With BuildTopia Marketing’s flexible email marketing templates and intuitive designer, it’s now easy for homebuilders to send emails that get responses.
Email marketing allows you to connect with your target audience to promote your brand, new homes and, or services to increase sales. Email marketing continues to be a powerful tool for homebuilders, they can advertise new home listings, share some news, and run customer surveys.
One of the challenges facing homebuilders today is that they lack the skills and expertise in-house to create professional-looking emails that get clicks. People receive more and more emails all the time, and it can be challenging to stand out in full inboxes. To overcome this challenge, you don’t need to hire skilled people, just use the right tool.
Spend thousands of dollars on complex marketing technologies. You need easy-to-use marketing software that is integrated with your existing CRM system, and the ability to successfully run it without the support of a large team of IT or Marketing professionals.
With BuildTopia Marketing’s campaign builder, it’s easy to find the right email templates for any message—whether you’re listing new homes, welcoming new homeowners, or simply sharing some news or your latest residential development.
How do I build an email list?
Building and maintaining an engaged subscriber list will give you the highest ROI, when it is made up of people who want to receive your messages – in other words, people who opted in on purpose. Although building a clean list can take more work at the outset of your email marketing strategy, to help you along the way BuildTopia Marketing allows you to create campaign audience lists based on practically any defined information you already have in your BuildTopia CRM.
There are lots of ways to build your email lists, but we’ve narrowed it down to a few that work best.
How to build an email list?
- Create a signup form on your website. When people come to your website for the first time and are interested in the homes you are building, they’ll want a way to stay in the know about your brand. Simply create a form for newsletter signups next to your listings page to collect customer data from your visitors.
- Use a good old-fashioned signup sheet. Whether it’s at your show house, design center, or an event that you’re hosting or attending. When you’re surrounded by people who are interested in what you do, provide the opportunity for them to sign up and learn more.
- Gain signups through social media. If you have an engaged social media following, tap into that resource to see your email list grow. Share your signup form on your social channels.
Want to add more subscribers to an existing list?
- Host a contest or offer a discount. Offering people an incentive to sign up for your email list—like a contest, works great. Try offering a discount code for a first-time buyer or a prize for some lucky new subscriber.
- Make your emails informative and nice to share. When you create beautiful, compelling emails, with a lot of valuable information, such as “new home purchasing tips”, people will want to share them. BuildTopia Marketing gives you features that let the word about your emails spread quickly (like share buttons to forward emails and social media).
- Build a referral program. Referral programs offer one more way to grow your email list. Using referral codes for subscribers to invite their own contacts for the chance to receive a reward for a successful sale, can drive email signups way, way up.
Email Design Tips
As the adage goes, “presentation is everything”. You only have one opportunity at a first impression, so we’ve compiled our best tips for homebuilders who want to send emails that subscribers click. Design is as much science as it is art, and by using BuildTopia Marketing’s ready-to-use email templates, we take the guesswork out of what can seem like the most challenging part of sending good emails.
Design Tip 1: Use a template or start from scratch
Sometimes it’s easiest to start from an existing template and make it your own. Select the starter template that best matches the layout you’d like to use, then use the drag and drop editor to add other content and apply colors and styles. Starting from scratch often leads to formatting headaches that can be avoided by modifying an existing template to suit your needs. Most importantly, instead of starting over every time you want to send an email, save this template you created so you can use and modify it again and again.
Design Tip 2: Brand recognition and continuity
Make sure the reader knows who the message is coming from by simply glancing at your emails. This can be achieved by putting your logo or company name at the top of the email, but also the colors you use. Be consistent. The fewer colors you use, the cleaner your design will look, which means the reader won’t be distracted from your message. Pick colors that your brand uses elsewhere and stick to just one or two colors for your emails.
Design Tip 3: Create a structure through hierarchy
Use headings and bulleted lists to divide content into sections that are easy to understand by putting the most important information first for people who are short on time and simply wish to scan through the content.
Design Tip 4: Use visual aids
Nobody likes reading a long, text-heavy email! Make a statement with beautiful photographical images. When selecting photos to use, try paring down the color in the surrounding design to make the images the central focus. You don’t have to be a photographer to get professional quality photos. BuildTopia Marketing offers you numerous free stock images to choose from, or simply upload your own. Just make sure your images are sized correctly to avoid squishing or stretching and include only the most essential images to keep the email file size down.
Bonus Tip: Choose a font that matches your brand and keep body text size within the 14-16px range to keep it legible. Serif fonts tend to suggest sophistication, while sans serif fonts feel a little more casual. Arial font is a good middle ground. You can use a mix, but we recommend limiting your email to two fonts tops.
Design Tip 5: Keep your message concise
Some of the most effective emails have one clear message. If you have multiple messages to send, consider breaking them up into a series of emails instead and reduce the length of your email until you can simplify no more.
Design Tip 6: Prioritize content from top to bottom
Most people spend less than 10 seconds reading marketing emails, so keep it short and to the point, prioritizing your content from top to bottom and use plenty of white space to give your content some breathing room.
Bonus Tip: When it comes to aligning your content, centering work best if your content is minimal (for example, one large photo and just a few sentences). Left alignment works best if you have more content, it will make it more legible. To maintain harmony, always keep alignment consistent across the entire email.
Design Tip 7: Have clear Calls To Action
“Calls to Action” or simply CTAs, as the marketers refer to them, either link readers to external content or ask them to do something. You can link buttons, text or images. Just don’t include too many CTAs in one email or readers won’t know what to click. Keep CTAs clear and short, to tell them what they should do, using active language (for example: Buy Now or Sign Up).
How to improve your email deliverability
If your emails aren’t getting to your customers’ inboxes, then there’s a good chance that your email program needs some refreshing with these email deliverability tips.
What is email deliverability?
Deliverability measures how frequently your contacts receive your emails into their inbox. It’s 1 of the most important factors for email marketing success, as it’s the ultimate metric that everyone cares about because landing in the inbox is how your messages get opened.
Common email deliverability problems
There are several factors that might negatively impact email deliverability, including bad list quality, missing email authentication, or low engagement. Improving your email deliverability often starts with identifying what’s wrong, which can often be a combination of two or more of the above. Here is an attempt to simplify this:
- Engagement rate – inbox providers (such as Gmail, Outlook, etc.) look at how users engage with the content of your emails. Open rates and click rates are both positive engagement signals that inbox providers will look at when determining where to send your emails.
- Email list quality – Bad email list quality can cause deliverability problems. If too many of the recipients block your emails, your domain could end up on an email blocklist like Spamhaus, causing inbox providers to send your emails straight to the spam folder, if they accept your message at all.
- Domain reputation – Blocklist providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) keep a list of spam traps – email addresses that aren’t operated by real users – that are designed to catch senders with poor sending practices. If your email domain ends up in on these databases, your emails will be blocklisted and won’t reach their intended destination.
Tips to improve your email deliverability
So, what can you do to ensure your emails end up in your subscriber inboxes? Here are a few tips:
- Tip #1: Keep your mailing list up to date – Older mailing lists contain outdated, abandoned, and uninterested recipients that can have a negative impact on your email deliverability rates. Avoid the Spam folder by validating your subscriber emails regularly and removing inactive subscribers.
- Tip #2: Have new subscribers verify their address – We’ve all mistyped our email address or perhaps we deliberately gave an incorrect email address to avoid being spammed. For a variety of reasons, it is important to request new subscribers to validate their email before being placed on your mailing list. The simple solution to verify the email address at the point of interaction using a double opt-in tool.
- Tip #3: Adhere to subscribers’ expectations – Recipients’ expectations are at the heart of email deliverability. Don’t invade your subscribers’ inboxes with your content on a daily routine. It might improve your brand relevancy today, but will hurt your sender’s reputation in the long term. Why? Because these subscribers didn’t request to receive regular emails and may ignore the message, mark it as spam, or unsubscribe. ISPs will also pick up on this low engagement and downgrade your sender’s reputation, hurting your overall deliverability rate.
- Tip #4: Monitor engagement metrics and spam complaints – One person may not care if they receive several reminders or new home offers from you, but another may protest about their full inbox. But how exactly do you know if your subscribers still want your communications and are engaging with them? Open and click-through rates, as well as unsubscribes and spam complaints, can help you understand whether your audience is finding your emails valuable or not. BuildTopia Marketing’s integration with Mailgun, ensures your emails reach their intended destination. This is made possible through using Mailgun’s proven sending infrastructure, IP warmup, reputation management and more.
- Tip #5: Don’t attach PDFs to your emails – By attaching a PDF to your mail, you may think you’re making things easier for the intended recipient, but this could give yourself a one-way ticket to the spam folder and a lower delivery rate. Instead, offer a link to where it can be downloaded, and if they’re really necessary, find a way to send them within the body of your email. This leads to less spam and better deliverability.
Key takeaways
Email remains an incredible standout opportunity as a digital marketing channel for homebuilders looking to stretch their marketing dollars. With tools such as BuildTopia Marketing, sophisticated marketing technologies are now accessible to smaller builders offering them the power to engage with their audience on a higher level, and outperforms social in regard to reach, personalization and content value. In fact, it has the highest ROI of any marketing channel, typically with a 50–100 times higher click-through rate than Facebook and Twitter. For more information about BuildTopia Marketing, Click Here.