How to Use Mailchimp for Your Real Estate Email Marketing Needs

If you’re playing your cards right as a Realtor, that client database just keeps getting bigger and bigger. If that’s your reality — congrats! You are killing it.

Unfortunately, it also means that emailing and following up with clients and leads gets increasingly complicated. And eventually, your current email client may just fail altogether. Enter: spinning wheel of death. 

Before you throw your computer out the window (been there), consider investing in a more robust email service provider (ESP) like Mailchimp.

Mailchimp has become the go-to ESP for small businesses for a few reasons: it’s fairly user-friendly compared to other options. It’s affordable. And it has some great features including an option for launching a web page.

Of course, there is a small learning curve when you’re just getting started and that’s where a nudge in the right direction can be a game changer. By following the below tips, you’ll be able to automate a huge chunk of your email efforts, add some pizzaz to your designs, and even keep a closer eye on how certain emails perform with any given audience.

Let’s get down to it:

Import your contacts using Tags

The first and most challenging step of onboarding a new ESP is getting your contacts ported over in an organized fashion. We won’t cover how to format your contacts in this guide, but you can find a sample CSV in Mailchimp when you’re ready to go.

What we do want to emphasize for Realtors specifically is the importance of using tags. You’ll want to add all your clients to the same Audience, but include tags for any potential criteria that may determine a group you want to send to. For example, maybe you serve multiple communities, Hodsonville and Peer Town, and send community-specific newsletters to each group. You’ll want to make sure you tag each contact Hodsonville or Peer Town when importing them into your audience. 

You’ll likely also want to be sure you tag clients by their location in the sale funnel. Think Past Clients, Leads, Lapsed Leads, etc.

Tagging your audience will allow you to easily separate them by Segments once you’re ready to send. We’ll get to that later on.

Authenticate your custom email domain if you use one

Many Realtors opt for branded email addresses and for good reason. For example, an address like [email protected] feels a lot more legitimate than [email protected] when you’re looking for a real estate agent. The client will know immediately that they are emailing an agent — which is what you want!

It’s more than okay to send from a branded email address in Mailchimp, but you’ll want to be sure to take the extra step to authenticate your email domain. This will help make sure your emails don’t end up in the Junk folder instead of in front of your clients’ eyes. 

To authenticate your domain, follow these simple steps:

1. Click “Website” in the left-hand tool bar column
2. Choose “Domains”
3. If you’ve already added your domain, click “authenticate” and follow the instructions provided
4. If you have not added your domain, do so first and start these instructions from the top

Create segments for your audience 

As mentioned at the start of this article, tagging your clients allows you to easily create Segments. Think of Segments like designated email lists based on certain criteria.

Let’s say for example, you want to send to a list of Past Clients located in Peer Town. You would need to: 

1. Click Audience on the left-hand tool bar column
2. Click Segments
3. Click Create Segment
4. Now you can add your criteria. You’ll first want to toggle to “Contacts Match All Of The Following Conditions” since you want the clients to be both Past Clients AND in Peer Town
5. Next, toggle and click Contact Is Tagged “Past Clients”
6. Click Add to add an additional condition. Then add “Contact Is Tagged Peer Town”
7. Finally, you’ll click Preview the Segment and name it something you will remember when you’re ready to send

Once you’ve created your segments, sending campaigns to specified groups will be simple. And by adding all your contacts to the same audience, you won’t end up with duplicate contacts. No one wants two of the same emails from you (sorry).

Utilize templates

If your title is Real Estate Agent and not Designer, you likely don’t want to spend too much of your time designing emails. Luckily, this is where templates come in to save the day. Using templates allows your emails to look professional without needing coding or design skills. To get started:

1. Click Campaigns on the left-hand tool bar column
2. Click Email Templates on the left-hand yellow tool bar
3. Click Create New Template on the top right corner
4. Choose between a Layout (which will involve adding your own imagery) or a Theme (which is already 99% ready to go)
5. Once you’re done editing the template, make sure to save it. When you’re setting up a new email campaign, you’ll want to click on Saved Templates in the Design stage to access what you’ve created. 

As an agent, the first thing we’d suggest doing is creating a simple text template with your branding, signature, and social accounts included. You might also decide to create a general “newsletter” template for your monthly or quarterly update. These are templates that you’ll use again and again so are worth putting some effort into at the get-go. 

Launching Your Mailchimp Account

These tips are just the start of what you can do with Mailchimp, and we’ll continue adding more blog posts on different features you’ll want to use once you’re up and running. Above all, know that setting up Mailchimp may take some time upfront, but it will pay dividends in keeping your funnel thriving from here on out.