Elite AgentSELLING + MARKETING PROPERTY

The value of a prospect’s email address

Greg McCutcheon from Real Estate Bookings takes us through the benefits of email marketing and the best ways to provide value to the customer and establish trust.

Email addresses are an incredibly valuable commodity for businesses, particularly in todayโ€™s age of ad blockers.

Your agencyโ€™s digital marketing mix might involve Facebook, Instagram, Google AdWords and content marketing. However, email marketing has proved to be the most cost-effective channel to market your brand and if the right practices are applied email marketing can deliver a high conversion rate.

Unlike other forms of digital marketing, email marketing is incredibly cheap and can achieve huge returns if managed correctly. You can also use email addresses for multiple purposes. For example, you can use an email address to segment your client list, remarket people on social media channels as well as using it to market to them directly.

Using an email address for remarketing

Based on our experience on running remarketing campaigns for our clientโ€™s, between 65-85% of the time,ย a personโ€™s email address will be directly tied to their social media profile. This means that social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram can be used to target a prospect directly by matching their email address to their profile.

Remarketing helps you distribute content to your prospective clients via social channels generating higher engagement on your marketing efforts. Unfortunately, not many real estate agencies are geared up to leverage the benefits of remarketing. ย Remarketing is a great way to gain higher reach, engagement and conversion from your marketing efforts utilising the prospective clientโ€™s email address. This leads onto my next pointโ€ฆ

Segmenting your database for better results

To make the most of the powerful remarketing capabilities that are available in the market, your data must be segmented. ย This means when a person enquires about services provided by your agency, they are recorded into your database and segmented into lists with other prospective clients that have similar characteristics and requirements. An example of a well-segmented database may have homeowners, buyers, tenants, investors and landlords segmented into specific groups.

Protect customer data

Now that we have established the value of a prospective client’sโ€™ email address it is important to ensure your digital asset is protected.

Review any software you have in place to ensure you are protecting any email addresses you capture. If your customer data is shared with third parties, it can have negative consequences for customers and your business.

Provide value and establish trust

To maintain the value of your email database, providing engaging email marketing is key. If someone is subjected to a promotional offer or newsletter they didnโ€™t want, they wonโ€™t read future emails and are likely to unsubscribe. Offer your email recipients genuine value by segmenting audiences and delivering targeted emails containingย relevant and insightful content.ย For example, market reports about specific geographic areas relevant to the recipient.

Customer loyalty is established through positive customer experiences and trust is a key aspect of this. In the case of email marketing, building trust is all about respecting people by only using their email addresses for the reasons outlined when itโ€™s collected.

You should also let the customer call the shots by letting them unsubscribe at any time or personalise the way they receive promotions.

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Greg McCutcheon

Greg McCutcheon is the CEO of Plezzel, with a wealth of digital experience across multiple industry sectors, including Telecommunications, Finance, Banking, Utilities and the Public Sector. Find out more about Plezzel at plezzel.com.au.