Building an Inbound Email Marketing Strategy

Creating an effective marketing plan means building a strategy that attracts the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons; and ultimately, having them reach out when they’re ready to work with you.
And that’s where building an inbound marketing strategy comes in.
A solid, well-planned, and well-built inbound marketing strategy encourages people to reach out to you when they’re ready to convert. When done correctly, it can consistently bring in high-quality, targeted leads that are already interested in your brand and your business.
★ Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Planning a Real Estate Lead Flow Through Inbound Marketing
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
Through inbound marketing, your strategy is always to have people reach out to you (rather than the other way around), and email marketing is a great way to do that – provided you have something of value to provide to people.
Email marketing can be both inbound and outbound, depending on your approach:
- Outbound email marketing is when you cold reach out to people, via email, without their consent (you know, those emails you probably hate getting).
- Inbound email marketing is when you reach out to people, via email, with their consent (you might even look forward to getting these types of emails).
In most cases, inbound email marketing is superior when it comes to building a strategy where people reach out to you, particularly if you want them to be engaged and often ready to convert, because it works towards you proving your knowledge, establishing your authority, and building trust for your brand with your audience.
An effective inbound based email marketing strategy is always based in providing value. If you’re not providing anything that your audience thinks is valuable, you won’t see results.
That’s because email is pretty easy to ignore, mute, or otherwise just make disappear if you’re not interested in it, or worse, if you’ve been added to some list without your consent.
So what does providing value mean? Ultimately, it means that you’re solving a problem for your audience.
That could mean providing a scheduled drip campaign educating buyers about the buying process, a weekly email round-up of new listings, a monthly email with local market sales statistics, a quarterly email with policy changes or industry news that affects buyers and sellers, or anything else that is something your audience genuinely wants to know about, and that works towards showing that you know what you’re talking about.
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A successful inbound email-based marketing strategy is based on 2 steps:
1. Making an Offer, and Getting Consent.
Here, you need to make a very clear offer around what your email strategy is all about, specifically addressing the needs of your target audience and how your email will help solve a problem for them by providing something they’re looking for.
However, it’s key that in your offering you tell your subscriber exactly what they’ll be getting, and when they’ll be getting it, once they sign up; otherwise, you run the risk of them getting annoyed with you, and eventually unsubscribing.
For example, if someone signs up for your monthly email where you thoroughly research and outline the sales trends in your market, and then you also end up sending them an email every time you have a new property for sale, they’re probably not going to be happy since that wasn’t clear in your original offer.
2. Providing Emails that are Valuable and in Line with the Initial Offer.
Here, you send out your carefully crafted email that aligns with your original offering. That means, if someone signed up for an email drip campaign all about the buying process, you shouldn’t send them emails about a client event you’re hosting.
The offer should be valuable. If someone signs up to receive an email from you, they are likely looking for information they can’t find anywhere else. While it’s fine to repurpose content from time to time, the email itself should be completely unique with original information that is not easily accessible.
Consider adding even more value to the email by including some sort of downloadable piece. For example, if your email is part of a larger buyer drip campaign, you could add something of extra value, like a printable PDF checklist or a link to your buyer’s guide if you have one.
But to see success, you have to be consistent. Like every other aspect of inbound marketing, building trust and authority in your email marketing takes time.
★Want to learn more about email marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Email Marketing Best Practices for Real Estate Agents
- Automating Your Email Marketing List Building
- How Real Estate Agents Can Improve Their Email Marketing Open Rate
Building a successful inbound email marketing strategy means building a value-based, personal email campaign that aligns with your audience’s needs. If done correctly, as part of your inbound marketing strategy, you can create an email marketing strategy that makes people reach to you, when they’re ready to work with you, rather than the other way around.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.