The Orchard is a premium real estate development company best known for its lavish, high-society real estate projects that transform underused space into plush residential pads. Established in the ‘70s, the company has grown to be one of the largest and most influential real estate entities in the U.S., developing projects in 19 different locations across the country, as well as in London, England and Hong Kong.
In recent years, the company has branched out from its traditional real estate development to become a full-service digital agency, designing websites, landing pages, CRMs, and e-mail marketing campaigns for its real estate customers.
Whether you’re a property manager looking to reach potential new homeowners or a real estate agent looking to attract more clients, The Orchard’s email marketing suite—which includes Reach, Constant Contact, and VerticalResponse—can help.
Why Build a List of Email Addresses?
You might be wondering why you would want to build a list of email addresses after you’ve already started a marketing campaign. The answer is simple: Just in case. If you’re out of the blue marketing to potential real estate customers, you might not have any leads, and if you do, you could end up with some addresses that are no longer valid. Better to have some contact information that you can hand over to a customer service representative than to risk losing a lead because their email address changed or they opted out of receiving marketing emails.
You can also use your email list to follow up with anyone who misses out on the initial pitch. Even if you’ve already sent them a follow-up email, they might have forgotten about it. Having their contact information on hand can help you jog their memory and get them to see the value in what you have to offer. With a little bit of effort, you can turn even missed opportunities into paying customers.
How Can Email Marketing Help Grow My Business?
In today’s world, people prefer to get everything done online. Those who prefer to remain offline will often browse websites, visit social media accounts, and enter search queries online to learn about products and services. In other words, potential customers are easily accessible online, meaning you have an opportunity to engage with them where they are.
Email marketing allows you to keep up with your online customers when they’re offline, whether they’re in the middle of cooking dinner, taking a walk, or shopping. With every email you send, you have the chance to educate or entertain your subscribers, connect with them on a personal level, and encourage them to take action.
Action could be as simple as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter. However, if you’re looking for more frequent action, you might want to consider paying for a lead generation program that will get you multiple leads at a time. Having leads that are already pre-qualified and interested in what you have to offer makes it simpler to get them to take the next step and make a purchase or join your list.
Three Tips for Building a Better Email List
If you’re serious about attracting real estate customers to your website and opt-in list, here are some tips from experts to help get you started.
1. Get Inspired
It’s essential to find the right audience for your email marketing campaign. In order to do that, you’ll want to think about what would make a potential customer interested in your products or services. One of the best places to get inspired is Pinterest, where you can curate a digital “wish list” of items you could buy if you had the money. Pinterest is a huge social media network that allows users to “pin” the products they love, making them easy to access whenever you need inspiration for a new marketing campaign.
If you find that a lot of your prospects are already on Pinterest, consider hosting a Pinterest Party where you can engage with potential customers through pinning your products. At the end of the day, Pinterest is a place where people come to discover and learn about products, and you can use that to your advantage when communicating with potential customers.
2. Tailor Your Approach
When you develop an email marketing strategy, you need to consider the platforms your audience uses and how you’ll reach them. Do you have a Facebook page? A Twitter account? A YouTube channel? Each social media outlet has its own algorithms, meaning the content you post to one channel may not appear on another. To ensure your content is reaching the right audience, create content that is relevant to multiple platforms. For example, if you have a YouTube channel about digital marketing, you might want to create a series of videos on the specific tools and tactics used by digital marketers.
If someone watches your video on YouTube and then clicks over to your website to read more, you’ll be able to show them the same tactics used in the video. This content will engage them, making them more likely to subscribe to your newsletter or purchase your product or service. If they’re already interested in what you have to offer, it’s easier for you to get them to convert. As a general rule of thumb, make sure that every piece of content you create has something to offer to a potential customer.
3. Measure & Analyze
Measuring and analyzing the success of your email marketing campaign is essential if you’re going to improve your approach and get the best results. To start, simply look at the percentage of people who opened your email, whether it was spam filtered, or went through a free newsletter unsubscribe, and take a guess at what happened. Did you hit your target audience? Did you cause any excitement?
An expert open rate of between 5% and 15% is considered excellent. Anything below that and you might as well not have bothered. Remember: people are more likely to respond to marketing emails if they’re interested in what you’ve got to say. If you can’t get that interest, you might as well not bother. The key to effective email marketing is to keep people interested, and that means creating content that is both useful and relevant to your audience.
The better your open rate, the better your results. Don’t expect perfect opens for every email you send out. As a general rule of thumb, you can send out a few emails per week and get great results.
To get started, download a free trial of Benchmarker, an email marketing tool that will give you all the metrics you need, including email open rates, unsubscribe rates, and much more. With a paid subscription, you’ll also get automated suggestions for new email campaigns based on what you input and your previous behavior. You can’t go wrong with a tool like Benchmarker.