In the world of real estate marketing and recruitment, email remains to be one of the most effective channels for engagement. The average open rate plays between 15% to 25%, while the average click-through rate is about 2.5%. Considering that popular social media platforms receive under 1% organic engagement, these numbers are definitely impressive.
Of course, if you don’t know what you’re doing, even a highly effective channel like email can deliver less-than-stellar results. This is definitely not ideal for recruiters and real estate brokerages who need good people to join their teams.
Fortunately, there are many simple ways for you to maximize email recruitment. Here are some of them:
Ensure That Your Emails Are Getting Delivered
You may have the best recruitment email design. You may have mastered the art of crafting subject lines and composing short-but-sweet messages. However, these might not mean anything at all if your emails don’t get delivered. Right at the beginning, your email recruiting campaign has already failed.
There are many reasons why your emails might not make it to the recipient’s address. Sometimes, it’s through no fault of your own. The candidate might have a full inbox, which means your email will bounce. The receiving email server may also be offline at the moment, or handling too many emails at the time of sending.
In other situations, it may be your own failings. Perhaps you’ve inputted the wrong email or your email protocol has a conflict with the recipient. Either way, many of these issues can be avoided with a real estate recruiting software that comes with powerful email marketing and management features like Brokerkit.
Through Brokerkit, you also have access to customizable email templates, drip campaign automation, and various features that can help you further refine and get the most of your email recruitment strategies.
Segment Your Leads
Lead segmentation is an important component of successful email marketing, but there are some recruiters who forget about this crucial aspect. Admittedly, this can be a tedious activity because there are plenty of ways to do it. For example, you can segment potential candidates based on their location, amount of real estate experience, property expertise, and the like. Nevertheless, this is a necessary step that can increase open and response rates.
It can be helpful to let your recipients self-segment. For example, when you end your initial phone call or email, add an optional question that will prompt them to choose from a fixed set of responses. This way, you know what kind of message to send them the next time you reach out. What’s great about this method is that you can also use the information you acquire to personalize your emails. Ultimately, this can help increase open and response rates.
Track Your Links
Including links in your real estate recruiting emails is a great way to encourage further engagement. For better results, use a trackable URL for linking text and images. It can be something as simple as redirecting them to the careers page on the brokerage’s website or even a hyperlink that will open their email composer so they can respond to you quicker.
Using trackable links will allow you to gather even more useful data about your prospects and refine your recruiting tactics accordingly. For example, if you notice that more people click on images instead of linked text, then you can use more images in your next email.
Optimize Your Images and Videos
Nowadays, you can’t send plain text emails. You have to add visuals like photos and videos to increase engagement. However, adding too many might defeat your purpose. What’s more, adding high-resolution files that take too long to load might only lead to frustration.
In short, you need to optimize your content. Use well-shot photos but make sure they’re compressed to the right size. It’s also ideal to embed videos by using a link instead of including it directly on the email file. You should also keep in mind that many real estate agents are often on their phones. Thus, your images and other visual elements must be optimized for mobile.
Don’t Make Every Email About Recruiting
The main purpose of a recruiting email is to, well, recruit. However, it can be counterintuitive to send purely recruiting emails. Just imagine a particularly persistent salesperson in a mall who follows you around and goes on and on about their latest offers. It’s annoying, right? The same can be said about real estate recruiters who only send emails when they need to hire someone.
To achieve better results, it’s a good idea to also send periodic emails about something relevant to the recipient. You can use your segmentation classifications as a guide. For example, if you’re sending an email to someone new to the industry, perhaps you can direct them to an online workshop hosted by your brokerage.
The bottom line is to tailor-fit your messaging based on the recipients and don’t focus on recruitment all the time. Focus on helping your candidates achieve their goals and pretty soon, they’ll be joining your ranks.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to improve your email recruitment campaigns. Start with these simple methods and take your recruiting emails to the next level.