Real Estate Marketing Automation in 2019
We’re all busy. Real estate agents, certainly, have a lot to keep up with, including work with current clients as well as maintaining relationships with prospects. As your real estate business grows, it’s important to streamline important but time-consuming or tedious tasks wherever possible.
Automation helps you do this. The purpose of marketing automation is to make marketing on multiple channels easier by eliminating repetitive tasks that suck your time and efficiency but that can be easily handled by a digital platform or system. Automation can help you nurture relationships with your clients, maintain your business, and reach prospects, as well. On average, over 50% of companies are using marketing automation. If marketing automation isn’t in your communications plans for 2019, it’s about time to make your life a whole lot easier!
There are many ways to automate your marketing tactics, but we’re going to talk about two buckets here: email and direct mail marketing, because when used in tandem, the two channels work exceptionally well together in a multichannel marketing strategy. We’ll touch on each segment and detail how you can automate each one to save time and make your real estate business more efficient.
Email marketing requires a LOT of upkeep. Besides regular content distribution, there’s maintaining your email list, which requires consistently expanding the amount of recipients that receive your emails based on leads gathered through social media, a lead form on your website, search engine marketing, and so on. But despite these barriers, email is a great way to regularly keep in contact with both real estate prospects and current clients in your real estate business. How can you automate email marketing to make your life easier?
As mentioned above, email list maintenance requires a lot of work, including deleting irrelevant emails and segmenting your lists so they can be personalized to unique target audiences. To help, use a platform like Zapier, which allows users to easily integrate with other platforms to automatically update their lists when new emails are acquired. Integration capabilities include the ability to sync web forms and your email list so that new addresses gathered via your web form are automatically inputted into your list, as well as the ability to add appointment attendees to your email list and even automatically add business cards you’ve gathered through meetings to your list by integrating with Full Contact Card Reader. When linked, Zapier and Full Contact Card Reader allow you to take a picture of the card you want to add to your list to have the contact added in seconds. In addition to email list maintenance, Zapier easily syncs with multiple useful apps for real estate agents.
There are also a multitude of ways to automate the delivery and distribution of your email marketing. On the delivery side, you can set up emails to be sent when certain events are triggered, such as someone signing up for your newsletter, through email platforms like MailChimp, which has a variety of preset automation types. And, on the distribution side, you can use MailChimp to automatically send out new blogs from your website to your email list via an automated email message.
Another way to automate email is to set up autoresponders, a sequence of emails over a set period of time. As an example of how autoresponders work, you could email someone initially after they’ve shared their address with you to welcome them, then send them another email a week later that shares content from your blog or a special offer, and so on.
You can learn all about email automation via MailChimp here - we think that MailChimp is an effective, simple platform that allows you to get the most out of email.
Direct Mail Marketing
Similar to email, managing the delivery and distribution of a direct mail campaign requires a lot of maintenance. Take the example of real estate farming postcards -- getting hundreds of postcards sent out to one or more neighborhoods would require several steps, including designing the cards, creating the card copy, printing the cards, labeling them yourself, adding postage, and sending them out at a post office.
Thankfully, direct mail automation is available. QuantumDigital offers the ability to consistently farm any neighborhood with real estate direct mail postcards through the platform AutoMail. AutoMail automates all steps of a typical direct mail campaign, from design to distribution. On the design side, the platform offers several pre-set designs to choose from -- just pick your favorite! -- and on the distribution side, it allows you to schedule the frequency of your mailers up to an entire year. Next, all you have to do is choose from any of the available targeted list options, or simply upload your own list. Once you check out, your real estate farming postcards are handled for the year.
AutoMail also provides multichannel integration capabilities, with each card featuring a unique online market report that provides the recipient with recent neighborhood sales data and a home value estimate. Whenever the prospect views the page or fills out the contact form, you’ll instantly receive an email letting you know that you have a new prospect awaiting your follow-up. If you’re interested in trying out AutoMail, don’t hesitate to get started today!
The Bottom Line
Marketing automation is becoming more and more of a necessity as technology continues to expand. While it can be challenging at first to adopt a new process or system, the results are well worth it in the overall amount of time saved as well as the increased engagement that comes from consistently keeping in touch with current and potential customers. Here’s to your 2019 automated marketing efforts!
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