CRE email marketing best practices

With all the email marketing tools available today, you no longer have an excuse to simply send generic mass emails to everyone on your list.

From segmenting email lists, to creating effective emails, to measuring email success, these are the best practices you should follow for your property promotions:

Segmenting email lists

To ensure your emails are targeted and effective, segment your lists by brokers, tenants, buyers, and investors, then again by their own unique property interests. You could have as many email lists as you have categories of contacts.  It’s also helpful to organize email lists by sub-categories. For example:

• Retail tenants
• Tenants for retail spaces 5,000-10,000 sq ft.
• Tenants for retail spaces 11,000-15,000 sq ft.
• Multifamily buyers/investors
• Buyers/investors for multifamily properties valued at $1-$5mil
• Buyers/investors for multifamily properties valued at $5-$10mil

You can even encourage your audiences to self-segment by sending them emails that ask what they’re most interested in. Then, you can tailor your promotions accordingly.

Creating effective emails

Be sure you’re sending emails that will be interesting to the right people at the right times.

With Buildout, you can send your audiences emails that promote a single property you think they will be interested in, or you can send emails that feature up to 20 listings that fit their specifications.

Our customers like using our multi-property email tool to efficiently share multiple listings with potential buyers, investors, or tenants. Sending multi-property emails saves your team time and allows your audiences to browse a tailored selection of properties that are relevant to them, improving the ROI of every email you send.

Read our how-to blog for a step-by-step guide to creating multi-property and single-property email blasts.

Measuring email success

According to our 2017 DNA of #CRE report, 17 percent of marketers don’t know their average email open rate, and 22 percent don’t know their average click-through rate (CTR). But tracking and analyzing these numbers is crucial to making sure your property marketing is as successful as it can be.

According to DNA of #CRE respondents who did track their analytics, these are the benchmarks your brokerage should use:

• Average email open rate: 21 to 30 percent
• Average CTR: 1 to 10 percent (varies based on brokerage size and clientele)

Check out our blog on benchmarking email metrics to learn more about what you can do to improve those metrics if you’re falling short of industry standards.

You can also download the Front Street case study to learn how one firm used the time they saved with Buildout to more strategically target email recipients.