Email marketing campaigns are becoming more and more popular for real estate agents. They are a great automated way to stay in touch with your SOI, without spending the time to send out individual emails to each and every potential or past client.
By now, you probably have all heard of Constant Contact and iContact. But you may have not heard about the new kid on the block - eMerge. eMerge is a little different than the typical email campaign service because there are a lot more features that come along with it that the other email campaigns do not offer.
The perfect service for real estate agents, eMerge allows you to make your services look more professional, but without requiring the technical expertise to do it. The service has all the tools necessary to customize, implement, and track all your electronic marketing, but has set it up so it is very user friendly. It's not just restricted to Email Marketing, but also incorporates social media, surveys and forms, and SMS text into the package. Here is a little breakdown of all that they have to offer.
Desktop Report Monitor: Sits in your desktop toolbar. Allows you to see your latest eMerge email blast, how many people have opened it, and how many people have not opened it. Double click the eMerge icon and you can see even more information - details about all of your email blasts.
Managing Your Contacts: Import your contacts into their easy upload template to manage your email list. Organize your list into different groups and campaigns accordingly.
Create Email Blasts: This is your chance to get creative with it. eMerge allows you to choose from a variety of templates and a large online image database, or, if you are tech savvy enough, you can create your own!
Tracking Your Responses: eMerge offers easy-to-read tracking and reports so that you can see if your emailing efforts are working or not, and the reasons behind it.
Social Media Integration: This one is really cool...You can integrate your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and RSS and Blog feeds into your current email campaigns. This way, everyone in your social media network can be updated by your current emails and alerts.
SMS Text Integration: We have told you before, and we'll tell you again - text messaging is the new way to communicate! eMerge just rolled out a new part of their service called SMS text integration. It allows users the ability to send and receive SMS text messages as part of their online digital marketing efforts. Following the same opt-in principles as email subscriptions, users will be able to offer their audience the ability to opt-in / out of receiving text messages as well as email communication.
Drip Campaign Feature: eMerge refers to it as Auto Responders, but the RealSupport Virtual Assistants like to refer to this as a Drip Campaign. It allows you to send automatic thank you messages and/or timed email responses based on opt-in criteria. Anytime someone joins your email list, you can have them automatically receive a promotional email about your products or services. RealSupport highly recommends this type of email blast for real estate agents because it is the best way to seem as though you are personally staying in contact with your leads.
Professional Campaigns: If this all sounds great to you, but you really don't think you have the time to manage it, they also give you the option of managing your campaign for you. Their professional design and development team can plan, create and execute your mass email marketing campaign. They will determine the timeline of your campaign, help write and design the emails, and manage and track the entire campaign.
**Note about this option: If you have a virtual assistant, you may be better off signing up for the Self Managed Campaign option and have your Virtual Assistant take care of the rest. If they have design skills, writing skills and the time to manage your campaign, they should be just as qualified to do it for you and may come at a better cost.
If this sounds interesting to you, check out eMerge's website and see for yourself. The account is free for the first 60 days so if you don't like it, you can cancel and won't be any worse off.
If you are interested in hearing more about how Drip Campaigns are a great tool for Real Estate agents, you can call RealSupport at (847) 705-1655 anytime and ask. We would be happy to explain them in a little more detail because if you have never done them before, they can be confusing. Until then, we'll keep a lookout for the latest tools for you. There are so many, we understand that it's hard for you to find the time to keep up. The "keeping up" part is our job.
Stacey Clarke
Copywriting and Marketing Coordinator
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