Here it is—the basics of creating a drip email campaign for your real estate business. In this blog post, we’ll cover the definition of “drip email campaign,” get into the specifics of crafting your email messages, and take a quick look at how you can automate these campaigns.  

What is a drip email campaign?

A drip email campaign is a series of emails sent on a consistent schedule—once a month, for example—with the goal of progressing people through your real estate sales funnel. It’s a way of nurturing your relationships with the people in your database. The general idea of a drip campaign is:

  1. By staying in touch on a regular basis, you stay top of mind with your audience. So whenever they’re ready to buy/sell, you will be the first real estate agent they call.
  2. By providing them with valuable, relevant, useful information they actually want to receive, you help your audience AND demonstrate your knowledge and expertise as a real estate agent.
  3. By including clear calls-to-action in each email, you give them plenty of opportunities and nudges to move further down the sales funnel.

The Basics Of Creating A Drip Email Campaign For Your Real Estate Business 

1) Focus on 1 goal per campaign.

When creating a drip email campaign, you should focus on progressing people just one step ahead in your sales funnel.

For real estate agents, your sales funnel probably looks something like this: Suspect > Lead > Prospect > Client > Past Client > Repeat Client

So you might create a series of emails designed to convert “leads” (people who have in some way expressed interest in my business) to “prospects” (people who have expressed interested in buying a home in the next 90 days).

Once you’ve successfully converted someone to a “prospect,” you can remove them from that campaign and start them on a completely separate campaign (most likely a prospect-to-client email campaign).

2) Craft engaging, effective emails.

Once you’ve zeroed in on a single goal, it’s time to write the emails that will take your contacts on their conversion journey.

If you want people to actually open and read your emails, your messages must be relevant, and they must provide value.

Let’s start with relevancy:

Begin by considering where your contacts currently are in the sales funnel/customer journey (e.g. leads that have shown interest in a property on my website, so are possibly thinking about buying/selling in the next 12 months).

Next, think about possible questions and concerns they might have. What are they worried about? What are they excited about? What are they interested in learning about, in regards to real estate? These are the topics you should be addressing in your emails.

By considering their current stage in the customer journey—and by focusing on topics of interest to them that relate to real estate—you will ensure that your drip emails are relevant.

Now let’s discuss value:

Each email needs to either teach them something (“Here’s what you need to know about Austin’s spring housing market”) or provide a helpful resource (“Check out our ‘How Much Home Can I Afford?’ calculator”).

Providing value isn’t just about getting them to read your email. When you share helpful, useful information, you are also demonstrating your knowledge and expertise as a real estate agent. That will get you closer and closer to converting a contact to the next stage of the sales funnel.

3) Include a call-to-action in every email.

The call to action—or CTA—is the desired action you want a contact to take after they read your email. The CTA will differ from one campaign to another, and from one email to another.

Let’s continue with the lead-to-prospect example. In the first email of that drip campaign, you might introduce yourself, share one quick local market statistic, and include a CTA to “Follow me on Facebook for more market updates!” Your second email, however, might try to move them a little further down the customer journey—perhaps a CTA to “Schedule a free home valuation.”

Closely monitor your drip campaigns to see which CTAs are most effective, so you can continue to tweak and strengthen your email marketing.

Automate Your Drip Email Campaigns

With hundreds of contacts in your database—all at different stages of the client journey—you’re going to need some sort of marketing automation tool to manage your email campaigns. A marketing automation platform allows you to:

  • Create email templates with data fields (so your emails will automatically insert the lead’s name, for example)
  • Set a schedule for when each email should send
  • Add new contacts at any time and start them on Day 1 of the drip campaign
  • Track opens, clicks, and other metrics
  • A/B test subject lines, send times, email content, and more

My favorite marketing automation platform, of course, is Realvolve. But there are plenty of options out there, so be sure to do your research and choose the platform that works best for your real estate business.

Learn more: The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing For Real Estate Agents