What are we trying to accomplish with an email newsletter?:
In working with our prospects and past clients, we want to:
Keep our name at "top of mind"
Market our services and listings
Develop more prospects with interesting content
Position ourselves as area real estate experts
Actually, all of these items are also goals of a real estate blog.
What are the challenges of producing an email newsletter?:
Many real estate professionals use newsletters, either in print or via email or both. The challenges are much the same for any media:
Coming up with interesting and timely content
Meeting a production or delivery deadline consistently
Recipient list management
These happen to be very similar to the requirements of a blog. You must post frequently with content of interest to your readers. You can have both news reader and email subscribers.
With these similarities, can an email newlsetter and blog work together?:
Actually, they can become one and the same as far as effort and maintenance, and the result is a better product! Once you commit to blogging, you're doing frequent and hopefully interesting posts about your community and real estate.
With some blogging platforms, such as WordPress, subscribers can elect to receive your posts via email instead of using a news reader. However, this gets them an email every time you post, sometimes three or more a week. So, how can we have a regularly scheduled delivery of multiple posts in a pleasing format?
Take a look at Feedblitz.com to automate all the tasks we've discussed.
If you're blogging, why not make that your email newsletter?:
Feedblitz.com is a free service that gives you the code to place an email subscription box on your site or blog. You then set up the frequency of your newsletter, say monthly. The service checks your blog's RSS feed for new posts, and if the minimum you've set is met, it sends out an email newsletter format of your blog posts since the last release.
The list is maintained, with reports of bounced email and automatic removal of those who unsubscribe. There are several formats from which to choose, with further customization possible.
Why not make your email newsletter your long-term drip email solution?:
Using the service as we've discussed, you can place new prospects into your normal drip email system. However, when a specified series of good informative drip emails is completed, just move those prospects/clients to your email newsletter list. They'll be kept informed long-term with fresh content from your blog on a schedule you set.
Can you use multiple blogs to custom-tailor newsletter content?:
Many real estate pundits recommend that you not market listings in your primary blog. They also believe that it should be community-focused, with the real estate marketing done in an unobtrusive way.
That's not a problem. You can offer your prospects and clients several choices for the type of newsletter content they want. Have a separate blog for new listing notifications. Those who want to know about every new listing you bring to market can subscribe to that newsletter created from a blog for that purpose.
What's the cost of several blogs and this email newsletter plan?:
Actually, it's almost free! If you use WordPress for your blogging platform, it carries no cost other than a place to host multiple blogs.
Yahoo Business will host unlimited blogs starting at about $12/month.
At basic level Feedblitz.com is a free service, with low cost as your email list grows, so you've got it all for under $150 to $200/year. Then it's just a matter of creating and posting your blogs and importing your current email lists. Add new prospects and clients in the future and you're in business!
Do you want something more customized for past clients?:
Again, it's just another blog and separate list. You're still only writing posts of some type of content for each blog you create. If you only wrote one post every other week for three blogs, you'd have a dozen articles in each of the three quarterly newsletters. That's about three hours/month writing content for three highly-focused newsletters. What three might that be?
Your community-focused general blog
A blog for new listing marketing
A blog focused on past clients
It's up to you, but this can be the ultimate email newsletter solution for your real estate business.
