Many estate agencies and individual brokers only dabble in publishing newsletters while others view it as a vital tool in the marketing and advertising mix.

Online newsletters can be an extremely cost effective and successful marketing tool which allow you to:

• Keep your brand in front of the market continuously
• Create and build relationships with prospective customers
• Maintain relationships with current and past customers
• Establish yourself as an authority in property matters
• Entrench yourself and/or your company as part of the local community

Keeping in contact with and engaging all your contacts – (including tenants who become purchasers, who become sellers, who become investors, who provide referrals and repeat business) - is obviously an important activity.

From a prospective customer point of view, newsletters are a great channel for positioning you and your company as a leader in the market. But that doesn’t mean the newsletter should be all about you. The “leadership” position comes from focusing on the needs of customers/prospects and providing information for them that focuses on your particular area of expertise.

Effective newsletters provide relevant information to the target market whether they are sellers, buyers or investors. It’s a good idea to have specific links to hosted articles on your site that allow readers to tune into more information that is most relevant to them.

So what should you include in your newsletters?

Market update
Movement on sale prices
Number of listings on the market
Governmental issues affecting property

Rental properties available

Featured properties of the month

Helpful hints
Things to do when moving house
Preparing your home for sale

Renovation tips

Quick online surveys about your area (with results to be published in next newsletter)
Survey of confidence in the market
Favourite restaurant in town

Community notice board
Highlight any sponsorships/community organisations you are associated with
Community activities

And yes you should beat your own drum a little
Testimonials
Staff profiles
Recent sales/successes
Awards

Building subscribers

You should look at every opportunity to sign people up for the newsletter. Everyone in your area is part of the community and most want to know what is going on – especially when it comes to property.

Take print-outs of your online newsletter to open homes and inspections and offer the opportunity to everyone you meet to sign up to receive it.

Advertise it in your windows, on mail drops and in community advertising/promotions.

Make your “free online newsletter” subscription stand-out on the home page of your website.

Put a link or URL to the subscription page on your online listings and in your general advertising.

Sign up request forms for attendees at any of your investor seminars, tenant or landlord information evenings, and any other functions you may be sponsoring.

If you have banner advertising on any portals, you should allocate one of them to highlighting your newsletter.

Lead generation

Ensure you include the ability to “send to a friend” on your newsletter. Referrals are key.

Look at discussing issues around selling your home and provide the opportunity for people to request further information. It may be a printed booklet such as a “Home Sellers Guide” or a Free Valuation.

Keep including the opportunity to link back to different areas on your website.

How to design and send an online newsletter

Many of the back office or CRM systems now have inbuilt tools to help you design and send html emails. If not, there are a myriad of email marketing programs that can assist at all different levels of sophistication. Your web designer should also be able to assist.

Helpful hints

Ensure there are articles or links to articles in each edition that relate to each of your subscriber segments so they will find at least one article of interest.

Avoid jargon or buzz words – make the content as approachable as possible.

Ensure there are some images or graphs to break up the text – the layout needs to be pleasing to the eye and easily scannable.

Keep each article relatively short and concise and perhaps have a summary in the newsletter with a link to the full article.

Quick idea to generate seller leads

Given that many people look to get rid of unwanted goods in the lead up to selling their property, it might be fruitful to advertise a free “Garage Sale Kit” in your newsletter. It could include signs (with your logo) that sellers can put their address on, a Garage Sale Hints brochure, and balloons. Perhaps you could even have a section on your website advertising garage sales coming up each week.

And finally…

Whatever the specific content, your newsletter should accurately reflect your business’ views and position in the community and be professionally presented and marketed. You should also have some way of measuring the results or effectiveness of your newsletter, otherwise, what’s the point? You should know how many times it is opened, passed on and which articles are read most of all. Over time, these statistics will give you a feel for what sort of content works best for your audience and you will be better able to target your future newsletters.

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The value of social media for real estate agents has been a hot topic for some time now, and we’ve spent a lot of time considering how best to make tools like Facebook and Twitter work to generate business.

Today, we thought we’d take a step back and look at whether online social networks still have the momentum that has made them so crucial to agents around the world so far.

The short answer is: social networking isn’t going out of fashion by any means. According to Nielsen, global consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, which is a massive 82 percent increase from the same time last year, when users were spending just over three hours on social networks.

Nielsen’s statistics show that globally, social networks and blogs were the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December 2009, followed by online games and instant messaging.

Facebook was the top global social network with 206.9 million unique visitors. In fact, 67 percent of global social media users visited Facebook during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users whiling away nearly six hours per month clicking through the network.

More recent statistics only confirm the continued popularity of social networks – Facebook in particular. compete.com data quoted on mashable.com shows Facebook is now even bigger than Yahoo! in the US. This isn’t surprising considering the fact that Facebook has recently passed the mark of 400 million users worldwide.

Not to be outdone, Twitter has also registered some impressive user figures after concerns its audience may have been flattening out. comScore figures released by techcrunch.com show Twitter’s own website attracted 73.5 million unique visitors in January, which is up 8 percent from December, 2009. This means Twitter’s annual growth rate stands at a huge 1,105 percent.

The statistics may be mind-boggling, but the message is clear: going social is a sure-fire way to connect with an audience that’s growing by the day.

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Australian real estate agents wishing they had widgets like those available in the US and UK are in luck: pricefinder.com.au has just released a range of its own.

According to pricefinder.com.au chief operating officer Kent Lardner, the widgets were inspired by offerings from zillow.com and trulia.com in the US.

The “SalesMatch” widget allows users to find and map matching comparable sales for any property. “RentMatch” does the same for rentals, while the “Stats” widget allows agents to embed suburb, postcode, and local government area sales statistics and charts into their website.

The main difference between these offerings and those available to US agents is that they aren’t free. The widgets are available at no extra cost to those on pricefinder.com.au’s “pro” and “solo” memberships, which start at AUD$95 per month. Banners and logos are also available.

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1. Consistency is key. We can’t emphasise this point enough. For people to come to recognise your online brand, you need to make sure everything – from the font you use on your website to the background colour on your email newsletters – stays consistent.

2. Consult with others. You might think your logo, tagline, or colour scheme is perfect. But are you the only one? Take every opportunity to consult with people outside your office to see where you might be slipping up, and tweak things accordingly.

3. Accessibility matters. This point builds off the idea of consulting with others. Set up a feedback process so your customers have some way of telling you when something goes awry – an email that only 10 percent of your subscribers can open, for example, or a new website addition that’s crashing half your readers’ browsers.

4. Keep it clean. The results of this study show that cluttered banners perform worse on branding impact measures than less cluttered banners. We think this goes for all aspects of your online presence. Less is always more when it comes to online presentation.

5. Keep it simple. Along with good, clean design, clarity of message is also crucial in online brand building. You should be able to sum up your aim in one short sentence, or even a few words. Find that message, and keep repeating it until its synonymous with your brand.

6. Relaunch with care. The feedback you receive might convince you to start your whole online brand strategy again from scratch. If you do, make it obvious to website visitors and anyone else who might come into contact with your online business that this is a new version, not someone else operating under the same name.

7. Track your mentions. A listening post tool like Google Reader can be invaluable in finding out when and where your brand is mentioned. Plug in your business name, then sit back and wait for the regular emails showing you exactly who’s talking you up online.

8. Thank them. This is the social side of online brand building. Whenever you do find an example of someone discussing your brand online, jump on and thank them – publicly if possible. This proves there’s a real, engaged person behind the brand name.

9. Drown out the negativity. There will be times when your brand shows up somewhere in a negative light. If it’s not an issue you can address personally, spend your energy promoting your business in a positive light. Don’t let other people’s definition of your brand be the most visible one.

10. Know when to stop. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as online over-exposure. If people are coming into contact with your brand too often, they will start to tune you out. Don’t be afraid to let things settle for a while, and see what effect your efforts have had, before launching your next campaign.

Online branding is a delicate business, requiring a mix of advertising savvy and relationship management prowess. We hope our tips take you a few steps closer to establishing a brand you can boast about.

[Image: activerain.com]

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Here’s one for the search engine optimisation enthusiasts out there: Google has recently released a report based on the SEO performance of pages for 100 different Google products.

The results show what’s working for Google and where things could be improved, giving the rest of us plenty of valuable SEO hints.

“Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines,” Google’s search quality team writes.

“From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products’ pages.”

Once you’ve found some hints and tips from Google’s report, be sure to check out our comprehensive series on SEO from guest blogger Glenn Batten.

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The results are in from our first poll of 2010, with the overwhelming majority of respondents saying they plan to spend big on online marketing this year.

For those of you planning to invest significantly more – or even a little more – in your online marketing strategy in 2010, you’ve come to the right place. Here are five articles to help you create your best online marketing campaign yet:

Fine-tuning Your Ad Strategy

Know Where Your Leads are Coming From

Maximising Leads from Portal Sites

Top 10 Tips for Marketing Your Brand on a Budget

Print Advertising is Obsolete – The Case for Online

This month, we want to know what you have found to be the most successful element on your website in terms of generating business. Is it the fact that you give people the ability to search for listings? Do your audience numbers spike each time you provide detailed information about the local area?

Perhaps the social media side of the website is working the hardest, or you’re finding most of your customers through the mobile website option you provide. What about those email newsletters your readers subscribe to – are they bringing in the customers?

Of course, in an ideal scenario, most or all of these elements would be bringing in plenty of leads. But if you only had time to focus your efforts on one area, which would you choose for maximum business success? Go to the poll on our homepage to let us know what you think, and feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

[Image: sawse.com]

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US agents keen to upgrade their Facebook profiles now have a new option from roost.com: an application simply named “Social Real Estate“.

According to roost.com, the new application creates a “Real Estate” tab on the Facebook pages of real estate agents and brokers. It can then display city-specific housing, education, and walkability data to create more engagement with your contacts.

The free application takes school data from education.com, real estate market data from Altos Research, and walkability scores from – who else? – Walk Score.

“Facebook has passed 400 million users and is arguably second only to Google in mass consumer engagement, but most real estate brokers and agents struggle to use the platform effectively,” says Alex Chang, roost.com’s CEO. “Our application solves that problem by delivering content consumers want and engagement tools real estate agents need within Facebook itself.”

roost.com adds that MLS real estate search, along with lead generation and drip marketing tools for real estate agents and brokers, will be included in a full version of the app slated for release in the coming months.

Don’t live in the US? Still keen for ideas on how to make the most of Facebook? Check out our article on how to make the most of your Facebook fans, and our golden rules for social media return-on-investment.

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That’s the pitch, but what about the price? The good news is, there is a free trial option, but from there its subscription packages start at US$99 per month.

So is ClickTale worth it? Judging by the recent glowing write up on geekestateblog.com, we’d says it’s at least worth a try. “It’s probably only a matter of time before some of their features are incorporated into Google Analytics and other analytics software I would imagine,” Matthew Swanson predicts.

Of course, we’d love to hear views and reviews from anyone who has experience using ClickTale.

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At the start of the year, we looked at what 2010 might have in store for real estate agents. One of our predictions was that a mobile presence will become a necessity for agents this year.

But isn’t this a bit of an overstatement? Are Internet-enabled mobile phones, or smart phones, really becoming that important? Well, now that the first few months of 2010 are behind us, we thought it was time to take a look at where mobile stands.

So far, it looks like enthusiasm for smart phones is only growing. Back in January, Forrester Research published survey results showing the percentage of adults in the US with smart phones grew from 11 percent in 2008 to 17 percent in 2009. While you could be forgiven for thinking Apple’s iPhone was the most popular device, Forrester’s research found that Blackberries actually out-number them two to one.

A further 15 percent of US adults were found to own quick message devices – defined by Forrester as those that carry a qwerty keyboard and/or a touchscreen, but run on a proprietary software platform rather than a smart phone operating system. So that’s nearly one in every three US adults carrying a smart phone or quick message device.

Over in the UK, comScore had a similar story to tell. According to their research, there were approximately 48 million mobile subscribers aged 13 and over in the UK by October 2009. Of these, 13.3 million accessed the Internet from a mobile browser and just under 17 million used a mobile app of some sort.

comScore also found something that should please Google Maps: of the 17 million mobile subscribers who used an app in October 2009, maps were the most popular type of app, followed by weather, social networking and search apps.

For a more global perspective, we can look to Quantcast’s 2009  Mobile Web Trends Report, which had mobile’s share of Internet consumption growing by 148 percent as measured by pageviews. This is an impressive figure, but the company also points out that mobile accounted for just 0.99 percent of worldwide Internet consumption.

While smart phones might not be replacing computers as the browsing device of choice, there are still plenty of people out there buying them. Gartner has smart phone sales up 41.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 over the same period in 2008. According to mashable.com, market research firm IDC had similar findings, reporting that the number of smart phones shipping in the fourth quarter of 2009 was up 39 percent compared to Q4 2008.

In amongst all those figures, it seems a story about a global shift toward smart phones – if not away from computers – is emerging. With no sign of the trend slowing, we’re sticking by our prediction that some sort of mobile presence will be expected of agents by the end of the year.

Wondering how to establish your business in the mobile space? Start with this article on the various mobile website options available to agents.

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One of the big debates surrounding the use of Twitter in real estate is whether listings should be broadcast through the social networking tool. Some argue that Twitter should be all about relationship building, while others say the occasional listing is perfectly ok to include. Still others are in favour of Twitter accounts that only tweet listings, maintaining they will only reach those who are truly interested.

tweetmehomes.com is a new US-based Twitter service that comes down firmly on the “listings only” side of the debate. The service was officially launched on 1 March, and according to a press release has already tweeted over 35,000 property listings in 40 major metropolitan areas. Most of these listings are said to be from national real estate companies like Coldwell Banker and Century 21.

So, how does tweetmehomes.com work? The idea is that interested property hunters will follow one of tweetmehomes.com’s accounts – TMH_Detroit, for example – to see new listings as they become available.

Large local, regional and national brokers can submit their agents’ real estate listings through an XML or RSS feed. Individual agents can submit their listings through Agentopolis, a national real estate agent directory, for a cost of US$47 per year.

For a service that only just launched, tweetmehomes.com isn’t doing too badly in terms of gathering interest – most of its accounts seems to have between 50 and 100 followers so far. According to tweetmehomes.com, accounts for 100 more cities will be added by the middle of the year.

What’s your opinion? Is tweetmehomes.com a great concept, or an example of business encroaching on the social realm?

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