How to Build a Successful Commercial Real Estate Newsletter
In commercial real estate brokerage today you can and should be providing a property news service to the people that you know in the local area. The news service should be location and property specific so that the search engines and the social media systems can optimise the news service business for your brokerage.
There are some quite common mistakes that can be made here. Get away from the standard brokerage approach of sending out listings three or four times a month to the people in your database. Provide valuable information to the people in your database in an informative way.
If you simply send out your property listings on a regular basis, most people will unsubscribe over time; just about every other broker or agent in your location will be sending out listings via their database system. Your uniqueness is required to make this work.
How can you do this?
To make your property news service informative and relevant, it must contain information based on the location, a few select property types, and the trends of the property industry. For a commercial real estate newsletter to be successful, it must be informative and valuable in some way or form.
Here are some ideas to make your property news service stand out in the local property market:
- TRENDS: Look for recent trends and activities that will be topical and of interest to the people that you serve. If there is something occurring within your town or city of a property nature, it is a potential topic for your newsletter. Stay within the bounds of professionalism, and don’t breach any aspects of confidentiality. Make sure that the information you send out is accurate in every respect.
- TOPICS: Certain topics are quite special and on that basis will require a particular segment of your newsletter or even a special newsletter to be sent separately to particular people. You can for example have separate newsletters created for office property, industrial, and retail property types. Make sure that the information provided is of high quality in all respects. Proof read the material that you send out. Create topics and headlines of interest to the people that you communicate to.
- METHOD: The information that you send out can be digitally prepared and dispatched. You can send the information through a database system and auto responder. Make sure that the auto responder system that you use is sufficiently flexible and professional to maintain your database list and contact information. The system should also allow people to unsubscribe should they wish to do so.
- VISUAL AND LOCAL: Remember that the success of the newsletter service is largely based on local information and visual material. Use plenty of high quality professional photographs as part of the process. The photographs that you use will pull in the interest of the reader to the article or the information that you are providing. Those photographs can be linked to an article loaded on your social media platforms or your websites.
- LOOK AT CLICKS: Track the ‘click throughs’ that occur from the newsletter. The auto-responder system will allow you to identify exactly what people are clicking on and where they are going to as part of that process. Ideally you would want your Email newsletter open rate to be greater than 25% of the database list that you are sending the message to; in that way you understand that your message is getting through in a relevant and real way.. From the click throughs you can understand what people are looking at and on that basis what they are finding interesting. That then allows you to refine and improve future ongoing communications and newsletters.
So there are some good things that you can do here to when it comes to creating and distributing a commercial real estate newsletter to your database. Refine the system over time and you will see the open rates and click throughs improve. Provide information of relevance to the location and the property type.
You can get more commercial real estate marketing tips in our ‘Snapshot’ eCourse right here.