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Portland Real Estate Marketing Tool Review – Constant Contact
The Portland Oregon Real Estate market is still going strong, but many Realtors I encounter are saying they are having harder times moving their listings. By utilizing an excellent marketing tool like Constant Contact, you can get more listings and move them more quickly.
As the RMLSWeb Market Watch shows, prices are still appreciating in the Portland Oregon Real Estate market. Last month, new listings grew 4.8% over the previous year yet closed sales dropped 8.3% and pending sales dropped 16.4%, according to RMLS. So if you are battling the Portland real estate market, you are not alone. But it is time to start considering new, innovative marketing strategies. Email marketing is one I am constantly amazed that Realtors do not have in place already and a year from now, you will be seriously hurting if you don’t have a program in place. Constant Contact will help you to get your distribution and tracking in place.
Constant Contact is an email newsletter distribution provider. What I mean by this is they do not provide content. Content is up to you. They handle the distribution, list management, design and tracking aspects. Many Realtors immediately inquire about a different service that will take care of the content as well. I can say that when I come across people in the Portland real estate market, I subscribe to their newsletters. I want to see what they’re talking about and how they’re marketing. I can say that in one day, I received three (THREE!) identical email newsletters with the only difference being the name and logo on the email. This was in one day. I received several more throughout the month that were also identical. I doubt I am on every (or even a third) of the Realtor mailing lists out there, but I received three identical email newsletters in one day. This is the biggest problem with using a content provider. I can tell you that I deleted all three emails without even looking at them.
Writing the content can take as little as half an hour. Include a brief section on something personal, perhaps a charity or community organization you are working with. Have another section about the Portland Oregon real estate market. Information for this section can be sited from the RMLSWeb Market Action Report. Finally, have a “Featured Listing” section. Go over the highlights of one of your listings. Rotate this listing with each email you send. All of this information can be provided in very little time.
Now that you’re over your apprehension regarding creating content, let Constant Contact do the rest for you. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), email usage increased 10% from 2005 to 2006 as a method to stay in touch with former customers. As I stated earlier, if you don’t implement this now, you’ll be kicking yourself next year when that number is even higher. As I point out in my Green Realtor class, according to “50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth”, 100 million trees are used to produce junk mail, 250,000 homes could be heated with one day’s supply of junk mail and Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail every year. If you’re sending out post cards and paper newsletters to market yourself and your listings, you are contributing to those numbers.
Since I know most of us want to know about the costs, let me first tell you about the returns. According to the Direct Marketing Association in their October 2006 study, they found that the return on investment (ROI) for each dollar spent on print advertising was $7.20. The ROI for each dollar spent on email advertising was $51.45. That’s over 7 times the ROI!
Now let me tell you about the pricing. Constant Contact charges based on the number of people on your email list, not how many emails you send. If you have 500 or fewer people on your list (it has been very rare that anyone I’ve met actually has more than that), it will only cost you $15 per month. Up to 2,500 people is only $30 per month.
Another great benefit is the design capabilities. Constant Contact uses a wizard based, online process to customize their many templates. You can upload photos, change colors, change font sizes, styles and colors – really all aspects of the newsletter. All of this is available without knowing any coding or programming. When you’ve created your “brand”, you can simply copy the layout for future emails. Realistically, expect to spend about an hour customizing a template to your look and feel. But this is a one-time expense of your time.
The last incredible benefit I will mention is the tracking capabilities. Constant Contact provides you with rich statistical data, so you can actually see how successful your campaigns are. It shows you how many (and which) people unsubscribed, actually opened your emails, clicked your links and forwarded your emails. This is a great monitoring tool to see how successful your email campaigns have been.
How do you market this wonderful tool in the Portland real estate market though? Every person you meet, along with collecting phone numbers, get their email. The Gen X and Y customers who are looking to buy their first home (or first move-up home) typically prefer to be contacted via email anyway. Put that person into your Constant Contact database. When you go to a listing presentation, you can tell your potential customer, “I have an email newsletter of XYZ number of people interested in Portland real estate that I contact every other week and YOUR house will be my Featured Listing”. Regardless of if the house sells from an email lead, this is an impressive statement to give at a listing presentation that will set you apart from the crowd. If you are working with a person employed in engineering, finance or another number-happy career, feel free to divulge more statistics such as your open and forward rates.
For $15-30 per month, you really can’t go wrong.
If you need help setting up your account, customizing your template or coming up with creative ways to obtain email addresses from your customers, don’t hesitate to contact me:
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Comments
Nick:
Great article! Thanks for all the advice with the sellpdx.com blog and email marketing.
Best
-Nick