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5 tricks for efficient email-marketing of new developments

5 tricks for efficient email-marketing of new developments

Real Estate is a complicated niche for email marketing as it takes time between the first interaction with the user and final conversion – property purchase. And the main goal for an email marketing specialist is to keep the audience hot and interested by offering the right new developments.

It goes without saying that the basic email marketing techniques should be applied in the first place: keep your contact list clean, test emails before sending, make them responsive for mobile, add call-to-action buttons etc.

We’ll describe a few email practices that work in Real Estate: we tried them and got results on a couple of markets (Kazakhstan and Turkey to name a few) And one more valuable advantage is that any additional help of back-end developers isn’t needed.

Let us start with a few words about key trends for email marketing in 2020:

  • advanced audience segmentation – create target groups to send proper offers to proper home-buyers in a proper time.
  • quality visual content – real images or well-designed renders of new developments.
  • gamification & interactivity in emails – animated gifs and elements which grab users attention and don’t let them unsubscribe or send you into spam.
  • AMP-Powered emails – higher level of interactivity in emails.

So let’s check 5 tricks for efficient email-marketing of new developments.

 

Trick 1. Primary contact list segmentation

 

How to implement: Promo emails as segmentation instrument

  • 3-4 promo emails with featured new developments in the biggest cities. 
  • Check clicks on different new developments and sort the contacts based on this click data – send them to a proper contact list.
  • Add some buttons called by Cities (or other parameters) and sort the contacts based on the click data.
  • Combine these formats into one message or send separate ones.

Our experience:

Our email message below: we had 2 projects in 2 biggest cities in Turkey (Istanbul and Ankara). Each user who clicked on any link on this email was sent to a proper contact list (Istanbul or Ankara) and then they would receive project suggestions based on this information.

And the second part of the email contains city buttons that helped to segment users who were not interested in projects offered above (Headline “Where would you love to live?”) and the example of click map – how users interact with these buttons ⇓

The same solution can be implemented for contact list segmentation by Price / Project Class / Purpose of Buying, etc. It depends on your goals. And this is an example of email used for contact list segmentation by Price range (there are 2 projects in the same city with a different minimal price for apartments:

Results. We got a few groups with users’ emails segmented by cities/price range so further we could send more targeted promo emails for interested clients.

 

Trick 2. Increase Open Rate (OR) by adding price & promo offers to the subject line or/and preheader

One of the rules for a subject line and high Open Rate is “Give your subscribers what they want”. In Real Estate reality the target audience would always like to see a good offer that helps to buy property for the best price (better with a discount or some financial program).

Recent Campaignmonitor research says that the average open rate for Real Estate emails is about 19.9%. 

 

How to implement:

  • add catchy and profitable offer (like good price or some promo discount) into subject line or preheader.
  • follow the subject line structure: firstly put what the user needs, then – what you need. For example: Apartments from … USD per sq.m. Open an email to check the floorplans available.
  • A/B (A/B/C) testing of subject lines is an effective solution to find out what element in a subject line brings better results and higher OR.
  • Nevertheless, don’t overvalue this metric because high OR doesn’t mean high campaign results. 

Our experience:

Not only prices but also location and infrastructure advantages could influence user’s decision to open your email: for example, a new development is located close to good schools or public transport, parks or sports complexes, etc. 

Below there are some good examples of subject lines that worked better (remember the average OR – 19.9%?):

Subject Line

English version

Offer

OR

ЖК Alatau City - от 255 тыс тг/м2 за квартиру с ремонтом в Алматы

Alatau City - price for apartments with fine finishing starts from 255 000 tg/m2

low prices

22,3%

ЖК Отау дарит мебель и технику при покупке квартиры

Otau gives furniture and appliances when buying an apartment

valuable offer, promo from the developer

25%

AND Pastel'deki hemen tapu teslim eviniz son yılların en düşük banka faiz oranıyla sizi bekliyor.

The deed for AND Pastel is just delivered so you can expect the lowest bank rates.

valuable offer

38%

Preheader:
199 000 TL'den başlayan fiyatlarla!

Preheader:
Prices start from 199 000 TL!

low prices

45,7%

How to show the property prices and make them work effectively:

1) in a subject line:

Trick 2

2) or in pre-header:

Trick 2

Note: be different. Create a subject line you’d like to click on by yourself.

 

Trick 3. Personalization in subject line: the user’s name as a part of email subject.

 

How to implement:

Add client’s name in a subject line is a good practice to raise OR of promo emails.

Our experience:

  • We collected 2 contact lists: one with user names, another one – without.
  • Experiment was based on 1 email newsletter.
  • Results were calculated after 2 weeks from the start.

Subject line

English version

OR

%FIRSTNAME|%, обзор какого жилого комплекса вы бы хотели прочесть?

%FIRSTNAME|%, what project review would you like to read next?

29,2%

Обзор какого жилого комплекса вы бы хотели прочесть?

What project review would you like to read next?

13,3%

Note: Despite the good results of this experiment it’s better not to overuse such personalized elements to avoid the decline of loyalty.

 

Trick 4. Show property prices in email to increase Click-to-open rate (COR)

Just to remind: there are a lot of factors that influence COR but we’ll say about more effective for Real Estate.

Users open your real estate email when they are interested in buying property. And they expect to see how much they’d pay for the apartment they like. If there are no legal issues show how much the property costs and you’ll get loyal and interested leads

 

How to implement + our experience:

  • on the main banner. The higher – the better especially when it’s on the first screen of the email. 
  • on foorplans

 

Trick 5. Interactivity – AMP-Powered Emails

This is one of the key points for email marketing for 2020 and next years. The idea is to enable your users to interact with email without following the link to the main website.

 

How to implement:

  • Get a verification approval from Google to include AMP elements inside engaging emails.
  • Use functionality of your ESP or another third-part service to add different interactive elements into promo emails.
  • Send, test, get response and analyze the results.

Our experience is based on these interactive elements:

1. Rollover

  • on images:
  • on buttons:

2. Image carousel & Accordion menu

These interactive elements offer users more freedom to click on elements to see more information without moving to site, look at the images closer, navigate within the email, etc.

 

 

Note: Some email clients (like MS Outlook) doesn’t display such interactive elements so the users will see just a regular static email version. But most email clients now display AMP emails in a proper way.

Results. AMP is a brand new technology that is developing pretty fast. And new interactive opportunities appear regularly. It helps to catch your clients attention, engage them into property searching.

 

A few email design examples that worked better in our Real Estate email practice:

 

 

Closing Words of Advice

Before implementing new features into email marketing for new developments keep these notes in mind:

  • Always test emails first! Use services like Litmus or Email on Acid to see how it looks on different devices and email clients. Or just send it to yourself and your friends to do a prior test.
  • Even simple segmentation is the key to loyal and more interested audience.
  • Firstly write what users need, and then – what you need from users.
  • Put yourself in the shoes of your recipient: if you don’t want to open this email and click on any element there, what do you expect from the homebuyer?
  • Never stop experimenting with subject lines, design, button names, interactive elements, etc. Keep being interesting for your audience and sell the new developments faster and better.
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