Top Email Ideas for Real Estate Agents to Boost Your Open Rates

What makes a good real estate email campaign

From picking the right audience to consistently providing valuable content, here’s what you need to stay on top of your game. 

Correct targeting

Finding the right audience for your emails is the first and most vital step to success. You don’t want to be a spammer, so make sure you are only sending your emails to people who are interested in your services. These might include your present and past clients, their referrals, and contacts collected via lead-generation efforts on your website and social media channels. 

As you build up your mailing list, you can try segmenting it to make your real estate marketing email campaigns more focused and personalized. For example, you can send different campaigns to buyers and sellers, segment your list by location, marital status, stage of the sales funnel, and other characteristics.

Trustworthy email address and sender name

Next, take care of your email address and sender name as these two are essential to building trust and credibility with potential clients, as well as to your deliverability rates. 

A good address should be short, clear, and easy to remember. In the real estate business, the most common option is to use your name and your brand name in an email address.

Whichever option you choose, the best practice is to use a custom domain name for your real estate email address. We recommend avoiding free providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc. because they are only designed for personal use. Therefore, some recipients may perceive marketing emails sent via these services as amateurish or suspicious. More importantly, the recipients’ mail servers typically regard mass emails sent with free email providers as spammy or unprofessional. 

That’s why you should use professional email service providers for business communication. With professional software such as Selzy, you can send bulk emails safely from your business email address, automate and test your campaigns, and more. Alternatively, you can send your campaigns using professional tools such as Google Workspace, Office 365 Outlook, or via your website host.

That said, it is sometimes acceptable to send mass emails to potential customers via free email providers such as Gmail or Outlook. However, this method has certain limitations — for example, you can’t send promotional emails with these tools.  

As for the sender name, the safest option is to use your name or your company name, or a combination of both. For example, “Jane Smith”, “Perfect Housing”, or “Jane, Perfect Housing”.

Compelling subject lines

Once you’ve made it into your potential customers’ inboxes, it’s vital to not get lost among dozens of other emails they receive daily. And that’s where email subject lines come in. 

According to research, engaging email subject lines increase open rates by 33 to 47%, making them one of the key factors affecting the performance of your email marketing campaigns. So, it’s crucial to get them right.

The easiest way to do it is to learn from examples. Take a look at these subject lines from actual campaigns to get an idea of what you should aim for. 

• Search tips for house hunters (Zillow) 
• Your home’s Redfin Estimate (Redfin) 
• 🔓 Unlock your property bonus (Willow Real Estate) 

• You Belong at the Beach! Save Up To 45% (Condo-World Resort Properties) 
• Your perfect home is out there (Zillow)

These subject lines are short and concise, which makes them easy to grasp and ensures they are displayed properly on mobiles. The first four also highlight value (tips, a helpful tool, a bonus, and a discount), while the fifth one offers a promise and evokes emotion. 

To see more examples like these, read our article on real estate email subject lines. There, we provide 50+ professional subject lines and give tips and best practices to help you come up with impressive ideas of your own. 

Casual tone

After your leads click open, it’s vital to hold their attention until they get to your CTA. A friendly, warm tone will help you establish rapport and make it easy for people to keep reading. However, professional emails should still remain professional, so it’s important to strike the right balance between sounding casual and businesslike. 

If you’re unsure about how your tone reads, try to recall how you speak to your clients in person and stick to more or less the same manner when writing your emails. Writing tools such as Grammarly or other software with similar functionality can also help you nail the right tone.

It can also help to keep in mind who your target audience is for a particular campaign, and what the email content is about. For example, a newsletter with home decoration tips calls for a more casual tone than one containing market updates and industry news. 

However, you need to keep your tone consistent across all of your emails, so make sure variations are subtle.

Valuable content

While all of the above matters, valuable content is the key thing that can make your email marketing (and all your content marketing, for that matter) a success in the long run. 

That means you should avoid generic “salesey” and/or “watery” copy as much as possible, and always remember that your subscribers are not with you because of what you are, but mainly because of what you can do for them.   

To make sure your real estate emails ideas hit the mark, always review your emails from the reader’s perspective before launching your campaigns. Can you learn something new from this email? Can you put this knowledge into practice? Does this email solve any of your problems or alleviate any pains? If the answers are “yes”, you’re on the right track. If there are more “no-s”, rework your emails to make them more client-oriented. For more tips on creating valuable content for your subscribers, check out more of our articles on real estate.

Consistency

Last but not least, valuable content works best when delivered consistently over time. Given that real estate email marketing campaigns often run longer than in many other industries, devising an email marketing strategy for your real estate business early on is the best way to stay on track and ultimately achieve your marketing goals. 

To make sure you always stay in touch with your prospects and clients, come up with a manageable campaign schedule early on. To that end, analyze the amount of content you or your team can produce as well as your audience’s preferences toward frequency. 

To add variety, leverage different types of emails: newsletters, announcements, special offers, and others. This way, you’ll ensure you keep your subscribers engaged in the long run and get tangible results from your email marketing efforts.      

Speaking of which, here are some best real estate email ideas to help you optimize these efforts and maximize positive results.

10 best real estate email ideas for your campaigns

Real estate emails don’t have to be “salesey”, “watery”, or boring. Here are the best email marketing ideas to diversify your real estate campaigns and provide value to your subscribers without spending hours on content production.  

Industry news and trends

Most people who consider selling, buying, or renting property want to stay updated on the current market trends and industry news because these can seriously affect their decisions. By consistently delivering a curated roundup right into their inboxes, you can save their time while also establishing yourself as an expert. When they finally decide to make a move, guess who they’re going to ask for professional advice?   

In the example below, Garrington Property Finders handles this format marvelously. This email is clear, concise, informative, well-designed, and contains all the elements a professional email should: a polite signoff, an email signature with contacts, links to the company website and social media accounts, and an unsubscribe link.  

Local deals

Keeping in touch with past clients is essential for real estate agents. One way to stay connected is by providing support to those you’ve recently helped to buy property — for example, by letting them know about local deals while they are new to the area. A weekly newsletter with a selection of deals offered by businesses in the area — a sale in a local store, a discount offer at a nearby cafe, and the like — will save your clients time and money and establish you as a go-to expert in the neighborhood. 

Another way to leverage the format of the local deals is by sending emails targeted at leads who recently viewed the property in a certain area. That’s exactly what Zillow does in this monthly newsletter with an overview of popular homes similar to the ones a lead browsed.

Local events

Informing past clients about local events in an area they’ve just moved to is also a great way to stay in touch. Similar to the local deals newsletter, you can put together a selection of events people typically find interesting, such as concerts, festivals, parties, lectures, etc. 

Active clients looking to buy a home will likely be interested in open house events as these usually present great opportunities to get a better feel of the property. 

To make the most of your open house announcement, remember to include a large, eye-catching image of the house and put it front and center, just like in this email from Sotheby’s International Realty:

How-to guides

How-to guides remain a staple of content marketing because it’s so natural for people today to learn things via the internet. As part of your email marketing campaign, this type of content can serve several purposes at a time, driving traffic to your website and building trust with your audience. After all, why search for information all over the internet when you have a guide put together by industry professionals in your inbox? 

One more advantage of this format is, there are so many topics to cover in a how-to guide. You can offer a home buying guide like Zillow does in the example below, or a guide to home sellers; give home renovation and decoration tips, offer home cleaning best practices, or even provide a guide to properly mowing a lawn — the possibilities are endless.

Seasonal content

Changes of seasons can often be stressful. To help your subscribers embrace seasonal changes, send them an email newsletter with useful content to match the season: for example, tips on keeping the house cool during the summer or making it warm and cozy in the winter. 

If you have any seasonal special offers, you can also announce them via a promotional seasonal email as Condo-World does in this “summer deals” email below.

Other real estate email ideas for seasonal content include:

• Seasonal holiday decoration tips (Christmas, Halloween, etc.).
• Seasonal home maintenance tips. 
• Seasonal local events guides. 
• Travel deals and ideas. 

Have neither a special offer nor seasonal tips to share yet? Just send a nice, well-designed “season’s greetings” email with your best wishes.

Business updates

Sharing updates about your business, such as opening offices, hiring people, or offering new services, is a great way to let your subscribers know you are not stagnating. If your business is growing, it is successful — therefore, it is likely reliable. Besides, keeping your clients, leads, and prospects in the loop will help them develop a certain connection to your business because the more they know about it, the more emotionally involved they become. 

In this example from Mantis Property, the company announces new useful features for its clients while establishing itself as one of the industry leaders at the same time.

Evergreen content

Even with experience, generative AI, and professional tips and tricks at hand, content creation is a lot of work. One way to reduce the workload is to have evergreen content — i.e., content that always stays relevant — always in store. You just need to put it together once, and then you can recycle it almost indefinitely.  

Typical examples of such content include how-to guides and seasonal content we mentioned earlier. 

Here are some more real estate email ideas featuring evergreen content:

• Welcome messages  
• FAQ articles and videos, and
• Personal branding content (more on that later)

In this email from Redfin, the company answers one of the most frequently asked questions home buyers face while also promoting its online tool and driving traffic to its website:

Blog posts

Having a blog on your website makes content creation for both email marketing and social media so much easier. 

Typically, email newsletters help promote blog posts by showcasing the most intriguing excerpts from the articles and inviting readers to learn more by clicking on the CTAs. Alternatively, you can rewrite a blog post for an email campaign, turning it into a series of engaging emails — just remember to add a relevant CTA. 

Below is an example of the most traditional way to promote a blog post in an email.

Personal branding content

Providing value for subscribers is important, but you should always keep in mind the goals you are pursuing as a business. That’s why you need to occasionally alternate valuable content with personal branding content — i.e., content that puts you and your services in the spotlight. 

Real estate email ideas for personal branding can range from a profile video of you explaining who you are and what services you offer to case studies and your clients’ success stories. Positive media coverage of your business, interview pieces, webinars and podcasts where you are a host or a guest expert also fall in this category.   

You can also incorporate personal branding into emails of any type — for example, into a welcome email, as shown in the template below.

Final thoughts

Email marketing is essential to anyone wanting to beat the fierce competition in the real estate business. 

But just sending out random emails is not enough: to succeed, you need to consistently launch professional email campaigns targeted at the right audience, and follow other best practices mentioned in this article. You also need to come up with compelling real estate email ideas to keep your subscribers engaged. 

Using the real estate email ideas listed above for inspiration will save you time and help make your real estate email campaigns truly efficient.