Like everyone else on Earth, I hate being on the receiving end of an email drip campaign.   Spammy, repetitive, annoying, often just barely better than a lottery-winner-notification from Nigeria, the real estate agent’s drip campaign can be the lifeblood of his business, or the death of it.

After dozens of changes and experiments with my own campaigns, I offer the 7 most important things I’ve learned about drip campaigns for real estate:

  1. People hate HTML rich emails.  If your drip emails have lots of colorful HTML and banners, they might suck.  If you want people to read your emails, then keep them simple with no banners and pictures of your happy home selling face.  Nothing says “SPAM” like a colorful email that looks like it came from Best Buy.  People are more likely to respond to auto-responders if they don’t know it’s an auto-responder.
  2. Long emails suck.  You don’t read long emails from anyone, not even people you like.  So why would anyone want to take 5 minutes to read a email from a real estate agent?  I’ve found that the most effective emails are about 3-4 sentences.  If a prospect can read it in 15 seconds, he might actually take 5 more seconds to reply.  (I sometimes use emails with no caps in the sentences. That looks authentic, though a little amateur.)
  3. Give people a reason to respond, or your email sucks.  If your email doesn’t ask a question or give the reader a good reason to reply, will they?  End your email with something like, “When are you thinking of moving?”  Or, “Let me know what you think of this house.”
  4. Emailing too frequently might suck.  If you email me every week, I’m eventually going to mark you as ‘junk’ in my Google account.   Don’t email people every week if they aren’t moving for a year.  If a buyer has no time frame for moving, then once a month is plenty, maybe even too often.  Early on in my career I had everyone getting a weekly email with properties.  The vast majority of those people opted out of my emails within a few months.
  5. Irrelevant emails suck.  You can’t just have one email campaign, because you don’t just have one type of client. Buyers should get buyer emails, sellers should get seller emails.  Prospects with no set time frame should get long term, spread out emails that just remind them you are there.  You want a custom email campaign for each types of lead, prospect, and client you are working with.  And by the way, those are 3 very different types of people I just mentioned.  A lead is not a prospect, which is not a client, yet.
  6. If you don’t send properties, your emails might suck.  I say “might” because not every drip email needs to show properties. But if you have a buyer, chances are they would rather see properties of interest than your pretty face.  Sellers want to see homes sold or listed in their neighborhood.  If you know anything about the recipient, sending properties of interest is your best bet.
  7. And lastly, for the love of all things email, don’t forward jokes or trite little stories about your cat.  I am actually on one Texas agent’s list and she forwards jokes to her entire sphere of influence (including me) about once a week.  Let me assure you, her emails suck.