Best Email Marketing Software For Real Estate

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools you can use to grow your real estate business. It is a great way to reach and engage with your customers, and can help transform your business from a small local company into an international enterprise.

The best email marketing software for real estate is one that is easy to use, has great features, and can be customized to fit your needs. In this article, we’ve compiled some of our favorite options so you can find the perfect solution for your business.

Best Email Marketing Software For Real Estate

1. ActiveCampaign – The Most Advanced Features

With plans starting at $15 per month for 500 contacts ($9 per month if paid annually), ActiveCampaign is a bit pricier than other services – but it’s my top pick for email marketing because it knocks every feature out of the park (don’t take my word for it, read, and watch, my colleague’s ActiveCampaign review). Not only does it offer the essential features you need for real estate email marketing, it also provides extensive options that give you greater flexibility and control.

For example, its automation workflow is straightforward to use and highly comprehensive. By setting your own triggers for automated messages, you can easily send follow-up emails to people who visit specific property listings – or you could advertise houses (say, in Arizona) to contacts who clicked related links.

In-depth analytics allow you to examine and learn from your campaign’s stats. ActiveCampaign’s reports track purchases, visitors to your site, open rates, and more. These stats tell you what’s working and what isn’t, so you’ll know which emails are really resonating with your clients.

You can further target your marketing by segmenting your mailing list using tags you define yourself. This is great for real estate because it means you can organize your contacts by location, family size, budget, renters, buyers, and more.

How does this help hook customers? Well, it lets you send clients listings they’re more likely to be interested in. For example, you could advertise rental apartments in California to people on your list who are part of a small household and looking to rent. You could then send a different email about houses in the same area to those with larger households who are looking to buy.

Features

• Mobile-responsive emails. By default, all emails built in the editor work on mobile. This is essential because many people access their email on their phones.
• 125+ stylish templates. You’ll find templates for product listings, blog posts, announcements, and more. All of them can showcase high-res images and full-blown backgrounds.
• Email personalization. Clients’ names and locations can be added to the content of your emails to make them feel more personal.
• Robust automation. Set up automated messages with an expansive list of trigger recipes, including custom variables set by you.
• Mailing list segmentation. Organize your contacts using custom tags. This means you could, for example, set up two sublists of renters and buyers, then further segment those two lists by location, allowing you to send targeted emails to the subscribers who will most likely be interested.

See ActiveCampaign’s Latest Deals

2. GetResponse – Great Value for What You Get

GetResponse is generously priced for the number of contacts on its plans, with its Basic plan starting at $0 per month for up to 1,000 contacts (there’s also a free plan for up to 500 contacts). That’s pretty low compared to other services with comparable features and contacts. That makes GetResponse a great choice for real estate agents with smaller mailing lists.

However, you have to pay for the Plus plan to get automation workflows. And the Plus plan starts at $19.00 per month for 1,000 contacts, which is a lot pricier than other services that give you automation for cheaper (or even free).

If you decide to go with the Plus plan, automations are slick and easy to use. You first define a trigger based on a contact’s behavior, then automatically send a message when that trigger is met. It’s a great feature…even if the price is very high.

That said, the Basic plan does include autoresponders, which may still cover what you need. You can set up autoresponders to send follow-up emails, welcome new subscribers, and promote property listings.

GetResponse could be stronger when it comes to analytics and reporting, the only thing that it needs to improve on as you’ll see in our GetResponse review. Reports cover email open rates and which clients contacts use, but those kinds of statistics won’t help you very much with real estate. They won’t tell you which emails buyers have opened or the links they’ve clicked.

Features

• Email chat. Add a chat button to your email, which allows contacts to initiate a live chat directly from the email. Great if you want to be on hand to answer quick questions about properties.
• Autoresponders. Set up timed messages to send to subscribers. This allows you to set up a longer campaign without having to individually send each message.
• Webinar hosting. Nurture client relationships by hosting online events to share buyer information, real estate tips, or even hold digital open houses.
• Conversion funnels. Software that combines product catalogues, ad campaigns, and e-commerce to streamline your email marketing service with the business side of things. It’s a nice option if you’re looking for a service that will also handle your sales and help drive customers to your site.

See GetResponse’s Latest Deals

3. Benchmark – The Best Service for Beginners and A Great Free Plan

While Benchmark lacks the standout features offered by the likes of ActiveCampaign and GetResponse it’s one of the easiest services to pick up (just read up on our Benchmark review). That makes it a great choice for beginners or those looking for something simple.

The biggest downside to using Benchmark is the extra charge it applies for image hosting. You have to pay an additional $5 per month once you exceed 10MB on free plans or 10GB on paid plans, which is very easy to do if you upload a lot of high-res images of properties!

On the other hand, Benchmark does offer a free plan, which includes 200+ templates and a lite version of its premium plans’ automation feature. Most importantly, you’re able to set up follow-up emails to nurture leads.

For example, if a contact opens an email about a 2-bedroom house in Colorado, you can arrange for a message to automatically send in three days’ time about similar listings. Tailoring your content to what your subscribers are looking for helps them stay engaged and think of your listings first.

On the downside, Benchmark’s simplicity, ease of use, and low cost come at the price of pretty underwhelming reporting. Its analytics will only give you basic email stats, such as open rates and links clicked.

This means you’ll miss out on e-commerce tracking and learning about how contacts behave on your website, which is really the information you need to up your real estate marketing game.

Features

• Real estate templates. 200+ free templates to choose from – including a template designed specifically for real estate, which is a nice plus.
• Polls and surveys. Build questionnaires to send to your customers. You can learn common trends, such as differences between buyers and renters, and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
• Free automation. Even with the free plan, you get basic automations to set up time-based campaigns.
• A/B testing. You’re able to set up 2-3 tests for the following types: subject line, campaign vs. campaign, multiple variables, or delivery time. You can then examine which strategy secures the most clicks and opens.

Try Benchmark’s Free Plan

4. Sendinblue – Solid Automation with SMS Marketing

Sendinblue is primarily suited to smaller businesses, so real estate agents with shorter mailing lists will benefit most from this service. You can store unlimited contacts with all Sendinblue’s plans, even on the free plan. The Lite plan starts at $25.00 per month, which isn’t terrible, even if it’s a bit steep compared to some competitors.

Sendinblue offers pretty solid marketing automation to boost client engagement. You can set up automatic messages when visitors to your website perform specific actions, such as viewing apartment listings in Seattle, or when contacts open specific campaigns, like sending mid-budget home listings to anyone who opens an email listing a moderately priced house.

Along with emails, you can also set up SMS for contacts who sign up on mobile. This is a great way to further engage with your clients and turn leads into customers. In fact, it’s not just SMS marketing and automation, Sendinblue scored impressively high for its features in our Sendinblue review.

For fine-tuning your marketing strategy, Sendinblue gives you basic statistics for campaigns, both email and SMS, and conversions. Reporting on conversion rate is especially great – this number tells you the percentage of subscribers who make a purchase after reading your email, helping you assign your emails a financial value.

Features

• Group segmentation. Four types of segmentation – demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic – allow you to organize your contacts.
• If/else automation. You can build automations based on both the activity and inactivity of your subscribers, like whether or not they visit a page for a home listing on your site.
• SMS marketing. By coupling Sendinblue’s extensive automation feature with SMS, you can really up your text marketing game.
• Basic CRM. Track the activity of your contacts, such as clients you’ve had meetings or phone calls with. This helps you stay on top of your contacts and turn leads into deals.

Try Sendinblue’s Free Plan

5. AWeber – Insightful Subscriber Reports

AWeber is great for realtors – for starters, they’re aware of their real estate clients, and provide a 19-page sector toolkit to help you get started. I thought this was a really nice touch, especially for a service not outright branded as a tool for real estate.

AWeber’s reporting is particularly strong – even with the free plan you’ll get automation tools and reporting covering geographical stats and subscriber activity over time, so you can really observe your leads.

This is a powerful tool for real estate agents who mean business, although I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for something lighter or beginner friendly – I’d redirect you to Benchmark for that.

The only potential issue I found is that AWeber’s automations only operate on time-based triggers or when a new contact first subscribes. You can’t set behavior triggers for when a contact clicks a link, opens an offer, or visits a certain page.

So while you could send house listings in Wyoming every three days to contacts who live there, for example, if someone opened an email about a property in Portland, you couldn’t send a follow-up email with additional properties available in the area.

Features

• 600+ templates. There are plenty of templates to choose from, more than most services offer – although many designs feel a little bit dated.
• AMP emails. Add image carousels in your emails to showcase a rotating display of high-resolution pictures. This could be a neat way to show multiple properties or different views of the same house, although it can look a bit old-fashioned.
• Sales tracking. View reports on which of your customers are making purchases and how they’re interacting with your site and campaigns. In fact, reporting is one of the things my colleague was most impressed with in our AWeber review.
• Form builder. You can easily create sign-up forms to add your site to gather data and help grow your mailing list.

Try AWeber’s Free Plan

6. Constant Contact – A Service with Realtors in Mind

Constant Contact offers more real estate support than I’ve seen from most other services – including design tips for sharing informative tips, community news, and property listings. I always appreciate it when a service is aware of their users, and love that Constant Contact includes features specifically for realtors.

Another useful feature for realtors is Constant Contact’s tagging system. It’s very easy to use and helpful for keeping track of your contacts. You can add custom tags to subscribers who have viewed a specific listing or visited one of your open houses. Then you can send people with those tags appropriate messages.

The downside of Constant Contact is that its analytics and reports only cover the bare minimum (the one thing that lets it down in our Constant Contact review): email stats, contact trends, and e-commerce sales. You won’t get the deep insights you’ll get with ActiveCampaign’s behavior and visitor tracking, although its analytics will help you determine which campaigns are (or aren’t) leading to sales.

Features

• 240+ templates. Many template options can easily be designed for information sharing and new listings.
• Easy contact management. Tag and segment your subscribers with custom labels, making organization easy. Additionally, you can import lists from a file or spreadsheet, including Excel and Outlook.
• Integrated social marketing. You can join your Constant Contact account with your Facebook and Instagram accounts. This allows you to monitor your ad analytics, as well as posts and direct messages, through Constant Contact.
• Eventbrite integration. By integrating Eventbrite, you gain a pretty easy way to create and manage events, from conferences, to open houses, to virtual tours.

Try Constant Contact for Free

7. Mailchimp – A Great Option For Small Realtors

The free version of Mailchimp offers all the key features a realtor needs – as long as your contact list doesn’t exceed 2,000 (which is fairly generous for no cost!). You’ll get access to basic automations, reports, and marketing CRM. If you have a larger mailing list, want to send more emails, or want access to more features like A/B testing, you’ll need to go premium.

Email personalization is extremely flexible thanks to Mailchimp’s merge tag feature. Since you can define the tags however you want, you’re free to personalize subject lines and body content in unlimited ways – you could add in a contact’s name, location, or even a personal factoid like favorite color! Learn more about the tag feature in our Mailchimp review.

While such flexible personalization makes Mailchimp a pretty solid choice, it is unfortunately lacking in the image department. Image uploads are capped at 1MB, so you won’t be able to showcase large high-resolution pictures of properties you want to advertise.

If you want to flash big, high-res pics, I recommend ActiveCampaign or AWeber instead.

Features

• 100+ templates. Templates are well-designed, but none are pre-made for real estate.
• Merge tags for email. Insert personalized content based on your contacts’ data in the corresponding tag.
• Expansive automation options. Trigger options for sending follow-ups, sharing relevant information, contacting website visitors, recommending listings, and more.
• Audience tracking. Reports offer insights into who is interacting with your marketing, such as when a contact clicks a link, makes a purchase, or downloads something.

mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing company that was founded by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius in 2001.

Initially, it was just a side project meant to help Ben and Dan’s web design agency clients build email lists, and it remained such for the first six years of its existence, bringing in just a few thousand dollars a month.

Original Mailchimp
Original Mailchimp (Image source: Sumo)
However, in 2007 Ben and Dan realized that their hearts weren’t in the web design agency business anymore, and decided to focus on Mailchimp full-time.

(Suggested reading: Your Guide to Starting and Running a Successful WordPress Agency).

They didn’t take any outside investment and financed the business growth by reinvesting its profits back into it.

Since then, Mailchimp has become one of the most popular and well-known email marketing software out there with recent changes that are turning it into a fully-fledged Marketing platform.

According to Forbes, in 2018 it had 20 million users, generated over $600 million in revenue, and was valued at $4.2 billion.

The co-founders remain committed to the business and have no intention to sell:

“Go public? Not worth the headache!” Chestnut says. Sell? The founders look incredulous.
“To this day, it’s just a funny feeling that we can help” explains Kurzius. Chestnut chimes in: “I want people to see that the past 17 years were just a warm-up.”
Pros and Cons of Mailchimp
What is the best email marketing software on the market today?

It’s impossible to answer this question. It all depends on the needs of your business. So what you really need to ask is: “Which email marketing software is the best for me?”

MailChimp, just like any other tool, has its pros and cons and works better for some people than for others. If you’re curious, we use and love Mailchimp at Kinsta.

Pros of Mailchimp
Established Business and Committed Founders
Going with a fledgling startup is always a risk because it might fold at any moment.

There’s something called Lindy Effect. It is a theory that says that the future life expectancy of a non-perishable thing is proportional to its current age. So, for example, if a company has been in business for one year, you can expect it to be in business for one more year, but if a company has been in business for 18 years like Mailchimp, you can expect it to stay in business for another 18 years.

This is an important consideration because an email marketing software provider going bust would disrupt your email marketing efforts which might cost you a lot of money in lost revenue.

Easy to Use, Has All the Necessary Features, Is Reliable
18 years in business also means that Mailchimp has a polished product.

Sure, software is always work in progress, but they have had the time to work out the user interface (though some would argue that there’s a lot of space for improvement there since learning how to use Mailchimp can take some effort), add necessary features, and ensure deliverability.

Free to start with
If you are just starting out, the chances are that the money is already tight, and paying $30+ monthly subscription fee to email your three subscribers might seem ludicrous.

However, with MailChimp, you don’t have to pay anything until you reach 2,000 email subscribers, at which point you are probably making enough money from your list to justify the expense of upgrading to a premium plan.

Mailchimp pricing
Mailchimp pricing
Cons of Mailchimp
It’s a Generic Email Marketing Software
Mailchimp’s target audience appears to be anyone and everyone who wants to build an email list.

And they are doing the whole casting a wide net thing really well. It doesn’t matter whether you are a hobbyist, an online creator, or an ecommerce entrepreneur, Mailchimp has got you covered.

However, serving such a broad target audience means that while it is an okay solution, it is not necessarily the best solution for your niche.

For example, if you are a hobbyist that only needs the most basic email marketing functionality, then MoonMail might be a better option.

MoonMail
MoonMail
Meanwhile, if you are an online creator, then ConvertKit was built with you in mind, and their mission is to help creators earn a living online.

ConvertKit
ConvertKit
And if you have an ecommerce business, then you might want to check out SmartrMail or Drip:

SmartrMail
SmartrMail
So you need to see whether it makes sense to go with Mailchimp when there are niche options available.

While You Can Start for Free with Mailchimp, It Can Get Expensive as Your List Grows
Mailchimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers, but how much does it cost after that?

You can use the cost calculator on their pricing page to work out how much you’d have to pay once you reach a specific number of subscribers.

Mailchimp pricing calculator
Mailchimp pricing calculator
Mailchimp has drawn criticism over their pricing which some people consider to be unfair.

For example, the bootstrapping star Pieter Levels switched from Mailchimp to SendGrind in 2017:

His main reason for switching was that Mailchimp was charging him $250/month which he called “predatory”:

However, to be fair to Mailchimp, their pricing isn’t that outrageous when compared to some of their competitors but it’s still something to keep in mind if the price is an issue to you.

Conclusion

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines