Value of an Email Address Has Gone Up 1000%
Email addresses are an incredibly valuable commodity for businesses, particularly in today’s age of ad blockers. Your agency’s digital marketing mix might involve Facebook, Instagram, Google AdWords and content marketing. However, email marketing has proved to be the most cost-effective channel to market your brand and if the right practices are applied email marketing can deliver a high conversion rate.
Unlike other forms of digital marketing, email marketing is incredibly cheap and can achieve huge returns if managed correctly. You can also use email addresses for multiple purposes. For example, you can use an email address to segment your client list, remarket people on social media channels as well as using it to directly market to them.
Using an Email Address for Remarketing
Based on our experience on running remarketing campaigns for our client’s, between 65-85% of the time, a person’s email address will be directly tied to their social media profile. This means that social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram can be used to target a prospect directly by matching their email address to their profile. The more segmented your data is, the more valuable this becomes as you will now have the ability to send super relevant and targeted content to people who have previously shown interest in your agency.
Remarketing is a great way to gain higher reach, engagement and conversion from your marketing efforts. Unfortunately not many Real Estate agencies are geared up to leverage the benefits of remarketing. The current industry average email open rate is approximately 20% which is very low. Remarketing can enable your business to distribute content directly to your prospective clients via google and social channels generating higher engagement and better conversion rate. The key to digital marketing is to make use of your database of email addresses to deliver the right message, at the right time on the right channel. A remarketing strategy can help increase the value of your email database by increasing reach, frequency and conversion rate. This leads onto our next point…
Segmenting Your Database for Better Results
To make the most of the powerful remarketing capabilities that are available in the market, your data must be segmented. This means when someone enquires about your services or one of your properties, they’re are segmented into lists with other prospects that have similar characteristics and requirements. example of a well segmented database may have homeowners, buyers, tenants, investors and landlords segmented into specific groups.
The Consumer Assigns Value to Their Email Address
Consumers today are well aware of the fact their likes, clicks and swipes online are tracked in some way. Many of these people are quite open to receiving a more personalised, relevant and efficient experience online. At the same time, they are understandably wary about sharing personal data and being barraged with advertising.
In a world where consumers hold the power within the transaction, it’s essential to respect them during your email marketing efforts by offering content they are genuinely interested in. Benefiting from the value of an email address is all about being flexible and catering to customer needs.
Consent and Transparency is Essential
Everyone is aware to some extent what it’s like to be swamped with unwanted commercial emails. The real estate industry on average has a poor email marketing track record, with an average email opening rate of 20.84 per cent and a click rate of only 1.91 per cent.
The lack of interest in opening emails is largely due to irrelevancy and fatigue from the sheer number of them. If you ask for an email address and obtain one, ensure you get consent and are transparent about what you’re using their email address for.
The best approach is to allow people to opt in based on clear terms. For example, “Sign up to our newsletter to receive the latest news and statistics about the Melbourne property market”. A customer is more likely to read an email they have opted to receive. Unsolicited emails on the other hand, are considered spam.
Provide Value and Establish Trust
Customer loyalty is established through positive customer experiences and trust is a key aspect of this. In the case of email marketing, building trust is all about respecting people by only using their email addresses for the reasons outlined when it’s collected.
If someone is subjected to a promotional offer or newsletter they didn’t want, they won’t read future emails and are likely to unsubscribe. Offer your email recipients genuine value by segmenting audiences and delivering targeted emails containing relevant and insightful content. For example, market reports about specific geographic areas relevant to the recipient.
You should also let the customer call the shots by letting them unsubscribe at any time or personalise the way they receive promotions.
Protect Customer Data
Now that we have established the value of a prospective clients’ email address it is important to ensure your digital asset is protected. Review any software you have in place to ensure you are protecting any email addresses you capture. If your customer data is shared with third parties, it can have negative consequences for customers and your business.
