Well-constructed email marketing campaigns are one of the best ways to stay in contact with potential home buyers. Email marketing can act as lead nurturing for home buyers who are still in the research phase of the buying cycle.  However, people are bombarded with emails with every day, so your emails have to deliver high value content to ensure people remain subscribed to your email list. Luckily, there are several things home builders can do to prevent or decrease unsubscribes.  

Use Segmented Lists

Put your years of industry knowledge to use. Your company knows its various potential homebuyers better than anyone else. With that said, it’s important to segment your email list based on different characteristics of the recipients. If you have a list of 5,000 emails, you can be sure that the people on that list have a wide variety of interests and other defining characteristics, such as age or location. So, segment your list into smaller lists based on defining characteristics you can identify, and then send different content and messages to the different segments based on their needs. This is the MOST important thing you can do to prevent and decrease unsubscribes. If you don’t segment, then many people on your list may feel your emails aren’t applicable to them, causing them to unsubscribe.

Don’t Use These Words in the Subject Line

There are certain words that should simply not be used in the subject line and “free” is one of them. In addition to looking like spam to those in your contact list, the word “free” will most likely be caught by the recipient’s email service provider and will send the email straight to the “spam” folder. Either way, avoid the word “free”. Other words to avoid inserting in the subject line include “chance”, “success”, “lose”, and “problem”. Writing the correct content in the subject line of your emails will ensure they stay out of the spam folder and the unsubscribed list.

Personalize the Subject Line

Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened (Source: SalesForce.com). If you use an email marketing service like Constant Contact or MailChimp, you can program your emails to add this personalization automatically based on the first name of the people in your email list. When potential home buyers see emails with their name in the subject line, they are much more likely to read them. They are also reminded that they have a previous relationship with your home building company. Creating familiarity with your company and potential home buyers in your list will decrease the likelihood they will unsubscribe.

Offer Customizable Email Frequency

Just because potential home buyers want to stay in the know about news and content offers doesn’t mean that they want a new email in their inbox on a weekly basis. Give your potential homebuyers a way to choose how often they receive updates. Some may prefer weekly updates while others may want to receive them biweekly or monthly. Taking steps like this to avoid sending too many emails to the inboxes of potential homebuyers will decrease the chance that they unsubscribe.

Create Mobile Friendly Emails

If your home building company can avoid frustrating or annoying your email recipients, less people will unsubscribe. One of the most frustrating things your homebuilding company can do is send emails that are not mobile friendly to potential home buyers. Non mobile-friendly emails load slowly and are difficult to navigate. To create mobile friendly emails, use smaller images, larger fonts, and single columns. Test emails to see how they look in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and any other service provider you can before sending. Minor adjustments can make a big difference in the ability for an email to load.

Combining helpful content and these email practices will decrease the number of contacts who unsubscribe from your emails. Implement these tactics into your home building company’s internet marketing campaign to remain top of mind with your potential homebuyers!