward the top of your email, so readers know what you want them to do right away. Also, buttons should be large in size and surrounded by plenty of white space so readers don’t accidentally click on something else.

6) Test your work.

After making your emails as mobile-friendly as possible, don’t forget the most important step: testing. Send out test emails to your coworkers that use different devices to ensure that your emails look exactly like you want. With 98.4% of users reading email on Android and iOS, those operating systems should be your main focus.

Don’t lose readers before they’ve had a chance to open, read, and engage with your emails. Use these 6 tips for more mobile-friendly emails to help improve engagement rates, lead conversion, and profitable investor action.

Related posts:

• Paid Digital Advertising: A Beginner’s Guide for Real Estate Marketers

• 4 Steps to Building a Successful DIY Content Marketing Strategy for Real Estate

• This Is the First Thing You Should Do in Real Estate Marketing

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Marketing Automation for Real Estate Marketers is Key to Lead Generation

by Katie Russell | Mar 19, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Social Media | 0 comments

Real estate marketing is an increasingly complex undertaking. Luckily, marketing automation for real estate is here to help you streamline your efforts. 

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Highlights: 

• Marketing automation tools automate the process of personalizing leads’ interactions with your properties 
• Create email workflows, schedule social media posts, and streamline CRM with automation software 

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Real estate marketing is a massive undertaking, which only grows in complexity as real estate buyers demand more and more personalized experiences throughout the buyer’s journey. Enter marketing automation, featuring a range of solutions for custom lead-nurturing content to all prospects in your database. 

The term “marketing automation” describes a variety of tools used to automate the process of personalizing the interactions that your leads have with your properties. Email workflows, social media scheduling tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) are all examples of automated marketing. You can tailor custom email messages based on indicated interests, streamline social media efforts with scheduled posts, evaluate the success of your efforts, and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

HubSpot recently reported that businesses using marketing automation to nurture leads received a whopping 451% increase in qualified leads. The same principles apply to marketing automation for real estate. Used correctly, marketing automation software can deliver real-time, personalized messages to prospective buyers and renters at every step of the lead-generation process. 

With so many tools and insights available, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Here’s our guide to what you need to know about marketing automation for real estate. 

Marketing automation for real estate: Email workflows 

Having a segmented email list — sorted by when a prospect joins the list, what emails they’ve opened, their demographics, etc. — is key to creating effective email workflows. With a quality list, you can ensure you’re sending the most relevant information to your prospects, keeping them invested (and keeping you out of their spam folder).  

The first step is setting up a template; once you do that, you can plug in your content, manage your contact list, and schedule your emails in advance. 

Our favorite tools for email workflows  

1. Customer.io 

This tool lets you send targeted messages to your prospects, crafting them based on how they interact with your property, and making personalized messages simple. You can also keep track of conversions and create customer profiles. Our favorite part? It integrates with your mobile app or website, letting you see data in real time and trigger actions by adding in predefined rules. 

2. Constant Contact 

This powerful tool has some features that are unique — and can take your marketing capabilities beyond the basics. Beyond setting up and managing an automated database, Constant Contact offers Facebook fan promotion, coupons and deals, and event management. 

Social media scheduling 

Keeping your posts on multiple platforms up to date, consistent, and engaging can be a major time drain. Automating your social media marketing efforts lets you plan ahead and schedule updates on some or all of your social media channels, and lets you easily strategize about peak posting times. 

Our favorite tools for social media scheduling: AdRoll 

AdRoll is an extremely effective tool for retargeting prospects through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere on the web. It offers cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities, as well as flexible segmentation, letting you provide customized experiences that dramatically improve your marketing efficiency. It also offers customized budgeting and full control over ad spend. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 

Converting website visitors to leads is always the goal, but it often comes with a back-breaking load of time-consuming labor. The right software lets you move your prospect through the sales funnel automatically, sending emails to educate them on the next steps, and scheduling them for viewings. 

Our favorite tools for CRM 

1. Pardot 

Pardot is an all-inclusive marketing automation suite, but it’s particularly strong for amping up your engagement with CRM integration. It’s a great tool for helping your sales team shorten the sales cycle. And, in addition to CRM integration, it offers email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting. 

2. Marketo 

This cloud-based marketing software lets you drive revenue with lead management and mobile marketing. It not only helps build prospect relationships, but it helps you sustain them as well. Best of all, you can try it out for free until you’re sure it’s right for your company. 

Select one or more of these tools, study them carefully, and get to work. Eventually, marketing automation for real estate will become second nature, save you time, and, most importantly, generate solid leads.  

Related Posts: 

• Our 6 Favorite Marketing Automation Tools for Real Estate Marketers 
• 5 Marketing Automation Ideas for Real Estate 
• Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing 

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The Metrics You Should Be Measuring in Real Estate Marketing (Hint: Not Vanity Metrics)

by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 10, 2017 | Blog, Data & Analytics, Pay-Per-Click and Social Advertising, Real Estate Marketing | 0 comments

Don’t waste your time reporting on vanity metrics, which won’t tell you whether you’ve achieved your ROI.

We all want to see the fruits of our labors. Whether renting a new property or launching a social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: not all metrics are created equal.

So-called vanity metrics are measurements that have no bearing on your bottom line but can give you an inflated sense of success. Generally, they are easy to calculate but are influenced by too many factors — and are too vulnerable to random external events — to be reliable.

Website visits and number of subscribers are two classic examples. A spike in homepage hits may be the result of your marketing efforts, or it may be because of ghost spam. (Or both.) Regardless, more visits do not necessarily correlate to increased revenue — just more visits. In the same vein, having 100,000 email subscribers means nothing if only 1% are opening them. You actually could be losing money in terms of resources allocated if the emails aren’t helping drive sales.

Investment vs. vanity metrics

That’s why it’s crucial to focus on return on investment instead of vanity metrics. You could waste hours reviewing a hundred different analytics that tell you nothing about how revenue was affected by a particular effort. Or, worse, you could use vanity metrics to justify decisions that don’t achieve their ROI.

As a simplified example: say you spend $1,000 on a display ad for a new apartment complex targeting established professionals on a local news website, and your analytics report that 100 people clicked through. This sounds like success! But don’t celebrate just yet. When you dig past the vanity metric, you find an extremely high bounce rate. That means most of those click-throughs left your site immediately, neither engaging with your property nor moving any closer to becoming a tenant. In fact, you find that only one click-through converts. Was it worth paying $1,000 for this one potential tenant? Probably not.

But say you ran another $1,000 display ad, one that targets a younger audience than you think your property fits. Only 20 visitors clicked through, which sounds less successful than the other ad. But when you follow those 20 click-throughs, you find that 5 ended up renting units, meaning the ad pays for itself many times over. You’ve also learned that perhaps a younger audience is more suited than you thought to your property. The ROI proves that the vanity metric was quite misleading in this case.

Metrics that help you make decisions

Lean-startup pioneer Eric Reis, who coined the term vanity metrics, said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measure the things that will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.

While vanity metrics tell you nothing about your bottom line, ROI can help you determine whether it was worth spending your resources in a particular way. This is extremely useful on platforms like blogs and social media, where things are constantly changing. Using ROI as a litmus test, you can keep experimenting and making sure you’re using these tools effectively. Tracking a vanity metric like number of followers, which is likely to build over time regardless, gives you no indication of which experiments were successful and which weren’t.

Your resources are limited, so it’s crucial to evaluate your efforts with meaningful numbers that illustrate their effect on your bottom line. Calculating ROI might take some time — both in the few extra minutes to do the math and the amount of time that needs to pass before all the data is available — but that number will be infinitely more valuable to you than any vanity metric on your Google Analytics report.

Related posts:

• Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing
• How Pay-Per-Click Helped This Property Get 54 Leads
• Learn How Content Marketing Increased Real Estate Sales by 37% in 90 Days

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5 TED Talks for Real Estate Marketers

by Elizabeth Hines | May 29, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Social Media | 0 comments

Need a little inspiration? Check out our top 5 TED talks for real estate marketers.

The popularity of TED Talks seems to have increased recently. A decade ago, the lecture series focused on technology, education, and design wasn’t a household name. Today, the number of views totals well over 1 billion.

TED Talks can be inspiring and full of useful information from thought leaders in all aspects of the field. Here are 5 that we think real estate marketers should watch right now.

5 TED Talks for real estate marketers

• Ben Miller: The real estate deal that could change the future of everything

Co-founder of Fundrise — an investment platform for creating a simple, low-cost way for anyone to access real estate — Ben Miller discusses the role technology will play in how people invest in real estate in the future. He offers his perspective, gleaned from 15 years in real estate and finance, in which he has acquired, developed, and financed more than $500 million in property.

• Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

You may have heard the phrase “The Golden Circle,” coined by Simon Sinek. It starts with the question “why?” and examines the emotional core of what makes employees and customers buy into a company. In his extremely popular TED Talk, Sinek discusses the connection between The Golden Circle, marketing, and consumer behavior — a must-watch for all content marketing professionals.

• Seth Godin: How to get your ideas to spread

Prolific author and marketing guru Seth Godin offers his insights about creating remarkable stories. He posits the idea that when it comes to getting attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. Ultimately, he advocates for a tailored, specific message spread passionately to those who want to listen.

• Gunnar Branson: Moore’s law of real estate

Gunnar Branson is the CEO of the National Association of Real Estate Investment Managers. His TED Talk applies Moore’s Law (which predicts that technology will get exponentially smaller as it advances) to real estate. He predicts that the physical space we live, work, and play in will transform in front of our eyes, and discusses how those changes will impact the real estate market.

• Kio Stark: Why you should talk to strangers

This one is good for the soul! Author, scholar, and speaker Kio Stark says, “When you talk to strangers, you’re making beautiful interruptions into the expected narrative of your daily life — and theirs.” Her talk explores the benefits of pushing through discomfort with strangers, and embracing what can become profound moments of genuine connection. It’s an inspiring listen for real estate marketers, in a field that’s all about connecting and telling a story.

What TED Talks for real estate do you recommend?

Related posts:

• 10 Social Media Statistics for Real Estate Marketers 2018
• 4 Real Estate Marketing Trends 2018
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Social Media Trends for 2018 Real Estate Marketers Need to Know

by Elizabeth Hines | Jan 23, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Social Media | 0 comments

Augmented reality, streaming video, and local experiences are 3 social media trends to try in 2018.

If there’s one thing real estate marketers can be sure of in the coming year, it’s that social media will continue to dominate the marketing landscape. Social media presents tremendous opportunity, particularly if you’re aware of upcoming trends.

“While the job of marketing and selling a house once required a lot of legwork on behalf of the agent or seller, many of the tasks associated with listing and promoting are much easier thanks to social media,” says Realty Times blogger Megan Wild.

Here are 3 social media trends for 2018 that you need to know about.

3 social media trends for 2018

1) Augmented reality

Just a few years ago, this seemed like purely Sci-Fi territory. But what was once wild fantasy is quickly making its way into real life.

Last year, for example, Apple announced that the iPhone 8 and iPhone X would incorporate a new chip that enables users them to provide users with augmented reality experiences. Google Glass may have been a flop, but now Facebook, Google, and Snap are all also throwing their hats into the augmented reality ring.

So what does this mean for real estate marketing? This technology is still in its early stages, and the possibilities will continue to develop as capabilities grow. But already sellers are using augmented reality and virtual reality to display potential color themes, floor plans, and possible renovations.

2) Streaming video

As video capabilities on smartphones and other devices continue to skyrocket, services like Instagram Stories, Facebook Live, and Snapchat are changing the way people interact with the world. According to Livestream.com, “about 80% of consumers would rather watch a live video from a brand than read a blog, and 82% would prefer live video to written social media updates.”

If you haven’t already started to make use of these platforms, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon. What was once a cool idea for reaching your audience is now the expectation for brands.

You can optimize your videos in all kinds of ways, like location tags, titles, and targeted descriptions. “Buyers no longer have to spend their days traveling and visiting different open houses,” says Wild. And “instead of spending their time preparing hosting open houses to advertise their new properties, agents can use high-definition video to provide a detailed tour.”

3) Local and personal experiences

Every new technological boom comes with a price. Social media marketing is incredibly popular for a reason, but increased volume means an increased presence of brand-written content, which in turn leads to brand fatigue among buyers. As a result, local and personal experiences are moving into the forefront. Online consumers want local, interpersonal interactions.

While it may seem like more work, this is great news and presents a lot of opportunities for real estate marketers. Real estate is local by its very nature. The more content you share on social media that focuses on place (e.g. local restaurants, entertainment, community events), the more of a personal connection you forge with your audience. Ultimately, that connection is what social media is all about.

What social media trends are you trying in 2018?

Related posts:

• 4 Steps to Building a Successful DIY Content Marketing Strategy for Real Estate

• How Will Facebook Marketplace Housing Affect Real Estate Marketers?

• 6 Social Media Don’ts for Property Management Companies