Benchmarking CRE brokerage email and blogging metrics

In our first ever DNA of #CRE Marketer survey, we found that many CRE marketers aren’t keeping track of useful website and email metrics:

• Twenty-four percent of marketers didn’t know if there was any change in their brokerage website’s web traffic since they began blogging.
• Seventeen percent of marketers did not know their average email open rate, and 22 percent did not know their average click through rate.

If you fall into the category of marketers or brokers not assessing your website and email analytics, you should begin taking steps to keep track of marketing KPIs. To maximize ROI of your marketing tactics, your firm should assess the performance of those metrics regularly and compare then with industry averages to better understand where you can and should make improvements.

Common industry marketing benchmarks

As you track your website and email analytics, you can use these numbers to assess the performance of your own email marketing compared to other firms in the country:

• Average email open rate: 21 to 30 percent
• Average click-through-rate (CTR): 1 to 10 percent

Your open rate is the percentage of people on your email list who view your campaigns. Your CTR is the percentage of those viewers who clicked a link or call-to-action (CTA) after opening the emails.

Additionally, 55 percent of DNA of #CRE Marketer survey respondents noted a positive change in web traffic since they started their blogs. Only 21 percent did not. This indicates that across the industry, firms that are leveraging blogs are seeing more website visitors, and in turn, new potential business.

How to make improvements to your marketing metrics

Depending on how your website and email analytics compare with industry averages, you may need to make some changes to your subject lines, CTAs and blogging SEO keywords. If your metrics are falling below average, consider these tips to improve your email marketing and blog performance to meet industry benchmarks:

• Strong open rates typically indicate particularly compelling subject lines. If your open rates fall below average, test different subject lines to see what gets the most attention to your email marketing. Or, revisit your email segmentation to make sure you’re sending your emails only to the people in your network who will care the most.
• Above-average CTRs are evidence of engaging CTAs and well-targeted email lists. To improve your CTRs, test different email templates and placements of CTAs, as well as CTA button text, like “click here” vs. “learn more” vs. “tour now.” You can also test different times of the day or week to see if there’s a time your audience is most captivated by your content.
• A jump in website traffic is often the result of strong SEO, furthered by leveraging blog keywords. When you write blogs, select a searchable keyword to use multiple times throughout the body of your post. These keywords should be relevant to your firm’s niche. You can learn more about selecting and using the right keywords in your brokerage’s blog posts here.

To learn more about CRE industry marketing best practices and trends including how firms like yours are using social media, digital advertising, traditional advertising and more, download the DNA of #CRE Marketer Report.