#385 – Mail-Right Show: Real Estate Agents Supercharge Your Email Marketing & Lead Generation in 2023

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Real Estate Agents Supercharge Your Email Marketing & Lead Generation in 2023

Are you a real estate agent looking to supercharge your email marketing and lead generation in 2023? Then this podcast/video is for you! Learn how to use modern strategies like automated follow-ups, personalized content, and segmented lists to increase your email open rates.

Discover the most effective ways of targeting potential buyers with an online presence so that they can find you easily. Discover why focusing on customer relationships is key to success in today’s digital world.

#1 – Don’t use your normal email address/domain

#2 – Subject lines

#3 – Email warm-up tools

#4 – Positioning your brand and nurturing relationships (having a real niche will make your email marketing more effective)

#5 – Increasing sales and conversions. (divide your emails into lists)

#6 – Email scraping tools combined with paid social media retargeting campaigns

Show Recourses links

Warmup Inbox – https://www.warmupinbox.com/

MailShake – https://mailshake.com/

Lemwarm – https://www.lemwarm.com/

Alex Berman – https://alexberman.gumroad.com/

LeadPost – https://leadpost.com/

GetEmail – https://getemail.io/

This Week Show’s Transcript

[00:00:11.770] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the Mail Right, show. This week we will discuss everything around email marketing, lead generation, and everything you need to know to make your email campaigns and getting prospects and leads more effectively. I’ve got myself and my great co-host with me, Robert Newman, and we will do a deep dive into this subject. I’m sure you’re going to find it really interesting. So, Robert, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and new viewers?

[00:00:48.750] – Robert Newman

I’d love to. So I’m the founder of Inbound Ram, Inc., Which is just an abbreviation for inbound Real Estate Marketing. We build websites and do real estate SEO campaigns.

[00:01:05.510] – Jonathan Denwood

Thank you, Robert. I’m the founder of Mailwright.com, and we build great WordPress websites and provide a great CRM-based solution that gets you leads a great competitor to real geeks and similar system platforms. So, Robert, I thought we’d talk about email marketing in 2023. It’s still recognized as one of the most effective ways of marketing yourself, generally and in real estate as well. But I know. No. Well, SEO? There are a lot of general fallacies and misinformation about digital marketing in the real estate industry. But one of the areas that cause a lot of confusion is email marketing and how to do it effectively. First of all, would you agree with that broad sub-notches of what I’ve said?

[00:02:14.570] – Robert Newman

Yeah, I absolutely do. I think email has been a strong way to market for almost 20 or 30 years. What is a steady, consistent, go-to fallback email as the world gets more cluttered in terms of all the marketing options, AI and video, and all this different stuff? Is it we’ve mentioned it in the last number of shows, and it’s great that we’re dedicating an entire episode to it.

[00:02:48.550] – Jonathan Denwood

The number one I’ve got is a shortlist here. I think the number one you got to be aware of is that, obviously, Google, through Gmail, dominates this area. You don’t want your email to end up in the promotional folder because when’s the last time, folks, that you checked? Are you aware that your Gmail or your Google Workspace has a promotional folder where emails that are marked as marketing and promotional can end up? It’s not quite like your junk folder, but it’s a similar graveyard where your email will never be read. So the main thing is there’s no point in sending out email campaigns if they really end up in people’s junk mail or promotional folder. Would you agree with that, Robert?

[00:03:59.710] – Robert Newman

Not entirely, but I feel what you’re saying. I do check my promotional folder, especially the ones that come from an individual. I don’t usually click them out of promotional into my standard email inbox unless it’s like a really exceptional circumstance. But for people that I have made an impression on me, that I follow, I have moved quite a few of Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Ricky Carruth, and a handful of other people out of my promotional folder into my standard inbox. So I pay attention to what’s going there and I occasionally move stuff around. But if something gets buried in a large sequence of emails and I haven’t opened up my email in a bit, I would agree with you then, which does happen a lot. I’d say 80% of the time that’s likely that could happen.

[00:04:48.990] – Jonathan Denwood

So let’s start off with number one on my list. Don’t use your normal email address and domain for sending out bulk email campaigns. And the way I kind of work this out in my own mind, Robert, is there’s one to one email where you’re sending a one to one message to individual. There’s what I call micro email campaigns, and I’m utilizing language that I made up, but what I mean by that is not one to one, but we’re not sending out to a large list, we’re sending out to what I call a micro list, which could be anything between 200 and maybe 500 email. And then there’s bulk mass email marketing, that can be anything over 500, and that might be thousands. And what you don’t want to do is to get your main domain, like mine is Jonathan@mailwright.com. I don’t want to get that email address and that domain blacklisted if I can avoid it, because I need that to be really clean and be able to send email to people and have a reasonable confidence that it’s going to end up in their inbox. So what do you reckon about, first of all, the three ways that I’ve subdivided email marketing one to one micro list mass, and what I’ve said about not utilizing your domain to send out hundreds of email on your normal domain.

[00:06:47.570] – Robert Newman

Well, I send out about half a million on my normal domain over the span of about a quarter to a list. And it has occasionally impacted me in the way where if Robert inbound RM is what I’m using as that email, so it’s on my prime domain under my own name. And occasionally I’ve noticed that my email goes into people’s promotional folders if they’re not expecting my email. So I agree with what you just said, saying that if you do this X can happen. I can absolutely attest to the fact that it does indeed happen that way. I don’t know whether it’s positive or negative that when I’m sending out a warm email that somebody click like, and I tell them, check your promotional folder, and then they move it over to their inbox. But I do know that that happens quite a bit, and I don’t have an overwhelmingly large case of people telling me that it hits their promotional folder. So perhaps it’s just maybe the first time I send it to an email address or something. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

[00:07:54.060] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I think it really depends where you got the email from and if you got double option on your list, people have opted in. And I think what I said is people buying lists or doing cold email, your kind of email hygiene habits, because you have been a marketer for a very long time and you know what you’re doing, the risk of you getting your main domain blacklisted on a blacklist where you’re treated as a spammer are greatly reduced because you know what you’re doing well.

[00:08:41.720] – Robert Newman

Yeah, which is the following for those listening to this show, here’s what my rule is with everybody, my clients, myself, everybody that’s listening. I don’t send out low value emails. Everything that I send out is connected to either a high value blog post with an extremely small intro and I don’t sell anything via email. I am always very conscious of the fact that it could for some people be a cold door knock and nobody likes a cold door knock where they’re just getting sold something. So instead, what I always attempt to do for myself and my clients is be helpful. And it, generally speaking, works. I have not been blacklisted in the way that John’s talking about, none of my clients been blacklisted in the way that you’re talking about. So generally speaking. But there’s a differentiation between that and saying I got a million names of people that I think might be interested in my stuff and I want to send an email to everybody at that point. A lot of the advice that you’re giving is excellent advice and I’d say go to a bulk email provider and send out those emails because a lot of times you send out a million emails, you get the 200,000 people or more likely the 17 to 20,000 people that are truly interested in what you have to say.

[00:09:53.790] – Robert Newman

You get rid of the other 990,000, whatever the number is, and you have a good list.

[00:10:01.410] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, and Roberts really put it really very clearly. That’s what I was talking about. If you’re going to buy a large niche which probably only might affect a very small element of the listeners of this podcast that are on brokerage level a large city, a region if you’re individual agent, what we’re going to discuss is probably the one one and especially the micro email when you’re sending out to smaller list size. But you got to be aware if you’re buying a larger list and your email your best not to send it from your normal domain because you don’t want that to have any problems with it. The other thing is if you’re utilizing your Gmail, you shouldn’t utilize your Gmail to send micro and definitely it’s the wrong service, they won’t allow you. But there is a gray area where you can send so many email per day. I personally wouldn’t utilize your Gmail, I would just keep your normal email and your Gmail for that kind of one to one communication, really, but that’s my stance on it. Number two, the elephant that will mark up your email as being spam and junkie is utilizing certain words in your subject lines, emails.

[00:11:54.630] – Jonathan Denwood

The services know what normal phrasing that spammers utilize in their email, and if there’s certain patterns of wording in your subject line, that will flag it up and probably get it in the junk folder and not in the inbox of your targets. What’s your thoughts about that? Robert um.

[00:12:30.750] – Robert Newman

I’m gonna leave that one alone.

[00:12:32.680] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, yeah. Now another one is email warm up tools. And what do I mean by this? Let’s say you’ve got a Pacific campaign. You’re running through Google or Facebook, and it’s going to a Pacific landing page. And it’s for a Pacific area. It’s targeted at a Pacific Niche market or Pacific Geo area. And they come into the landing page and it might be a new property that’s up for sale. And to get more information, they got to give you their name and email. Or it could be some other lead magnet that you are giving away to get this information from the prospect. That might depending on how much you put in the budget, that is probably what I would probably call a micro or lead to a micro email campaign. So you got this list and you want to market to those people, so I wouldn’t utilize them. You need to warm up that list. And there are certain services like Milkshake warm up inbox. And what they do is they set up a network of Gmail campaigns and they break up if you import a list into it, let’s say 250 to 500 email, and then they will send out the email, but Google won’t know that you’re utilizing it will be treated like a one to one email.

[00:14:44.170] – Jonathan Denwood

And they give you analytics as well. But it’s pretty guaranteed that those email will go to people’s inboxes, and you can utilize that. So it’s a micro focus email campaign aimed at a niche which should result from your campaign to get people to a specific landing page. And you do this to make sure that it does go into people’s inboxes your outreach after they’re given their details to get whatever lead magnet or information that you’re offering. Does that make sense?

[00:15:28.240] – Robert Newman

Robert yeah, but I’d like to put my own spin on this anyway, so it’s been a long time since I’ve heard of Warm Up Inbox stuff, and I think the reason that it’s been so long since it’s come up is that Warm Up Inbox stuff like, I’m on Warm Up Inbox. For those listening to the show, none of you are there, but you should go there if you’re considering this. Essentially warm up. Inbox is talking about its case studies. Its case studies are both examples of very large companies sending out millions of emails cold to very large lists and how warming up the inbox on a select set of the list such as 20,000 emails, increases the chances of opening those emails in a dramatic way. My emails, without using this tool get a 17% open rate and less than a 1% spam rate. To give you an example, on one of the case studies, the spam rate was as high as 65%. Why am I pointing all this out? If most of you real estate agents are not engaged in mass email campaigns to cold or semi warm lists, you probably don’t have to worry about this.

[00:16:39.950] – Robert Newman

Very few real estate agents that I know are involved in massive email marketing campaigns to relatively cold lists. Most real estate agents, at a minimum are sending out emails to a list where at some point, somewhere, somebody signed up for something. Every once in a while you get a real estate agent that is getting extremely aggressive, targeting a neighborhood or an audience, buying the list cold and then sending out emails to them. That’s pretty rare in my experience. And if those in that very rare circumstance, you’re one of those people listening to the show right now, by all means go check out warm up inbox it’s probably worth it before you send out your first campaign.

[00:17:25.150] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I agree with you there. I’m just really kind of putting in options to people from experts that I listen to. One of the main experts that I listen to about cold email and utilizing it as a marketing tool, he’s a man called Alex Berman. I’ve read his book and followed his YouTube channel for years and he’s a pretty hardcore cold email seen as one of the leading cold email experts. And he talks about email warm up tools. But I do see where you’re coming from because the people, they’ve opted in to receive email when they hit the landing page. But on the other hand, if you send in out your email and you just don’t seem to be getting a lot of seems very low, the results you’re getting, it might pay off to look at one of these Walmart tools just to double check, because you get analytics as well that show you but you got to have the time. They’re not enormously expensive. You can pay for one of these tools month to month and it might make a difference. I’m just putting the option out there.

[00:18:54.490] – Robert Newman

No, I agree 100% and I think I might have to give a listen to this resource. He is mentioning things that I haven’t thought of in a while, but deliverability. Like the second that you start saying, oh, I’ve got over 100,000 people that I’m trying to do deliverability to all of these tools because they’re very cheap in comparison to the idea that you’re going to have 10% extra open rate on 100,000 emails and you really want your emails opened because now you’re talking about 10,000 names. You’ve already spent all that money getting the names or acquiring them, whatever it is. And then these guys want to charge you somewhere between $30 and $150 a month. Pay it. Hands down. You pay it if you think you can get the result, but keep on my man. The original cold email king, Alex Berman is on his list, ladies and gentlemen. So he has included Alex Berman, which I think is very cool of you.

[00:19:50.590] – Jonathan Denwood

All right, we’re going to go for our break, folks. We’ll be back in a few moments doing a big dive on email marketing. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:20:01.710] – Speaker 3

Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mailwright. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mailwright.com.

[00:20:26.650] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks, doing a bit of a dive in email marketing. It’s still one of the most effective ways to outreach when people land on the landing page or to do a search on your website. You’re utilizing Robert services, expert services around SEO, or you’re utilizing paid campaigns. You want to get them on a mailing list and then keep that relationship going.

[00:20:59.730] – Robert Newman

Well, since he’s already introduced himself slightly, Jed, this is our live podcast. Why don’t you go ahead and say hi, since you just bumped into the back of it. Sorry, guys. All right, have a good buddy.

[00:21:13.250] – Jonathan Denwood

See you later.

[00:21:17.190] – Robert Newman

This is the challenge of me operating my first office. I’ve never had to deal with these particular challenges where I had my staff in the actual well, previously.

[00:21:30.740] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s been your cats, isn’t it?

[00:21:32.400] – Robert Newman

Right, it’s been my cats. They’ve jumped in the podcast a couple times.

[00:21:36.250] – Jonathan Denwood

Anyway, you’re non inferior friends. Yeah. There we go, on to number four, positioning your brand, nurturing relationships. The way I see this, Robert, it’s really linked to our previous podcast where we’re saying, trying to market, when you’re getting going, getting started, you just got to take whatever leads, whatever people that are selling a home, a property, you just got to take what comes your way. But as you grow in experience a bit, the quicker you find a niche and market to it, the better. And I think you totally agree with this as well, the better its fins are going to be for you. That niche can be a certain age group, a certain type of home, a certain geo farming. There’s numerous different types of niches. But the quicker that you find your niche. And that will then help with your email marketing, because the more you can provide value, which you mentioned in the first half of the show, the more that you can offer value in your email, your newsletter, your outreach. It’s going to be easier to offer value if you have identified that niche. What do you think of that, Robert?

[00:23:14.510] – Robert Newman

I agree. I agree with that.

[00:23:19.890] – Jonathan Denwood

Right, well, we’re running a little short.

[00:23:23.330] – Robert Newman

On time, but I can certainly jump in and expand. We’re both niche marketers. We’re talking to a niche. We’re trying to speak to the real estate industry as a whole. So when it’s like a niche for real estate, it’s going to be speaking to people in the neighborhoods or targeted five step marketing plan. My favorite leveraging of cold email right now would be in conjunction with like a multi touch marketing plan like Brian Tracy used to talk about, which is where, for those of you who may not be familiar, it’s where you take 3000 homes in a targeted area. You try to get name, email address, physical address, try to figure out all the names of everybody that lives in every home, and then you drop them a postcard and a magnet, and then you send them an email if you’ve got their email address. And then you may even have somebody go ahead and flyer their home. So physically drop something on the door. And then after you’ve done three or four touches, you place a call. You have somebody place a call to all these people, and you try to provide something of value inside that call and schedule a campaign.

[00:24:36.210] – Robert Newman

In other words, through five targeted touches, you basically adopt an entire area and make it your own through extremely focused targeting. Which email would be one, then that would be a niche, in my opinion.

[00:24:50.270] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, that’s great. Onto number five, divide your emails into lists.

[00:24:56.530] – Robert Newman

I told you, you wanted me to skip the question. Go ahead.

[00:25:04.690] – Jonathan Denwood

He’s giving me a bit of our time on this particular podcast. He was nice to be last week. You never know what you’re going to get with Robert. Increase sales conversion. Obviously a dubbit to PV up. Increase sales of conversions, basically. You can overdo this, but I think, like what we discussed during the show, I think you have your kind of bigger list where you send them your news monthly newsletter. You have your micro campaigns, which are linked to landing pages, and then you have your one to ones, which you could utilize a tool like Bomb Bomb, which I think we’ve had a couple of discussions about. Bomb Bomb is they’re really effective in when you might have a smaller list, but you’re utilizing you’re just sending off one or two bomb Bomb videos per day. So that’s real kind of custom email marketing. Then you have the micro list, as I call it, marketing. And then everybody goes if they show no interest, they go into a nurturing newsletter where they get a high value newsletter per month. What do you reckon about that? That’s how I kind of rationalize it.

[00:26:47.110] – Robert Newman

Well, I’m going to tackle this as I oftentimes do, backwards, forwards, on number five. The way that you’ve got it is increasing sales and conversions. Divide your emails into lists. And so instead of doing exactly a response to your handoff, I’m going to say the following dividing emails into lists is something that we do do at Inbound REM, and we have a way of doing it, which I think is valuable to mention and didn’t make it up onto your list, which is this we multivariate test a lot. Ever since I handed my email over to the head of my brand and marketing campaign team, he multivariate tests every single email drop that we do and he’s slowly dividing our list into segments. A couple of those segments are high interactivity people who open up everything that we send and then he’s starting to divide into segments where some people open up some emails based on a certain topic that we talk about, such as lead generation versus website reviews and things of that nature. So taking these, I know everybody, this is my team, there’s many people here with me today, so you’re getting to meet all of them.

[00:27:58.810] – Robert Newman

So dividing those listen to specific segments over time, I can’t really say for sure John, that it’s going to be hugely valuable, but I definitely think that there is value in targeting your list. Like people who are interested in for real estate agents, it’s going to be people who are interested in lifestyle updates or market reports versus property information. There’s all sorts of things you can talk about as a real estate agent and I think it would be really helpful to multivariate your test your list, find out who’s interested in what, and then segment your list out so that you can start to send emails to people on subjects that they’re very interested in.

[00:28:39.770] – Jonathan Denwood

Right, thanks for that. Rob onto the last one because I think you utilize this yourself. Email scraping tools combined with paid social media retargeting campaigns. One of these tools is a tool get email basically anybody that lands on your website. It won’t provide the data for everybody, but somebody lands on you, it can identify the IP address of the person and a lot of times it can identify few magic who that person is. And so a high degree of people that visit your website can be identified even if they don’t sign in to a lead magnet of some kind. And then you can put them on a list or you can upload that list into social media and by putting a little bit of money, you can retarget them through social media, through your posts and get yourself in front of that audience again through retargeting. What do you reckon about this one?

[00:29:58.750] – Robert Newman

Well, this one you’re right. This is probably the cornerstone of one of Inbound RM’s own marketing campaigns. Scraping email addresses off our real estate, our website, our blog, which we attract in through organic traffic. There’s no doubt that the 11,592 people as of yesterday that we’ve scraped are some of our most engaged email respondents. We also acquired about 40 or 50,000 names, numbers, cold, and we’ve also gotten about another 19,000 names through our social media channels. So, in other words, they subscribe to us on Pinterest. We’ve looked up their information, we’ve acquired it and downloaded it. Believe it or not, the scraper information is absolutely, without question, the highest engagement way of us acquiring email names and them being responsive, which is crazy because we have old contacts that I uploaded. And believe it or not, these scraped email addresses are just as good as my actual Rolodex that I uploaded into these email campaigns. So people I’ve physically spoken to respond about the same as these people that got scraped off our website, which I find you could have blown me over with that information. Jonathan. So I love these strategies. I love social media retargeting combined with email scraping, because now somebody visits your website and they end up finding they’re getting emails from you, that they’re seeing you on social media.

[00:31:29.770] – Robert Newman

I feel like if you were doing an omnichannel approach with that kind of lead, that there’s a very good chance that you could convert a medium person into a warm person through sheer persistence.

[00:31:40.990] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it could work. So, to finish off with you, have you chosen to email them directly then with a newsletter or some other content, you’ve decided not to retarget them? Or have you also combined that with a bit of social media retargeting?

[00:32:01.570] – Robert Newman

I tested retargeting, and at the time that I tested it, I don’t have the capacity to take more leads than I get organically. That’s my problem. That’s why I’m in the Philippines right now training a sales team. Jonathan, is that I literally ran out of the ability I can’t take more calls, can’t do more clients, can’t take more calls. So I had to get more salespeople before I can worry about any of this. But I’ll tell you what, when I did test the retargeting campaigns, they were splendidly effective, almost too much so. We got 5000 visits to the website in almost no time flat and did not spend that much money for that kind of traffic or interactions. So it was brilliant. And it was so brilliant, I turned it off almost immediately.

[00:32:48.150] – Jonathan Denwood

So just to finish off, I got the impression, I think you really like the last point. I think .5, you’re okay. I think the second half of the show, I think the first half of the show and I got most of this information from reading Alex book, and also some of it I’ve done myself. I think when it came to using up warm up tools and the subject lines and the first half of the show, I got the impression that you felt for our particular audience that a lot of the things that Alex and other experts doesn’t really directly apply to our specific target audience. Really? Would I be fair about that?

[00:33:35.280] – Robert Newman

Yeah, I agree with that. Subject lines is one of those universal email strategies. Subject lines are definitely something you can play with. John, I’m just going to be straight with you. I have personally gotten very tired of kitschy grabby kind of email lines. And so instead, with me, it’s just like, does something look authentic from a person that I know to be what I call an authentic marketer, where I feel like they’re going to make some effort to provide something of value to me. And it won’t be a tricky subject line that will get me to click on the email anymore. It’s usually just very direct and very plain, like, this is what’s in the email. Because I’ve done the clickbait thing too many times and wasted too much of my time. I don’t respond to it anymore. I presume that other people are the same way. So subject lines for me are just pretty plain, like, this would be more effective with your email. That’s how I’d send out the email. It’s not all that clever, and it’s not all that Ben’s playing subject Lines, I don’t know that we’ve seen a massive difference in open rates based on clever subject lines, but I’ll have to check with them.

[00:34:41.850] – Robert Newman

So I’m a little on the fence. And the rest of what you said is absolutely true. It didn’t necessarily apply to our audience.

[00:34:48.410] – Jonathan Denwood

No, you’ve made a good point there because Alex, I do listen to Alex, but he is a real hardcore marketer to his core. He really is a bit of an animal. And what you’ve just said is very relevant because I had mixed feelings about it myself. But he is seen, built up a tremendous YouTube channel, has been pretty successful in his own marketing agency, and has a track record, but he pushes it really far out. He’s really hardcore. And I agree with you that I have similar feelings, but it’s been a great discussion because it hopefully puts some faults in your mind about email marketing and puts some ideas into your mind. So Robert, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what your team is up to?

[00:35:57.570] – Robert Newman

For everybody that’s listening to the show, I would love it if you go to Inboundrem.com and look under the About or Services pages to get a little synopsis of what we do here. That would be great. How about you, John? How would you like people to look you up?

[00:36:12.920] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, go to Mailhyphenwright.com, and look at what we have to offer. We’ve got a great platform, great value, and also get the freedom of WordPress. It’s a real lead-generated platform, text, email, and some other call functionality. And we love to have a. Chat with you. We’ll be back next week, either doing an interview or talking about another digital marketing strategy that will help you get the kind of results that you’re hoping for yourself and your family. We’ll see you soon, folks.

[00:36:50.620] – Robert Newman

Bye bye.