Staying top of mind with your past clients and sphere of influence … which ways work best, and which actually hurt your “brand”?

There are right and wrong ways of doing top-of-mind through marketing for real estate agents. This is one of the things that I find that most real estate agents don’t really understand. In their perception, they think, “If I can send anything out to that homeowner that might have some value then that is going to keep me top-of-mind.” There is some truth to that, but when you are talking about top-of-mind, this is what actually happens when you send out real estate postcards or other real estate mailers. Every time you touch someone, it’s either going to add value in their mind about you, it’s going to be completely neutral (not going to add value or take it away) or it’s going to be negative. You never want to risk a neutral or negative touch when sending real estate mailers, either via email or physical mail, because those do no good. You want to make it where every touch is adding value all the time. You can tell if it’s adding value based on the responses that those in your sphere of influence give you back.

For example, I have a loan officer who is touching me all the time with a drip email campaign. And they are the most ridiculous emails. They are so ridiculous that I’ve actually created a folder on my computer that I put them in just to create my own marketing research. It’s called “Ridiculous Email Campaigns.” He sends out things like this, “How to clean pillows.” I don’t care about cleaning pillows. The last time I cleaned my pillow was…. Never. That email comes out as negative or neutral, at best. It adds no value for me. Another one of his emails says, “Now that’s it’s springtime it’s time to start planting flowers.” I don’t need an email series to tell me that. So what happens is that these things create negative responses. Now when I see that email come in, the first thing is I do is delete it. I don’t even open it because it’s a nuisance.

How to properly touch clients through email drip campaigns to increase the effectiveness of your real estate marketing strategies and in turn get more real estate leads

Think about that. This is a very good loan officer using a professionally-written series of emails (because I’m sure he bought the system for that). And what it’s doing to me is it’s making a negative association in my mind about his business. You can’t afford to turn away your people with negative touches. What I’ve found in doing touches, especially like an email campaign, the touches that you need to do are those that add value to someone so that they appreciate it so that it contributes value to their perception of you, which helps with real estate branding.

What we do in terms of offering real estate marketing products with our Agent Dominator clients is two types of top-of-mind touches. One is an email series and one is our ‘My Smart Resource’ app. Both of them keep you top-of-mind all the time. The app is probably in front of them 80 to 90 times a year. Then we have a set of emails that are just email touches that add value and encourage seller leads to contact the real estate agent.

Let me talk about the email series because, as a real estate marketing tool, it kind of synopsizes what I’m trying to explain. You don’t want to push out something that you think you want the homeowner to know. You want to find something that the homeowner wants to know and then give it to them in your real estate mailers. We have an email series that touches them, get this… every week.  That’s 52 touches a year. Most people would say, “Oh my gosh, you are going to burn your list if you are touching them every week.” Not ours.

How we keep your sphere of influence interested in real estate mailers to create an effective touch every time

One of our real estate agent clients is actually taking our emails and sending them out on his own. If he misses a week of sending them out (and he has 350 – 500 people on his list), he gets people contacting him saying, “I didn’t get that email, would you please resend it?” He’s working on real estate branding, solidifying his sphere of influence, and successfully touching potential seller leads on his list through these real estate mailers that we send in digital format.

We have another real estate agent client who just started with us. He’s had two or three emails go out (his list is small, around 70 people), but by the second or third email, he had already gotten three responses saying, “Jaime, I love this, please keep sending them.” When you get that type of response, that’s adding value.

Building a positive relationship with clients in your sphere of influence with these real estate marketing ideas

What we find that makes a difference is what I’ll call ‘human interest stories’. If you are my age or older you’ll remember Paul Harvey and “The Rest of the Story.” If you are of the younger generation and don’t recognize that name, just think about when you watch a news piece and see a human interest story. It’s something fun, something uplifting. Something that makes you think, “Ahhh, that’s so nice.” Our digital real estate mailers are something that leaves you feeling good. That’s what these emails are all about.

Prospects welcome the emails. What happens is they get them, they open them, they read them and they attribute all of this value back to you and it raises your value as a realtor, which in terms helps with real estate branding. That’s how you do a proper touch.

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