Email Marketing Frequency for Real Estate Agents

Adam Small: Good afternoon. This Adam Small with “Agent Sauce”, and this is the real estate marketing podcast. With me today is Doug Karr of DK New Media. How are you doing today Doug?
Douglas Karr: I’m here.
Adam Small: You’re here.
Douglas Karr: I am here.
Adam Small: That’s good to know. Good to know. Listen, I was thinking about this. Over at Agent Sauce, we send one e-mail a month for our customers on their behalf. I’m often asked, “How often should I be sending an e-mail?” I thought that’d make a great topic for today’s podcast. Email Marketing Frequency, What do you think?
Douglas Karr: Email marketing frequency 101.

Is there an Email Marketing Frequency Rule? [0:40]

Adam Small: Yes. Absolutely. There you go. Is there a hard and fast email frequency rule, “this is how many times you need to send an e-mail in this period of time”?
Douglas Karr: No.
Adam Small: No? It all just depends. Actually, I know the answer to that. I agree, it’s definitely it depends on your content, it depends on your audience, and email marketing frequency depends on what your objective is. Right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Let’s take the MarTech Zone blog. I know that you use CircuPress, and you send a daily e-mail. In addition to that, you also send a weekly e-mail, right? Which is really a dual email marketing frequency.
Douglas Karr: Right.
Adam Small: Why does that work for your blog?
Douglas Karr: I really like it because it provides a choice. There’re so people that really want to see a daily. They don’t want to miss out. They want to see what article posted yesterday, and so they’ll subscribe to the daily. Then there’s other people that they just want the weekly digest and the wrap-up. I like the idea of being able to have someone choose. Our list is, I would say, on a weekly basis probably about 30% sign up for the daily e-mail, which is surprising.
Adam Small: That’s really good. Given that then, the nature of your blog is really informational news related. I say “news”. Martech news? Marketing technology news, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Because of that nature and that fact that you’re providing a choice for daily versus weekly, you’re able to get away with a little bit more frequency of sends, right?
Douglas Karr: Yes and no. Yes for the people that want a daily.
Adam Small: Because they’re opting in for the daily email marketing frequency.
Douglas Karr: Let’s put it this way. If I had just said, “You know what? I’m going to switch everybody over to a daily e-mail,” I think a lot of people would unsubscribe that didn’t want that. They wanted the weekly digest. They didn’t want to get bothered every single day.
Adam Small: Get another piece of mail in the inbox that they’ve got to look through and see if there’s anything relevant.
Douglas Karr: I always go to look at your own behavior. If it’s a daily deals e-mail, you want it, because every day you don’t want to miss a deal. If it’s a retirement account update, you don’t want that every day. You want that once a month or something.

Content impacts frequency [2:00]

Adam Small: It doesn’t really matter on a daily basis. It’s an interesting thing. It’s an interesting conversation to have with real estate agents in particular, because I’ll tell them, “Don’t send a daily email marketing frequency.” I think that that’s generally a bad idea for a real estate agent, but we have those outliers that prove me wrong. I can think of two off the top of my head. One actually sends multiple e-mails a day. It blows my mind, because the e-mail’s going to somewhere around 1,500 people. It’s always the same group of people, that sort of thing. You would think that there would be tremendous opt-outs and a really poor open rate and all that because you’re just overwhelming these people with a high email marketing frequency is what you would think looking at it, but they actually get an open rate between 30 to 40% on every e-mail. I say every day. It’s really five days a week is what it is, so close enough to every day.
Douglas Karr: Obviously they’re providing something of value. They’re setting expectations. They’re not changing their frequency from fast to slow and fast again. They’re probably doing some good-
Adam Small: Some real consistency there.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. Some real consistency. I think, for me personally, that email marketing frequency would be overwhelming, because I think I have 400 unread e-mails right now.
Adam Small: Not only that. Just the amount of work that goes into creating three to four e-mails a day five days a week is pretty daunting in and of itself. They do a good job with it. Then we’ve got another customer that, and I never would have bought into this dream, but they send recipes on an almost daily basis. They get an extremely high open rate. Again, I think that that comes back to knowing your audience like you were saying. Setting the expectation in what your audience is wanting.
Douglas Karr: That’s really intriguing. The interesting thing to that is how it’s a little bit off-topic. It’s not talking about real estate, but what you’re really doing is connecting with that homeowner. Just on a frequency level you’re staying top-of-mind and aware. That’s pretty cool.
Adam Small: Really great idea there. Insofar as the thing is I don’t necessarily suggest everybody do that, but for this particular person’s list and their sphere and the people that they’re working with, it works. I would never have thought, if somebody had come to me and asked me upfront, I probably would’ve said, “That’s a bad idea.” I would’ve been wrong.
Douglas Karr: There’s one e-mail like that that I get. There’s one called CB Insights. It’s tech and startup and everything else. The guy really takes his time writing it every day, and he makes it funny. Every day it’s a little bit of entertainment. It breaks the monotony of the day. That’s one that I tell everybody, “You’ve got to subscribe to this. Everything else is-“
Adam Small: I remember you telling me to subscribe to it.
Douglas Karr: If it’s once a day, I’m usually unsubscribing.
Adam Small: It’s overwhelming.
Douglas Karr: Regardless of the value of it. That’s, I think, for your audience. If I was a real estate agent, one I would work on what am I actually writing in these e-mails, and is it worthwhile? A recipe a day is pretty interesting. It’s unique. It’s a good find for people that are cooking.
Adam Small: For the right audience.
Douglas Karr: For the right audience. That’s one thing. They’re doing a good job from that. If it was, “I’m showing this house on West Street,” and then the next day, “I’m showing this house on East Street”, then it’s [ugh 00:06:46].
Adam Small: That gets kind of back into the concept that you have about social media insofar as don’t tell me all the activity you’re doing. Show me the good stuff.

Provide something of value [7:00]

Douglas Karr: Show value.
Adam Small: Show value.
Douglas Karr: The recipes are of value.
Adam Small: That’s actually something I was going to touch on, because you actually mentioned two things here just in the last couple minutes. The first thing that you mentioned was consistency, and the other thing you mentioned is value. We’ll touch on consistency in just a minute, but value is something that people sorely underrate. When you’re sending e-mails, make sure that what you’re sending is information of value plain and simple. If it’s not, you’re going to have terrible open rates and all that.
Then it comes back to, when you start talking frequency of e-mails, are you able to convey value while still maintaining that frequency? A different recipe on daily basis? Probably so. Market stats on a day-to-day basis? Probably not. It doesn’t change that much. Make sure that whatever you’re working with has value, real value, to the person reading it. Getting back to value, it doesn’t have to be a physical something or a freebie or anything like that. Information is value. I still remember the drill instructors from bootcamp pounding into our head, “Knowledge is power.” Same thing. Information is value.
Douglas Karr: It might be even interesting, like that person that’s doing the recipes, just going down that kind of theme. What about when to plant stuff in your garden, when to do maintenance on your house? All of those different things that you could really have a pretty cool e-mail that goes out every day. Maybe every year it’s the same e-mail on the same day. April 30th, you get the-
Adam Small: A never-ending drip. “Hey, it’s spring cleaning time. Make sure you change your batteries on this day in your smoke alarms and that sort of thing.”
Douglas Karr: I look at that, boy that might even work for me. I maybe I would pay attention.

Consistency [9:10]

Adam Small: Interesting there. The other thing that you had talked about, you mentioned, the other word was consistency. You even used the example you’re really fast, then you slow down real slow, and then pick back up. I think consistency is probably one of the greater keys even over frequency.
Douglas Karr: I agree.
Adam Small: Even one a month, as long as you’re consistent once a month, you’re getting in front of that person and they’re seeing that. They have that set expectation as opposed to you send one this month, and then next month you send four, five, or even six, and then you wait two more months before you send another one. Once you boil out that consistency, it becomes erratic and you lose the effectiveness of your overall e-mail marketing campaign.
Douglas Karr: It’s tough that if someone learns to live without e-mail for a couple weeks because you went on vacation or something, and then you come back from vacation and pop up an e-mail, they didn’t miss it. They go, “Ugh. You know? I don’t even read this thing. Let me unsubscribe.” To me, it’s almost like a domino effect, that yes or no, they may subscribe or not subscribe. Then, all of a sudden, if you haven’t written one in a long time and two months, three months, goes by and you write an e-mail, the worst thing is spam complaints.
Adam Small: You get a spike.
Douglas Karr: People won’t even remember that they were opted into it, and all of a sudden you’ll get a spike. One tip on consistency that I would put out there that’s good is letting people know how often they’re going to receive the e-mail. That lady that, I’m sure if her signup form says, “Hey, sign up here to get a daily recipe,” guess what? Nobody’s going to be upset that they get a daily recipe.
Adam Small: They’re not going to sign up and then go, “Why am I getting this daily?” By setting the expectation up front, you end up only getting people that really understand what you’re going to get. I say that really what you did is you minimize the number of people that misunderstand. You’ll still get people that go, “Why am I getting this daily?”, without fail, but at the very least, you put it out there. It helps pre-qualify, if you will, those that are opting into your message.
Douglas Karr: Set expectations for people. “Hey, this is a monthly e-mail. This is a weekly e-mail.” That way they know what they’re getting into.
Adam Small: Good conversation. Enjoyed that.
Douglas Karr: We should have it more often.
Adam Small: You think?
Douglas Karr: Did you get that? That was a joke. Frequency.
Adam Small: Frequency, consistency. Yeah.
Douglas Karr: Sorry. It wasn’t that funny. I’m sorry.

Take Aways [11:50]

Adam Small: Kind of like a dad joke. Couple takeaways I guess would be email marketing frequency is important, but really consistency and value of the e-mail are probably more important than necessarily frequency. Stay consistent and make sure that what you’re putting in there has value.
Douglas Karr: Yes. Last thing we should probably throw out is if someone did want to change from a monthly to a weekly, they might want to let people know. They might want to let people know ahead of time and say, “Hey, you know what? We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on the newsletter and everybody loves it so much that we’re going to start doing this on a weekly basis.” Again, preempting anybody being shocked or upset. I would never tell anybody, “Don’t try.” Try frequency and see how it works out for you. You definitely don’t want to switch, switch back, switch, switch back. You want to sustain the course for a while.
Adam Small: You’ve got to give it a chance to see if it’s really working or not. Sending once or twice on whatever the frequency may be and then saying, “Well, it’s not working for me,” doesn’t work. It’s just like running a Facebook ad for two days and saying, “Hey, I didn’t get 100 customers, so I’m out.” That’s not it not working. That’s you not giving it a chance. When you’re creating your e-mails, when you’re sending your e-mails, take into account your audience, make sure you’re providing value, and be consistent.
Douglas Karr: Boom.
Adam Small: Thanks for joining us today, Doug. I appreciate it.
Douglas Karr: You bet.
Adam Small: If you guys have any questions, want to learn more, you can contact us at info@agentsauce.com or visit us at agentsauce.com. Thanks. Have a great day.