Key takeaways:
· Irrelevant, poorly timed emails damage your conversions and alienate prospects
· Properly segmented email campaigns improve the effectiveness of your messaging
· Investing in better targeted, more relevant emails can double your conversion rates
The number of legitimate emails the average person receives each day has remained static since 2015, according to research from The Radicati Group; the number of spam or otherwise unwelcome emails, however, has grown exponentially.
For estate and lettings agencies, contributing to this deluge of irrelevant emails can be extremely costly: not only does it lead many prospects to unsubscribe, it actively damages your agency’s credibility and wastes your precious marketing spend.
In this article, we’re going to explore how your agency can avoid spamming prospects and do email marketing better. But first, let’s consider why so many agencies end up pumping out excessive, irrelevant emails.
Three reasons agencies get email marketing wrong
1. Lack of time
The number one reason for poor email targeting simple: agents lack time.
When you’re working on ten different things, it’s easy to let sloppy email tactics slip through the cracks. And because most agencies still see some positive outcomes from their email campaigns, they assume everything is going great.
2. Assuming more is better
Without the time to carefully consider how and when to email prospects, agencies often default to an assumption that increasing volume will increase sales.
This is a complicated problem, because increasing the volume of your emailing will increase your sales – but not your conversion rates. Moreover, it will be doing hidden damage you don’t realise and can’t see until it’s too late.
3. Limited technology
The ability to tailor and target emails is specialised: not every agency has the means to do it effectively.
Rather than invest in tech or outsource expertise, many agencies just bite the bullet and accept their limitations. But this is a mistake: the extra effort involved in developing a sophisticated email strategy pays extraordinary dividends.
Ultimately, this combination of a lack of time, a lack of will, and a lack of capacity means many agencies are missing out on a huge number of sales. Fortunately, it’s not too late: with a few simple tips, you can stop sending spam and start converting.
How to avoid spamming prospects with irrelevant emails
1. Always segment your audience
Segmenting your audience sounds complex, but all it means is dividing up your email subscribers into relevant sub-groups. This could be done in any number of ways: through age, occupation, gender or net-worth.
By splitting your audience up this way, you immediately enable more relevant and compelling messaging; if you’re trying to talk to everybody, you end up talking to nobody in particular.
Some analysts have found that properly segmented email campaigns perform over twice as well as non-segmented campaigns.
2. Personalise your messaging
As an extension of segmentation, you should ensure your emails are meaningfully personalised. At the simplest level, that means including your prospect’s name.
But you should do everything you can to extend this further and make your messages as personally relevant as possible, such as sending specific messages on key dates – we discuss this in detail here.
3. Automate your send times
Irrelevance is not just about content – it’s also about timing. Too many agencies entirely overlook the role timing plays in their email campaigns, and this means even when they do have something relevant to offer a prospect, it has less impact and may even be actively harmful.
Whether it’s mistimed recontact emails or failed attempts to send personally relevant messages, the impact can be shocking: you can read a thorough exploration of the psychological reasons for this here.
Conclusion | Getting rid of the rubbish with Active Agent
Nobody likes receiving junk emails, and no agency should be happy sending them, either.
Active Agent’s CXM system was built to remove exactly these sorts of wasteful, damaging practises, by enabling agencies to create better targeted email campaigns in less time, giving you true control over who is sent what message when.
If you’d like to see how we do it, click here to book your free demo today.