If I see one more canned, ugly Realtor email campaign, I
think I will go insane.
The key to every successful marketing campaign I've seen is
product differentiation - how to make yourself and your products stand out from
the clutter and get noticed. It doesn't matter whether you are selling soap or million
dollar Chicago Gold Coast condos. The first place to start is having a different set of products. You may think product A is much more profitable than product B, but if something goes wrong with A, like a shortage in a necessary material to produce it, then you can always have a fall back option.
We have always preached differentiation from day one.
Everything you do, you must do better, more efficiently or in ways that your
competitors can't or won't. For instance, a common email marketing system
used by agents in Chicago has canned templates to advertise new listings, open
houses, and price reductions. Unfortunately, there must be hundreds of
agents using these same templates, which makes every email that arrives in my
inbox look almost exactly the same.
However, the email marketing system also allows you to
create completely custom HTML email messages. It's just too bad agents
can't or won't take advantage of that feature. I recently sent out one of
my custom email campaigns, and a Realtor wrote back to me saying "How do
you make your emails come out looking so different than everyone else's?"
This is not an unusual occurrence - I get a lot of questions and compliments on
my email marketing pieces.
I explained to her, from a high level, how to do it, and how
easy it really is, if you just know a few simple things about creating HTML
documents. And for advanced users, it's nice to know a bit about CSS, but
it's not critical.
The greatest thing about differentiation is that its
benefits are boundless. It is also the best method of insurance. When something goes wrong in the market, you may be able to stay afloat by focusing more on what's working right. Agents could and should use differentiation to
help sell their listings, but they should be using a differentiation mindset
when talking to potential clients in their listing presentations or during
their buyer representation pitches. In a business where so much of your
competition is of average or poor quality, even slight differentiation between
you and the rest of the crowd goes a long, long way.
