How to Master Real Estate Marketing Offline

real estate marketing offlineAre you feeling good about your online real estate marketing? Maybe you’re already sending out targeted emails and have a real estate website complete with a blog. If you’re still working on some of these elements, check out last week’s post Online Marketing Tactics for some tips.

Today, I’d like to emphasize that although online marketing tactics are very effective, they shouldn’t be the only marketing strategies in your real estate marketing toolkit.  The best real estate marketing strategies use both online and offline tactics that complement each other.

Similar to online marketing, real estate marketing offline can help build your relationships, generate leads and repeat and referral business. It’s another avenue to seek out your audience, capture their attention, and build relationships. Let’s explore some of the different offline marketing tactics below.

Direct Mail Newsletters

Similar to email marketing, direct mail newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your audience. Best practices suggest sending direct mail newsletters to your “A list” contacts. This could include past clients, hot leads, and potential referral sources.

Your audience will appreciate your consideration and efforts to keep them in the loop. Follow these tips to ensure your direct mail newsletter is as successful as possible:

  • Provide value to your audience.
    Why should they pick up and read your newsletter? What’s in it for them? Make sure every word of information in your direct mail newsletters is relevant, useful and audience-centric.
  • Be intriguing.
    You can’t give away the entire purpose of the information in the first sentence – why should your audience keep reading? Save the meat of the story for the middle, but no later. You want to intrigue your readers, not frustrate them.
  • Keep your target audience in mind.
    What does your audience care about? What questions are on their mind? Answering these questions can help you formulate topics that will perform well with your audience. No matter what the newsletter is about, your audience needs to care about it.
  • Avoid clutter.
    Too many words, images, types of fonts or calls to action will confuse and overwhelm your audience. For best results, however, we urge you to take a simplistic approach.
  • Tell your audience exactly what you want them to do.
    Do you want them to follow you on your social channels? Or are you hoping your past clients will contribute to a testimonial? Whatever you want them to do, be upfront about it and always include a call-to-action.

Printed Letters

While many communications have moved online, there is still a need for letters and postcards in your real estate marketing plan. Sometimes sending a letter feels more personal than an email, making it the perfect way to say thank you for a successful referral or congratulate a client on their new home.

IXACT Contact makes it easy to send professional offline marketing materials with our Letters and Labels feature. Send personalized mail merged letters to all your contacts, or just a select few. You can either select from one of our pre-written letter templates, or create a new letter from scratch.

The best way to build and maintain relationships, whether new or existing, is to make sure you always keep in touch. While many of your contacts may prefer email communications, others would rather hear from you in a letter. With the right contact management system, it’s easy to create both online and offline messages.

Takeaways

Now it’s time to action everything you’ve learned into a detailed plan. The potential for new customers, improved customer retention, increased brand awareness and more are within reach. These 3 steps are to help you get started:

#1: Figure out your strategy

The above marketing strategies are meant to work together for the best possible results. So here are your options: you can pull all of the above tactics together and get to work, or you can pick and choose which strategies you think will work best for your real estate business and establish a plan.

#2: Execute your plan.

This might seem like the most time-intensive part of the process, but if you choose to use a real estate CRM, it’ll be simpler than you think. Everything you need will be easily accessible through a streamlined interface. Whether its email marketing, newsletters, print materials, reporting, business directories, to-do lists, automated lead capture, or keeping track of events, you can manage it all in one cohesive and organized location.

#3: Measure your results.

Reporting is a huge part of real estate marketing because you need to keep track of how you’re doing. It allows you to analyze which methods are working or failing and identify exactly where your current strategy can be improved. Make note of how many new customers you’re gaining through offline marketing and compare it to your online marketing results. This way you can make well informed decisions about what marketing efforts to focus on.

IXACT Contact’s real estate CRM makes contact management easy.  The system comes equipped with both email marketing and printed letter templates. Try it now! Start your 5 week free trial.

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