Before we dive in, I’ll start with three questions:
- Do you send regular newsletters to your buyers and/or sellers?
- Do you send regular newsletters to your Real Estate contacts?
- If YES to the above questions, how much time do you spend? If NO to the above questions, why not?
THE NEWSLETTER
Now to start things off, let’s make sure we are all on the same page when we say the word “Newsletter”. A newsletter is not a weekly installment of your current listings or solicitations to hire you. These types of e-mail marketing strategies do have their place and can produce sales, but are not a “Newsletter”. Rather, a newsletter is something that provides valuable, relevant, and interesting information to the recipient, as is confirmed in this blog post by Justin Premick of AWeber, a leading email marketing company. An effective Real Estate newsletter should definitely include your listings, but also definitely not be limited to them. Try to imagine yourself on the receiving end, and ask, “Would I open and read this e-mail if it arrived in my inbox?”
THE DILEMMA
But herein lies a common dilemma; you want to provide professional and effective newsletters, but lack the time, resources, or natural writing creativity to do it. The Real Estate industry in particular presents uncommon challenges when it comes to time allowances; every minute is crucial and must be used in an effective way that will produce results. Do you really have time to research and write useful articles, design a professional layout, add your listings, and send it off every week? Every month?
THE SOLUTION
What if you could create professional-looking, effective newsletters that featured your listings and interesting content, in a matter of 15 minutes? This is what SimplyConnect, a new email newsletter program from EmailFlyerAds.com, provides to Real Estate professionals. The content is provided for you, and ranges from tips to news to videos to fun, all from a variety of trusted industry sources. This allows you to tailor your newsletter to a number of different target audiences, from buyers, to sellers, to Real Estate pros and more.
The SimplyConnect system is unlike any other newsletter platform because it provides all of the components of a successful newsletter, and costs as little as $9.99. By poking at a few letters on your keyboard and clicking a few times on your mouse, you can create and send a custom newsletter that people will actually read.
I do send out newsletters to my contacts every month, but no more than one a month. No one from my list has unsubscribed and the content is pre-written by a company. I have been doing it for about 3 years and have gotten a couple of good deals. Getting new people on the list is a challenge. As an agent I have been slammed by flyers about new listings and special deals etc. I went to my board to opt out of thier list for sale program and spent the better part of a month unsubscribing to all of the junk reminesent of the "book" days of real estate when we dropped our new listings off at different offices.
I do believe in the newsletters but I think people must opt in and not have to figure out how to opt out with all the disclaimers that it could take, days weeks or months to be removed from lists that they did not subscribe to. The information must be of a quality that people want to muse through.
I use to send over 500 emails a week but I wonder how many really opened them. Probably about 30....I prefer a more personal type email to those 120 POI than the 2000.
But I will look into this. Thanks
Candis, I wish you the best. We send out seasonal and holiday ecards to our clients. As for leads we have a drip email campaign which seems to work well.
looks like a great program. thanks for the tip
your friend in Charlottesville!
Willl definately have to check it out as I was in the market looking for this exact product.
Looks good -- will check it out -- keeping it simple is the key
Hi Candis - Thanks for the heads up on the newsletters. WHen I get some free time I will check it out.
Thanks for information. I have an e-postcard template that I send out from my Advanced Access site but this sounds really good and I need a change....Marketing should always change and update!!!
Hey Candis, we have a lot of great marketing tools for agents as well as newsletters like this one. It looks great and informative. Please let me know if you want me to help promote some of your marketing tools to my agents. Talk to you soon.
Hi Candis - I currently use "Constant Contact" to create e-mail newsletters and promotions. I have been happy with their service, but I will check out SimplyConnect to see how they compare.
Thanks for the tip and advice!
Jim - Glad you've found something that works well for you. You bring up some good points about "email inundation"... that definitely won't get anyone far. The key is to send interesting content on a consistent basis, and also make it easy to unsubscribe if one so chooses. Best of luck to you.
Hi Nancy - Sounds like you are making a real effort in your marketing, and that's great! A newsletter with good "meat" will really encourage people to open it, and even look forward to it. The nice thing about SimplyConnect is that your listings are featured in the side column and the content is written for you! Really easy and fast...
Tim and Pam - Sounds like you've got a good thing going. Best wishes!
Hi Donald - Yes, let me know what you think. As far as I know, Constant Contact doesn't provide an article library for users to choose from, which really makes the whole process so easy. They are great though, so I'd be interested to hear back from you once you've compared the two.
Hi Charles, Billie, Scott, Jane, and of course Bill -
Thanks for stopping by! I think you'll really like it, and let me know what you think!
Scott - That's very nice of you to offer! Check it out and see if you think it would be useful... if so, by all means, pass it on :)
Just a quick note to say I've added a link to a sample newsletter at the bottom of the post so you can see what they look like!
Candis - I've been doing my own really simple email updates (I'm going stop short of calling it a newsletter) to my SOI. But because I am constantly updating my SOI, it's not been a hassle for me because I really target on the folks in my SOI who I regularly stay in contact with and who have actually referred people to me. But now, I'm getting to the point where I think I want to take it to the next level. I'm looking at a lot of different types of email newletters. This one seems simply enough. I'm going to do a little more research though before I make a decision.