The real estate buying cycle isn’t as fast as it used to be. The typical American homeowner now expects to stay in their home for a median of 10 years, the highest tenure rate we’ve seen in years, according to the National Association of Realtors. This makes it crucial for real estate agents to find creative ways to market themselves in between buying cycles.

How do you stay top of mind?

Real estate marketing, launching an email newsletter is a great place to start.

Many real estate agents already use email marketing to promote their services. Sending a newsletter is a cost-effective way to leverage your email contact list and build relationships with clients throughout the year. It’s also an opportunity to share relevant and useful information with your audience. The result? You gain both visibility and credibility. 

Full disclosure: This advice comes from a bunch of email newsletter geeks at rasa.io. Here at rasa.io we spend a lot of time thinking about email newsletters. Our goal? To make better email and help your name be the one that comes to mind when your clients think about real estate.

We do that by making it easy for you to create and send a unique email newsletter customized for every subscriber on your email list. That customization part is done using artificial intelligence. We’re a tiny bit biased, but trust us when we say it’s pretty cool stuff. (Or watch this explainer video and decide for yourself.)

All that to say: We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to email newsletters. Here are our tips for a quality email newsletter. For good measure, we’ve included ways rasa.io can help execute on them.

Don’t make your real estate newsletter all about you.

This seems counterintuitive. After all, it’s your email newsletter. But the content included in successful email newsletters serves the audience first. Think about your clients. What interests do they have? What problems do they face? What information is useful to them?

People will tune out if your email newsletter only provides updates on your company or recent listings. The opposite is true if your subscribers know they can count on your newsletter to deliver articles and videos about engaging topics like personal finance, neighborhood happenings and home improvement. Focus on sharing information that will help your subscribers make a decision, save money or get the most out of life.

How rasa.io can help. The rasa.io platform makes it easy to build an email newsletter that keeps subscribers engaged. Get access to customizable templates, a curation tool that allows you to handpick the types of content you share with your audience, and analytics to track topics your audience is interested in. You can also add your logo and customize the newsletter intro among other personalization features to elevate your brand in a subtle, but effective way.

Share quality third-party content in your real estate newsletter.

An effective way to curb the self-talk? Share good content from other sources. If this also seems counterintuitive, think back on the first point: Successful email newsletters serve your clients first. Sharing quality information reflects well on your brand regardless of whether you created the content or someone else did. Clients see you as an expert source, and a brand they can trust to share the right information at the right time. The process of gathering and sharing content from other sources is called curation. Check out rasa.io’s curation guide for tips on how to start weaving curated content into your marketing.

How rasa.io can help. The rasa.io platform allows users to easily add your company blog as well as third-party blogs and RSS feeds to your content pool. The platform does the curating for you, automatically pulling articles and other content from this content pool each time you create and send a new email newsletter. The result is a well-curated newsletter without the hassle of having to manually copy and paste links to interesting content.

Be consistent with your real estate newsletter.

People like certainty and routine in their lives. The same holds true for email newsletters. One of the first steps to developing an effective newsletter is to determine how frequently you want to send it and stick to that schedule. For example, a weekly newsletter should be sent on the same day at the same time each week. Here at rasa.io we send our newsletter out every Thursday at 8 a.m. Being consistent allows your readers to build your newsletter into their email routine, which boosts open rates and brand awareness. It also demonstrates that you are consistent as a real estate professional and as a brand.

How rasa.io can help. The rasa.io platform allows users to fully automate their newsletter, including when it is sent. Pick a recurring date and time to send your newsletter, as well as the content that will go into it and rasa.io will build it for you, ensuring your newsletter is sent out at the same time, every time.

Personalize your real estate newsletter content.

People value information that is relevant to them. Indeed, personalization—and the technology that enables it—is changing the face of marketing. Think about targeted ads on Facebook or Amazon recommendations.

Personalization is also changing the way we think about the traditional email newsletter. To start: Copywriting matters. Brands with well-read email newsletters often adopt a more conversational tone and have a distinct voice in their writing. They also solicit responses from readers and feature audience-generated content. Tracking audience data is also key. Be sure to track what articles and topics your audience is clicking on and use that data to guide what content is included in future newsletters.

How rasa.io can help. Most email service providers offer audience analytics to help you improve your email newsletter. The rasa.io platform takes that feature a step further with the use of artificial intelligence. Our AI not only tracks what content each person in your newsletter audience is clicking on—it uses that data to automatically personalize the content that person receives in each newsletter that follows. The result is an email newsletter that is unique to each subscriber on your email list.

The takeaway

Email newsletters require a thoughtful and consistent approach in order to build and nurture client relationships over the long-term. Follow these guidelines and you have a powerful tool for staying top of mind as a go-to source for real estate help in your market.Here at rasa.io, we’re working to automate aspects of that process so that you can start sending a relevant email newsletter fast. Sound like something you’d be interested in? Sign up to send 10,000 newsletters a month for free. rasa.io/pricing/