Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
As a real estate agent, you likely send out a handful of e-mails on a daily basis. Or depending on how large your business is, you may even be sending out dozens of e-mails each day. Many of these messages go out to colleagues, mortgage lenders, attorneys, and various other people who may not be in the market for a new home, but even if a small percentage of those e-mails are directed towards clients and potential home buyers browsing the local real estate market, wouldn’t it make sense to promote your real estate services in any way possible?
All too often I see real estate agents and brokers with a boring, bland e-mail signature. Even worse, it isn’t all that uncommon for agents to have no e-mail signature at all. I understand that in today’s tech-savvy world, many responses you send via e-mail are on-the-go and from your iPhone or Blackberry, but that certainly doesn’t account for each and every e-mail message you’re sending.
If you’re a Realtor with a business website, you need to make more of an effort to send out e-mails that include a personalized, linkable e-mail signature whenever possible. Not taking advantage of this FREE form of advertising is only doing yourself an extreme disservice, as this can be one of the best effective, low-cost ways to promote your site. Sure, there may be an initial cost in having a graphic e-mail signature designed specifically for your real estate business, but this expense should be minimal, and once you pay for it, the signature is yours to use for as long as you want at no additional cost (depending on what type of signature you get).
Generating website traffic is a key component to maximizing your revenue stream in the real estate business. As you find more ways to drive visitors to your site, you’ll undoubtedly start to see better results in your website investment by receiving more quality web leads that lead to home sales. So why settle for a simple e-mail signature in Times New Roman font that only list your name, business address, phone and fax numbers, and e-mail address when I can have clickable, interactive call-to-action buttons that are linked directly to my real estate website?
Not only will a customized e-mail signature appear more modern and professional, but it will automatically give buyer’s a new and direct way to find and search homes available in your local area without even having to do a Google search. And unless your real estate site is ranking #1 in an organic search result [which it’s not], that’s not something I’d want to overlook when it’s so easy and affordable to put in place.
Joe Heath is a graduate of Indiana University and possesses a Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development from Drexel University. After working in the market research sector and authoring published Market Snapshots for Hanley Wood Market Intelligence, Joe now works as a Web Marketing Specialist and co-owns Real Estate Web Creation with his partner, Ted Guarnero, a 25+ year real estate veteran.
