How well do you know your audience? One way you can tell is by analyzing your click-through rate and “unsubscribe” numbers from your email list this past month. In November, we had Founder and CEO of Tobe Agency Andrew Hong on our podcast to discuss “Executing an Authentic Digital Marketing Strategy in Luxury Real Estate.” Hong highlights how email is one of the most powerful marketing technologies available to luxury real estate professionals. But with much power comes the ease of damaging your subscriber list if you aren’t carefully giving your audience the content they want.
Digital Marketing with Email
Digital marketing is about being liked, trusted, and remembered via today’s technology. These days, our email inboxes are absolutely bombarded with messaging. And in the age of the “unsubscribe” button, becoming another annoyance in your subscriber’s inbox is likely compelling them to press it.
You need to ensure you’re sending out content that everyone on your luxury real estate email list wants. But what if your audience is itself diverse? Sometimes we think “casting a wide net” is best and sending the same email out to every person on our email list is the best approach. Instead, we should target groups within our broader audience with information catered specifically to each group. For instance, if the scope of your audience ranges multiple locations, segmenting your audience into groups by their town or city, and sending each group local relative content will make that content significantly more valuable than simply blasting everyone with every town’s data stuffed into a single email.
How to Segment Your Email List
For luxury real estate professionals, you can segment your email lists by:
- Location: city, town, neighborhood, etc.
- Clients who’ve purchased before
- Clients who’ve sold before
- Clients who’ve both purchased and sold before
- Prospects who are buyers
- Prospects who are sellers
- Prospects who are both buyers and sellers
- And much more
When sending content to any of your email segments, you have to refine the message you want to send. If you’re getting negative feedback, such as high unsubscribe or low click-through rates, you either need to refine the segmentation of your email list or refine your content for that segment.
Customization is Essential for Luxury Real Estate Marketing
Customization shows more than a clever email to a client; it displays your sophistication as a luxury real estate professional.
When you know your customers, how to use the technology you have at your fingertips, and respect the real connection made in face-to-face interaction, you should strive to deliver that luxury experience through a medium like an email.
Your emails should be seen as useful, helpful resource points because that’s who you are as their real estate professional. One example of this would be sending an email to a client informing them that the value of their home is likely increasing by a certain percentage point in the very near future.
Wholefoods, for example, sends out countless recipes via email to its customers. But the intent isn’t simply to get customers to buy more ingredients from their stores; it’s about painting the Wholefoods brand as helpful and a home-cooking resource.
Simply relying too much on the automation offered in technology may in fact cheapen your customer service experience. Remember, emails should enable us to be more human, not more automatic; we should try to digitally emulate our in-person warmth with every email sent.
In the end, sending the same automated email to everyone in your list without segmenting out audiences will likely worsen your customer experience.
It’s a powerful technology.
Live by the email, die by the email.
You won’t remain neutral in the hearts of your audience when you replace attentiveness with automation.
Luxury real estate content can span from topics like luxury lifestyle tips or relevant trends within your community to sending newsletters about upcoming events at local businesses offering wealth planning seminars or nightlife entertainment. You can talk about price changes in a particular housing market and even leverage the valuable information found in our monthly Luxury Market Report.
Remember, it’s the type of content that genuinely nurtures your luxury audience of home buyers and sellers that you should be sending out to your segmented email lists. Your goal is always to be informative and provide your clients with something of value without being overly transactional about it. As a luxury real estate professional, you are a connector in the local communities belonging to your clients. Connecting clients and homeowners to local businesses, and building community and relationships not only for yourself but also for both those you already do business with — and those you may potentially do business with in the future — can have incredibly beneficial repercussions.
Refine Your Luxury Real Estate Marketing Strategies for Your Target Audience Today
Email and plenty of other marketing technologies make playing the positioning game easy.
Become an Institute member today and get access to some of the top producers in the luxury real estate industry along with ready-to-use marketing tools for strengthening both your digital presence and client relationships.
The Institute also offers a wide range of resources to invest in yourself at any stage in your luxury real estate career, so give yourself the gift of growth today in your career as a luxury real estate professional!