How (and Why) to Build a Real Estate Marketing Segmentation Strategy
As part of your overall real estate marketing strategy, one of your main goals should be to continually remind your marketing database that you exist, so that when it’s time for them to make a real estate decision, they’ll remember you, your brand, and your business, and reach out to you for help.
And a really effective way to remind them you exist is through an email marketing strategy that sends your marketing database information that’s relevant to them on a consistent, reliable basis.
However, your marketing database is made up of different people, with different needs, and different wants, so to be really effective, your email marketing strategy should be planned and executed with that in mind.
And the most effective way to send out email marketing based on understanding your database’s needs is by segmenting your marketing database.
★ Want to learn more about email marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- Email Marketing Best Practices for Real Estate Agents
- Automating Your Email Marketing List Building
- Why You Should Never Stop Building Your Email Marketing Database
Segmentation begins in whatever email marketing software you’re using (like MailChimp, Active Campaign, HubSpot, etc), by using the tagging feature. While it may be called different things in different software, almost every email marketing software allows you some sort of way to tag or otherwise identify/categorize your contacts.
If you’re tagging your contacts properly, it also makes your database contact list management a lot easier.
For example, it’s totally possible that you’d only have one, big, main contact list in your marketing database, and by tagging your contacts correctly, you’d be able to call out contacts with certain interests or historical information based on the tag(s) you applied to them.
One way to decide just how segmented you want it to be is based on the amount of effort you’re willing to put into your marketing; and that’s because the more segmented your database is, the more opportunity you have to send targeted marketing (which could be several times for month if you have a lot of segmentation).
There’s no true right way to segment your marketing database, and it can be segmented in many different ways based on how you plan to use it. For example:
- By transaction type: buyer, seller, investor, etc.
- By transaction property type: freehold, townhouse, etc.
- By geographical location or neighborhood.
- By period of time: transacted 1 year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, etc.
- By lead source: search engine, downloaded content, client referral, etc.
- By lifecycle stage: incoming lead, ready to buy, ready to sell, etc.
- By all or some of the above (it’s absolutely fine, and more strategic, to have contacts with multiple segmentation values assigned).
Segmenting your marketing database allows you to tailor your email marketing to address the needs and wants of your contacts more strategically and more specifically.
★ Segmenting your marketing database plays an important role in a successful lead generation strategy. To learn more, have a look at this post called: What To Do If You Have a Real Estate Lead Generation Problem.
For example, sending out a general monthly or bi-weekly newsletter to your database is a great way to keep in touch with them and remind them you exist, but it’s much more effective to be able to send a monthly newsletter to your contacts that specifically:
- Bought a condo,
- As an investor,
- In a specific neighborhood,
- Within the last 5 years.
If you were able to identify your contacts specifically through segmentation of your marketing database, you’d be able to send some very targeted email marketing campaigns that directly address what that type of person would be interested in, which is more likely going to get them to reach out to you, in addition to reminding them that you exist.
While it’s certainly more work to do, it’s also certainly worthwhile to do it. Being able to send the right information, to the right person, at the right time, through marketing segmentation is a lot more likely to get better, more targeted results rather than sending the same thing, at the same time, to everyone in your database.
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