I realized after the new year came that I think I made a critical mistake in my email marketing to prospective real estate clients. Here is my major mistake and how it turned out.
I have learned in the last week that when you send your emails can make all of the difference in the world. The experts say that you should send your emails on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday around 10:30am to get the most attention and response from your prospects and newsletter subscribers. My timing was less than impeccable when I sent the email to my contacts to have them sign up for my newsletter. I sent it on Thursday December, 30th at 4:03 PM. Looking back, I can see why that was just stupid. I should have known that sending an email to people who are either already on vacation for New Year’s wouldn’t see my email until they returned to work the new Monday. I was also competing with the other emails that they received during the same period of time so they likely have a lot of emails to wade through when they got back into the office. My email was of a more personal nature so it certainly wouldn’t take precedence over the critical work emails that were sitting in their inbox.
Of course the non-response by some people is nothing personal but rather poor planning on my part. With that said, here is the fruit of my labor and a few statistics for you:
127 emails sent
11 bounced emails (people I obviously hadn’t emailed in a while)
19 newsletter opt-ins = %16.4 opt-in
Analysis: Subtracting the bounced emails from the total sent gives me an opt-in rate of 16.4%. With the timing of my email, I don’t think this is terrible but I certainly have some work to do. I am shooting for an opt-in rate around 50% from organic traffic to my Aske Real Estate blog which is my other venue to get new subscribers.
It will take time but it will pay off in the end. I think that the book, “The Millionaire Real Estate Agent” says that your list needs to be at a minimum of 100 people. I am going to go back and read that book again because it has some very useful information in it.
One other positive are the great emails I received back from my list. I had many people who encouraged me, said they will refer me, and support me. I also connected with someone looking for a rental. Not my ideal market but it helps me to build my clientele and show that I will do a great job for people.
I am excited for next week. Open houses are also another way I am going to build this list of contacts. I’ll write another post about the tools I am going to use to do this effectively and creatively.
Happy hunting!