Generating qualified buyer and seller real estate leads from cold email is one of the most overlooked lead generation strategies in the industry. Think about it a single email has the potential to take your business from 0 to hero just like that.
Cold emails can turn website visitors, prospects met at open houses, friends of a friend, or a random homeowner with whom you have their email addresses into clients.
Here’s how to write a cold email that generates real estate leads and converts them into clients.
- Find a Lead Pool
Whether you are finding potential prospects from running open houses, cold calling, direct mail, SEO, or other marketing strategies, the first step in every cold email campaign is to find a pond to drop your bait. In other words, see where the prospects are and get your message in front of their face.
Next, capture their personal information such as their name, number, interest in buying or selling, and email address. Once we have the data, we want to segment it into groups.
- Sellers Relocating
- Sellers Downsizing
- Sellers Moving Up
- Landlord Selling a Rental Property
- First Time Home Sellers
- First Time Home Buyers
- Buyers Looking to Move Up
- Buyers Wanting to Downsize
- Etc.
If applicable, we want to segment our data by market, price, and timeline for our seller and buyer prospects. The majority of good cold emailing starts in the quality of our prospects. The more qualified our prospects are for buying what we are selling, the higher the cold email conversion rate.
- Create and Test a Subject Line
Subject lines are crucial to our real estate cold email campaigns. Without a good subject line, our email will never be read. This means it does not matter how good we write our cold email copy if it is never opened. Keep in mind people are used to disqualifying spam emails daily.
How do we make our subject lines stand out?
Our goal is to stay out of the spam box and trash folder. Writing a personal, relevant, and engaging subject line that intrigues the recipient to open will achieve our goal.
For instance, let’s say you met Todd at a recent open house, and you talked about how great the Sarasota area is in Florida.
Your subject line could read something like:
“Todd, Here are some Great Properties in Sarasota from Our Convo Today”
- Personalized First Line
Following the subject line, the personalized first line is arguably the second most crucial component of a cold email. Similar to a subject line, the first line carries a lot of weight on whether the recipient will open your email or not. In most email clients, including Gmail, which accounts for 28% of the market share, the first line is visible before opening the email. For this reason, an attention-grabbing personalized first line that leaves the recipient wanting more is crucial to excellent open rates. We aim for our cold email campaigns for a strict 60% open rate or higher goal.
Once the recipient has opened your cold email, the first line must grab their attention. Good opening lines are typically compliments, personalized relational comments, congratulations on achievement, and more.
Following up on our example from earlier with meeting Todd at an open house, here is what an excellent first line may look like for him.
“Hey Todd, nice to meet you at the open house today; loved the chat about [insert subject]”
Keep testing the subject lines and first lines until you achieve a 60% open rate or higher on your cold email campaigns.
- Body of the Cold Email
The body of the email is short and straight to the point. This is where you give them a pitch on your services while demonstrating past success. A good body massage maybe read something along the lines of, “we just helped five buyers find their dream home in Sarasota within the past three months, they purchased their homes 30% under market value, and each included a pool. We are looking to help five more home buyers this month find their dream home 30% under market value.”
The more consistent your success is with former clients to your prospect’s needs, the higher the response rate.
- Call to Action In the Form of a Question
Following the pitch, we move into the close of the cold email, which includes a call to action in the form of a question. Using a question as our call to action ends the email urging the recipient to respond. Following the body of our email, a right call to action may look like, “Whens a good time for a call this week “first name”?
- The Power is in the Followup
The follow-up is one of the most overlooked cold emailing strategies by real estate professionals. We are using similar principles to what we learned to write for the first email we want to continue adding value in our followups.
Repeat this process until your response rates are at 15% or higher. Pro tip: using a custom CRM such as Mailshake or Buzzstream will make it simple to streamline the process of sending cold emails. Now that you understand how to write cold emails that generate real estate leads, it is time to take massive action.
Author Bio:
David Freudenberg is the COO, and Founder of David Buys Houses Florida, a real estate investment company with the famous slogan “We Buy Houses Florida” based in Sarasota. His company and he run cold email campaigns consistently to convert motivational seller and buyer leads. When he is not buying houses in Florida, he enjoys boating, fishing, and spending time with family.
How to Generate Real Estate Leads from Cold Email
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