10 Best Practices for Drip Email Marketing in Real Estate

Real estate drip campaigns are a powerful email marketing tool for Realtors® to nurture leads, build relationships, and ultimately close more deals. 

Just like the name suggests, this type of marketing allows you to “drip” a series of emails, one at a time, to a particular segment of your contact list. Drip emails help you stay top-of-mind and motivate recipients to take the next step — whether that’s calling you for information, scheduling an in-person meeting, or even committing to an exclusive agreement.

We’ll walk you through several best practices for creating effective drip email campaigns that convert prospects into clients. We’ll also show you an example campaign so you can see what it looks like in action.

The Purpose of Real Estate Drip Campaigns

A drip email campaign is an automated email marketing strategy that uses predefined rules to create and send messages to leads at specific intervals. For real estate agents, these campaigns are designed to:

• Provide consistent, valuable communication with potential home buyers and sellers
• Educate prospects about the local real estate market
• Showcase your expertise and personal brand
• Gradually move leads through the sales funnel

The ultimate objective of a drip campaign is to transform cold leads into warm prospects — and, eventually, into actual clients. By delivering targeted, relevant content over time, you can build trust and credibility with your audience and demonstrate your market knowledge. 

Crucially, you also stay visible during a prospect’s decision-making process — increasing the likelihood of being the agent they choose when they’re ready to buy or sell.

Let’s cover best practices for drip campaigns next.

10 Best Practices for Real Estate Drip Email Campaigns

1. Segment Your Email List

Different leads have different needs, which is why your real estate drip campaigns have to begin with careful segmentation. You can segment your email list in a number of ways, such as:

• Separating buyers from sellers
• Categorizing by neighborhood or property type
• Distinguishing between first-time and experienced buyers or sellers
• Customizing based on specific interests or needs

Example segments could include:

• Homeowners with high or low mortgage rates
• Luxury homeowners
• Homeowners with $200,000 of equity in their property
• First-time home buyers
• Contacts who have engaged with your content X number of times

2. Personalize Your Content

It’s really easy for people to ignore generic emails — which defeats the purpose. If you want to capture attention and increase engagement and conversion, personalization is your friend. Make sure to:

• Use the recipient’s name in the subject line and email body, as well as the address of their current home, if applicable.
• Tailor the content to the recipient’s situation — do they have a high mortgage rate? No mortgage rate? Have they been in the home for 10+ years? You've segmented your audiences, now offer those segments solutions and your services.
• Reference the specific local market conditions where the recipient is planning to sell or buy

3. Craft a Strategic Email Sequence

When a real estate drip campaign is well-planned, it follows a logical progression that moves recipients through the initial stages of the sales funnel. It can look something like this:

Initial Contact Stage

• Send a welcome email introducing yourself
• Provide an overview of your real estate services and what you specialize in
• Share valuable market insights or local community information

Nurturing Stage

• Create or link to educational content about the buying or selling process
• Provide market trend reports
• Highlight the characteristics of different neighborhoods
• Provide home valuation tips
• Create or link to mortgage and financing guidance

Conversion Stage

• Share testimonials from satisfied clients
• Highlight your success stories and track record
• Mention special offers or free consultations
• Provide clear calls-to-action (CTAs)

Schedule a demo to see the pre-built drip campaigns in the Fello platform →

4. Provide Value in Every Email

Drip email marketing in real estate should always offer something meaningful to the recipients — without being overtly salesy. You can do this by positioning yourself as a trusted advisor and local market expert, providing information such as:

• Local market updates
  • New businesses or businesses closing
  • School ratings
  • Community improvements
  • The number of homes for sale
• Home maintenance tips
  • Seasonal maintenance tips, windows, gutters, waterproofing
  • Maintenance and ROI
  • Home improvements with the biggest ROI
• Community event information
  • Where will you be?
  • What public resources are you offering?
  • Are there open houses you want to promote?
• Pricing trends
  • How are home prices trending?
  • How long are they staying on the market?
  • What are the most common updates to homes for sale?

5. Optimize Email Design and Formatting

Branded emails with a clean, user-friendly design increase your professionalism and help you make a good first impression with leads. To optimize your email design and formatting:

• Use a mobile-responsive template (most email platforms let you see your email in mobile size)
• Include high-quality, not grainy images and embed property listings if able
• Keep the text concise and scannable, using headers and bullet points to separate out your main points
• Incorporate personal branding elements such as your logo and color scheme

6. Pay Attention to Timing and Frequency

Sending the right emails at the right time and with the right frequency goes a long way toward increasing the open and click-through rates of your real estate drip campaigns. Try this:

• Start with a welcome email immediately after lead capture
• Follow up with communications at a regular cadence, such as quarterly market reports and monthly pricing trends
• Avoid overwhelming recipients with daily emails
• Monitor your engagement metrics to see if you need to email more often, less, or update your content

7. Implement Triggered Emails

Another big component of drip campaigns for Realtors® involves automated emails that trigger when a lead takes a specific action. For example, you can automate emails in response to:

• Downloading property details > Send a local market report for that ZIP code, or a similar ZIP code
• Submitting a form on your website > Send a confirmation and direct to relevant resources
• Checking their home value dashboard > Send a local market report and link to schedule a call
• Requesting a virtual or in-person tour of a property > Send a confirmation, and what to expect
• Booking an appointment > Send a confirmation, and a checklist of questions they should ask for buying or selling

These are just ideas. Consider what your next step would be for any of those actions, and see how email can help communicate that. 

8. Track and Analyze Performance

If you’re unsure how your real estate drip campaigns are performing, you won’t know how to refine your strategy and make them work better for you. Continuous improvement requires performance data, so make sure to:

• Monitor open rates and click-through rates — establish a baseline of performance, then work to improve it by trying different messaging and adjusting segments
• A/B test subject lines and content  — see what is getting contacts to open and click 
• Track unsubscribes — are recipients finding your content valuable? Also, remove unsubscribes immediately!
• Track bounced emails — do you have out-dated contact info in your database? You may need to enrich data to find updated email addresses
• Analyze conversion metrics from email to form submission to listing appointment — you will begin to see which emails perform best, and which segments are the most engaged

9. Maintain Compliance

Email marketing is constrained by certain regulations and standards. To ensure your real estate drip campaigns are in compliance: 

• Comply with all CAN-SPAM Act requirements, which govern the use of commercial emails and messages 
• Obtain explicit consent from your contacts to email them
• Include clear unsubscribe or opt-out options
• Maintain a clean, updated email list
• Protect your contacts’ data and privacy

10. Leverage Technology

Utilize robust email marketing platforms that offer automation, segmentation, and advanced tracking capabilities and can integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) system or lead generation tool. Consider your entire business needs when deciding on an email platform. Do you need digital marketing? Or perhaps a CRM, too? Popular email platforms include:

• Mailchimp > Popular email platform with website, SMS, and content creation tools
• Constant Contact > Email marketing and digital marketing platform
• HubSpot > Free email marketing as part of CRM and Marketing Hub of tools
• BombBomb > Unique video email platform
• Brevo > Email marketing, SMS, chat, plus data management features

Or, you can save significant time and effort with Fello’s pre-built, tested, and optimized email drip campaigns you can turn on to engage and nurture your contacts. These pre-built campaigns include a sequence of emails that can run for a month or as long as needed, and feature dynamic, AI-powered, performance-based content for home sellers, such as:

• Home value updates
• Cash offer estimates
• Comparable market analysis (CMA)
• Advice and strategy for homeowners looking to sell their homes
• Selling after a listing expired 

Schedule a demo to see the pre-built drip campaigns in the Fello platform →

Common Mistakes to Avoid

As with any form of email marketing, drip campaigns can work for or against you. To avoid annoying your prospects and impacting your campaign’s success, make sure you’re not:

• Sending identical emails to all contacts
• Neglecting list maintenance (unsubscribe users immediately) 
• Using overly formal, generic, or impersonal language
• Focusing solely on selling
• Using inconsistent branding
• Ignoring mobile users

Sample First-Time Home Buyer Drip Campaign

To illustrate how a real estate drip campaign works in practice, here’s an example of a six-email sequence targeting first-time home buyers:

Drive Growth Today with Drip Campaigns

As you generate and nurture leads, ensure that real estate drip campaigns are a central part of your strategy. By implementing these best practices, you’ll create relevant, personalized message sequences that build trust with your audience, provide ongoing value, demonstrate your expertise, and help you close more deals.

Far more than just sending emails, successful drip campaigns build solid connections with prospective buyers and sellers that can help drive growth in your real estate business. 

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Ready to transform your seller lead nurturing strategy? Schedule a demo to see how Fello’s tools can help uncover more seller leads, get more listing appointments, and close more deals.

Already a Fello user? These best practices can work for you too. Schedule a call with your CSM to get help setting up audience segments and using the pre-built drip emails, or email success@hifello.com.