Investment Property Management Arsenal San Antonio Texas

Email marketing, when done correctly, can serve as an effective tool for communicating with existing tenants and clients, connecting with new tenants and clients, and promoting your properties and business. An effective email campaign also makes interacting with a large number of people easier for property managers and requires minimal effort and expense. Below are twelve tips for better real estate management and to maximize the benefits of email marketing efforts.

The effectiveness of the message content created for your email campaign audience is only as good as the list with which you’re working. Building a list that accurately targets your audience is critical to the campaign’s outcome.

You may need to create multiple lists and email campaigns to accurately target specific groups intermingled in the original list. When creating your email subscriber signup form, consider how you may want to target and segment those subscribers by asking relevant questions to help execute a precise targeting strategy.

Some examples of useful email lists may include current tenants, new tenants, potential tenants, owners, and business or professional contacts. You’ll probably need to compose separate messages, each tailored to provide information relevant to specific audiences.

What makes a healthy list? Many elements combine to develop a healthy email list, the two most important being engagement and churn.

Engagement is critical for ensuring your email campaign earns the intended results. If recipients never open your email, it’s not getting read, which means the opportunity could be wasted.

Additionally, sending emails that end up in spam folders or sent to non-existent addresses can negatively impact your sender reputation, which hurts the reputation of your IP, which, in turn, lowers your deliverability even further.

Email churn refers to the number of recipients who unsubscribe from your list, report your emails as spam, whose addresses result in a hard bounce, or who simply don’t open your emails. These recipients are either not engaging or they’ve actively disengaged with your emails. The average churn rate is 83 percent, which actually means that 17 percent of your emails are not making it into your target audience’s inboxes.

While some churn is inevitable, utilizing email list best practices will help regenerate your list and decelerate the churn to a manageable rate. Now that you understand what makes a healthy list, it’s important to keep it that way.

Once you’ve spent time growing an organic email list filled with quality contacts, you’ll want to manage it correctly to keep it healthy. As discussed earlier, disengaged subscribers have a strong, negative impact on your list’s deliverability. Soft or hard bounces, negative spam reports, and lack of engagement are all factors that affect your key performance indicators (KPIs), so list management should be an integral part of your email marketing strategy or real estate management, for that matter.

“List hygiene,” a buzzword in email marketing circles, involves clearing out inactive (cold) email subscribers from your future email marketing campaigns and keeping your remaining list warm with healthy email sending habits. Performing email hygiene regularly will ensure that your emails only go to the people who definitely want your messages, which will also help to avoid your emails being marked as spam. Keeping your list clean is vital to the success of your marketing efforts.

For best results, consider performing a list cleaning a few times per year or when you notice a spike in bounce rates, whichever comes first.

Here’s some of what you’ll do when you clean your list:

• Remove duplicate addresses.
• Remove or fix addresses containing typos.
• Update or remove invalid addresses.
• Delete emails from hard or soft bounces.

Don’t be concerned if you have a high number of invalid email addresses—people move, change jobs, and get new email addresses all the time and often forget to update their opt-ins. It’s important to remove invalid email addresses from your list as the higher your bounce rate, the more it hurts your sender reputation and the less likely your mail is to get delivered.

After you’ve purged your list of all the incorrect and invalid emails, you should be left with a stronger list of contacts. There’s still more work for you to re-engage or eliminate old contacts as some of those contacts are undoubtedly unengaged. An unengaged contact is an email address that is still valid and subscribed but the subscriber does not open or read your emails.

Even if they haven’t actually clicked the “unsubscribe” button, they’re not connected to you and they’re probably deleting your emails anyway. You have two options to deal with your unengaged subscribers. You can purge their address since they’re not helping either your sender reputation or your return-on-investment (ROI) or you can try to re-engage them.

Re-engagement campaigns help re-ignite your lagging subscribers’ interest in your brand, so it’s worth a try before deleting a list member. Re-engagement emails should only be sent to list members who haven’t opened or clicked during the prior 6 months to a year. Send them a targeted email, perhaps with a message detailing updated benefits of subscribing, and ask them to re-subscribe. If they do, that’s great! But if they do not re-subscribe, go ahead and remove them from your list. By doing so you’ll see better results from a more engaged list.

While the goal is to keep subscribers on your list, make it easy for them to unsubscribe or they’ll find another way to do it that may not be good for your IP reputation. Subscribers who can’t easily unsubscribe will just mark you as spam instead.

With unengaged users off the list, you can concentrate on delivering targeted, relevant content to those remaining on your list. Make sure to comply with email marketing laws such as those described in the CAN-SPAM Act.  Email marketing laws include requirements for providing recipients with an easy way to opt-out of their subscription, requirements for providing the address of the business represented as the message sender, obligation to provide truthful information regarding the message sender and content subject and more.

Most people don’t have the time to read lengthy messages, or they simply lack interest in reading them. You have a very short time span to capture and you’re your reader’s attention, so compose your message accordingly to maximize the opportunity for your recipients read and digest it.

Key to capturing recipients’ attention before they even open your email is composing a subject line that effectively piques the reader’s interest and compels them to open the email to read more. If your subject line fails to persuade recipients to open the email, they will skip over it and your message is left unread.

Learn to write attention-grabbing email subject lines that entice recipients to click on the email to read more. Reward them for opening the email by keeping the content brief, direct, and relevant.

Email campaigns should not always be about promotions and sales. Opening two or maybe three promotion-stuffed emails is a good way to get subscribers to stop opening your emails altogether. Send messages containing information that is relevant and useful to your subscribers and your email campaigns will flourish. Customer-centric messages give subscribers what they want. Keep the promotional content at a minimum and send pertinent information in the majority of your email campaign messages. That way, subscribers will keep opening all your emails including the promotional stuff.

Use your email campaigns to help educate subscribers or to direct them to the pros who can. Sharing your industry expertise with current and potential tenants and clients provides the, with something of value which goes a long way toward gaining their trust and deciding to do business with you.

Strike a balance between the desire to stay in contact with your email list often enough to ensure they haven’t forgotten about you, but not so often that they want to forget about you. Flooding inboxes is the fastest way to get subscribers to unsubscribe, ignore your emails, or format them to go directly to the “junk” file—not the positive interaction you had intended. However, sending email updates to subscribers too infrequently may have your audience wondering if you’re too busy to communicate or if you’ve gone out of business.

The best option is to schedule your newsletter emails to go out on a regularly scheduled day of each month or every three months or at whatever interval you choose. This way, your audience knows when to expect your next email and can look forward to what you have to say. Another good idea is to time your mailouts to optimize their relevance among the recipients. For instance, a Thursday or Friday afternoon before a community-wide mixer scheduled for apartment residents and guests.

Always keep in mind, the goal is to engage and build trusting relationships with your audience. It should never be about simply getting your brand content in front of as many eyes as possible. Make an impact on your audience by creating consistently engaging and informative content for a truly effective lead-building email campaign.

Audience trust is built and reinforced when subscribers feel they can rely on you for timely, relevant information that responds to their needs and answers their questions. This is the quality content they’re most likely to share with others on social media and through word-of-mouth.

No matter how awesome your list and email campaign may be, the only way to monitor a campaign’s effectiveness is to track your data. Tracking email campaign stats shows you exactly what’s working and when it’s working, while also identifying areas where improvements can be made.

Armed with tracking data, you can focus your efforts on making improvements where needed and sticking with what’s working to create more effective email campaigns. Make the most of your email marketing efforts and give your subscribers the high- quality, relevant information that’s valuable to them and enjoy growing success with your real estate management campaigns.