Email is still a major marketing tool, and real estate drip email campaigns are a favorite marketing method for real estate agents and brokerages. A popular approach is to just buy a set of campaigns and start sending them out, as illustrated by a recent exchange in a national real estate website forum:

Question:"Does anyone have a good buyer drip email campaign that they are using for internet buyers with no phone numbers. I would like to send something of value to them."

Reply:"Our drip campaigns come with all the emails created for you and ready to send out. They can be set to go out automatically. The system comes with a comprehensive library of email and letter templates."

There are also many real estate website providers with drip email campaign modules. A common characteristic or offering is multiple campaigns targeted to buyers, sellers, investors, etc. Some of these campaigns run out for a year or multiple years with hundreds of emails. They are very similar, as how many things can you say to a homeowner about cleaning up the yard and house before showings?

These campaigns must work to some degree, or there wouldn't be real estate professionals all around the country paying for them. But is "to some degree" all you want for performance? Also, opt-out or unsubscribe rates are very high when these campaigns are employed. When real estate professionals complain that Internet leads aren't very productive, many times it's not the leads but the follow-up that's at fault.

An alternative real estate drip email strategy:

Instead of buying hundreds of emails, why not try writing just a few. I am a buyer-only broker, so I don't market to sellers. My buyer drip email campaign consists of four automated drip emails...just four. That doesn't mean that I stop emailing prospects after those four emails, but I change the frequency and content focus after them. Here's my program, and it works very well for me:

• Four emails over a four week period are the automated drip portion of my follow-up. This is the right duration for my vacation home market, but could be very different for yours.
• The first email thanks them, points them to the MLS area map page on my site, and tells them that they'll only be receiving four emails from me in the series. Our MLS covers an entire county, and has 41 named areas. My site visitors find the MLS area map and information about the areas very helpful, and there is a high click-through from this email. Also, telling them only four emails were coming dropped my unsubscribe rate by two-thirds.
• Each of the other three emails link the prospect to another popular area of my site with information most requested by email.
• The fourth and final email tells them that the automated series is over, but I'm placing them on a list to receive my quarterly market sold property statistics reports, just four emails a year. I almost never have anyone unsubscribe at this point. They stay on the list, I keep sending out the reports, and at some point they make a more substantive contact.

All prospects, whether buyers, sellers or investors, like market stats. As a vacation home market can be shopped for years while they visit, this system works very well. For faster markets where people are actually moving in for jobs, etc., you could modify the stats reports to monthly. I create them right out of the MLS system with a simple report request and print to PDF. In the emails I add some commentary and my opinions about market activity and trends. It's fast and easy to do, though not as easy as just letting a bunch of pre-written emails loose. It does work much better though.

More about Jim in his Bio