Whether you’re a real estate agent or a real estate attorney, email marketing should play a prominent role in your overall marketing strategy.

Let’s take a look at some of the steps you’ll need to take to build a foolproof email marketing strategy for your real estate business or real estate law firm.

Build a landing page (if you don’t already have a website)

In digital marketing, a landing page is a single page on a website created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. Typically, users come to such landing pages from ads on search engines or social media. As a real estate agent or attorney, your goal is to provide people who find your website with free, valuable, and relevant content in exchange for their email address.

Email addresses are currency: people are providing you with their contact information so you can market to them, so best practice is to provide high-quality content that will educate, entertain and inform your audience.

You can keep your landing page super simple — tools like Leadpages and ConvertKit make it easy to do if you don’t already have your own website. Include a header and footer with your contact information, logo, brokerage logo (if applicable) appropriate disclaimers, and a privacy policy that states how you plan to use the information.

Be sure that your email collection box is prominent so that people are more likely to take action. Although some believe that an email collection pop-up is too invasive, they can also be very effective.

Collect email addresses for your list

Once you have a landing page set up, you’re ready to start collecting email addresses to build your database. The good news is, most real estate agents and real estate attorneys already have lists in place and it’s just a matter of uploading them to your email service provider.

There are a lot of ways that you can grow your real estate email marketing list, from networking in-person to digital advertising. Start by importing your existing contact list,  and then try different tactics like attending networking events and collect business cards, creating a lead magnet on your website, and give presentations where you can put out sign up sheets that ask people for their email addresses.

When you build your list correctly, email marketing for real estate agents and real estate law firms can increase your business and provide a huge ROI.

Use audience segmentation

Using audience segmentation in real estate email marketing is a modern tactic to use when you want to target specific groups of people with more personalized content.

Digital marketing has made advertising an increasingly personalized experience. Although this raises some privacy concerns, most individuals have grown accustomed to having content that suits their needs and interests.

Let’s say you are a Chicago real estate agent serving the city and the suburbs. You might segment your list by location so that you can send relevant local content to each set of subscribers. If you work in the North Shore, you might want to be sending your clients information about taking the el or where to go out to dinner in the South Loop.

Which brings us to our next topic…

Choose the types of emails you’d like to send

When you have everything set up behind the scenes, think through what kind of email marketing you’d like to do and what you’d like to talk to your subscribers about.

For example, real estate agents might use drip campaigns to walk subscribers through the steps in the process of buying or selling a home, or targeted campaigns to keep local residents informed about the open houses, new listings and recent homes closed in their neighborhood.

Real estate attorneys might set up follow-up campaigns after networking events to warm up agent leads, or referral campaigns to keep in touch with agents after a successful deal.

Use email automation when applicable

If there is one thing busy real estate agents and real estate attorneys don’t have a lot of, it’s time to spend writing emails and keeping track of follow ups. Email automation can take a lot of the weight off of your shoulders, so you can set up a series of emails to deploy after certain events, such as someone filling out a contact form on your landing page, signing up to receive email updates, or abandoning a property search on your website.

Here are a few of the email automation tools that we like:

• Mailchimp – one of the most accessible email marketing platforms for . small to medium-sized businesses. Integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, WordPress and Google Analytics.
• SendinBlue – a user-friendly email design and distribution platform for those looking to add extra functionality to emails and detailed analytics. A little technical know-how is helpful here.
• GetResponse – a scalable email marketing tool that offers 500 pre-designed templates.
• ActiveCampaign – a sophisticated email marketing platform for content-rich email designs with a drag-and-drop interface and A/B testing tool.

No matter what side of the business you are on, real estate email marketing always comes back to one key principle: sending valuable, high-quality content to your list to keep them engaged and be sure that you are top of mind when it comes time to buy, sell, or give a referral.