Do’s and Don’ts of Text Message Marketing in Real Estate

Buying a new house is one of the most stressful things in our lives. It is also quite a challenging process for a real estate agent. However, modern marketing tools can make the workflow a bit more easy. One of them is SMS text marketing.

If you think that SMS is a thing of the past, then you are wrong. SMS for real estate marketing still have enormous potential, but it is important to be able to compose them correctly.

About what you can write and do, and what you can’t, we’ll talk in our article. Let’s dive in!

How to use SMS marketing for real estate in the right way?

DO’s

• Personalize a text message to your existing or potential client. It is this approach that will help build a trusting relationship with the client and increase the clickability of messages. It is best to introduce yourself and clearly explain why you are texting.
• Give customers the option to opt out of further communications. This means that if the landlord answers you and asks you to stop writing to them, you will stop. If you send a message again after this request, you are breaking the rules. So add a line at the end of the text like “STOP future messages” or add the link that will help customers forbid the new messages.
• Give clear information in SMS so that the client understands everything the first time. It is desirable to write everything as briefly as possible – without ornate turns and complex sentences. It’s still not a blog.
• Use a call to action. As you understand, this is the main goal of the whole text SMS marketing. Decide in advance what you want from the client – make a call, write a return SMS, go to the site. In order for the recipient of the message to become a house buyer, you need to push them to do this, and do it wisely.
• Send text alerts for price changes, especially when a home falls within a client’s range.

DON’Ts

• Send information that will be useful to your client. They should mark your SMS with a tick in their brain – “Don’t forget to meet N, there’s an awesome offering”. Nobody likes meaningless spam. If some change in your service doesn’t bring benefits to your customers, you should not bother them with such trifles.

• Never ever ignore the time you send SMS. You can immediately delete a client from all lists if your message came at night when they were sleeping. In addition to irritation, your messages will not cause anything. Track the time of receiving SMS when sending messages and keep in mind that daily SMS traffic can be very high, and your message will arrive with a delay.

• Try to avoid group texts. You can openly share sensitive or personal information.
• Don’t forget to engage text marketing platforms or set up text automation that asks customers who have recently bought to leave a review. Don’t wait – you want to capitalize on all the good feelings that come with getting the keys. And don’t choose a solution based on today. Choose the SMS marketing service you need for your next growth step.

Why does SMS marketing still work?

Someone is in a hurry to bury text message marketing for real estate, but it’s too early to do it. SMS marketing is still one of the key ways to communicate with real estate clients, and here’s why.

• Availability

Most subscribers open a message in the first seconds after receiving it. With other channels, the situation is more complicated: people don’t check email every few minutes, and in order to enter the messenger, the subscriber must at least have a mobile Internet – and not everyone uses it. Thus, using SMS, you can significantly expand your customer base and find those who live in a particular city or region and who are not on social media and the Internet.

• Saving

When calculating the cost of a marketing message, it is necessary to take into account various parameters: how much the work of a designer and copywriter (if it is a leaflet or email newsletter), printing and other services will cost. You won’t need any extra costs for SMS mailing: you don’t need pictures, and you can come up with a small marketing text yourself. The final cost of an SMS campaign depends on the number of messages sent.

• Do-it-yourself analysis

The effectiveness of an SMS campaign is easy to understand even for a novice real estate agent. After sending, for example, 10,000 SMS, it remains to calculate how many buyers took advantage of the offer, and then evaluate the ratio of the cost of the mailing to the number of customers – this way you can immediately realize the effectiveness of such a marketing campaign. If you have a website, you can use UTM tags and use them to track the reaction of visitors to an advertising campaign in analytics systems.

• Timeliness

You can start working and send the first SMS mailing in just one day – just come up with a text message and send it. If you are limited in time or tied to a specific date, then it is easy to quickly notify customers about your offers in this way and just as quickly pause the mailing if the house has been already sold.

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SMS marketing is still a killing communication channel that is popular in the real estate industry. Its relevance has only increased after the pandemic, so we highly recommend using it in combination with other customer communication methods. And of course, don’t forget about the basic do’s and don’ts when using text marketing for real estate.