Leveraging Email Marketing to Effectively Communicate with Investors
Commercial real estate is an industry built on relationships. Investors are taking a risk and entrusting CRE sponsors with significant sums of money. Both historically and to this day, networking, face-to-face interactions, and relationship-building are critical to success. After all, choosing the right sponsor could mean the difference between success or failure.
But technology is changing the way that commercial real estate professionals engage, communicate, and otherwise conduct every aspect of their business. Technology has enabled new strategies and channels for developing and building relationships with investors, including email marketing. While new marketing techniques and opportunities seem to pop up on the regular, email marketing has exhibited staying power and proven itself as a key channel for B2B professionals, including commercial real estate sponsors.
Read ahead to learn why email marketing is an effective channel for commercial real estate sponsors to use to communicate with investors.
Personalized Communications
Today, personalization is key to gaining an investor’s loyalty and keeping them engaged, meaning that the “one-size-fits-all” approach that may have worked a couple of years ago is no longer the best strategy for engaging investors. However, firms that handle multiple deals and investors can easily become overwhelmed in their attempts to effectively and consistently communicate with each investor- even the ones who may not be active in a current deal. Fortunately, email marketing enables firms to create valuable, personalized, relevant messaging en masse. With 81% of today’s consumers wishing that companies knew them better, firms that leverage technology to craft personalized communications are more likely to receive a higher volume of engagement from investors than those who do not.
While performance has traditionally been the key to attracting and retaining investors, emerging investors’ preferences are heavily centered around personalization. In fact, 70% of Millennials are reportedly frustrated with irrelevant marketing emails and instead prefer personalized communications. As this cohort begins to invest in and influence commercial real estate, leveraging email marketing will continue to be undeniably useful in ensuring that they are properly engaged.
User Segmentation
In commercial real estate, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your business, new offerings, and portfolio updates to your network. But with hundreds of investors, business partners, prospects, and other stakeholders, it can be challenging to know who to email and when is the right time. Further, everybody may not need to receive every message, which could reduce their chances of reading those emails that are relevant. Creating targeted email distribution lists to organize your contacts can help you manage and scale your communication efforts. For example, email marketing with user segments can be incorporated to target subsets of contacts with common needs, wants, demands, behaviors, or characteristics. While distribution lists carry a significant portion of the workload for scaling communications, evaluating your contact list and creating user segments is a technique CRE firms should strategically consider in order to take their marketing and communications to the next level.
Today, 81% of consumers today wish companies knew them better, while 94% of businesses wish they knew their customers better. Segments enable you to better understand the patterns that differentiate your customers. Additionally, analyzing customer segments enables you to customize your messaging and send relevant communications. According to Mailchimp, segmented campaigns drive 100% more clicks.
Automated Processes
A CRM, like RealPage IMS, enables firms to automate emails and portal notifications rather than having to manually notify each investor every time that they make an investment. Most CRM’s provide email functionalities that allow firms to create bulk emails for sending information to more than one investor at a time. A marketing automation tool enables more integrated marketing efforts and tracks critical data within the CRM, allowing you to customize communication efforts and have a clear history of previous engagements. It also saves time by automating processes that were previously manual. This automation allows sponsors to easily be in constant communication with investors, keeping them engaged, streamlining the communication process, and ultimately increasing efficiency.
Email marketing is proven time and time again to be one of the most effective marketing channels to reach and engage an audience. Today’s investors demand personalization, and email marketing helps sponsors to meet those expectations. Leveraging personalization, segmentation, and automation also helps to ensure that your emails get delivered to and opened by the appropriate audience rather than being sent to the spam folder. After all, content that is relatable, relevant, and timely is much more likely to garner engagement.
You may also be interested in reading Leveraging CRE Technology to Build Meaningful Investor Relations.
