KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Level Up Your Real Estate Email Marketing with Strategies and Best Practices to Boost Engagement and Sales

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Friday Focus is your weekly mini-series from KGCI Real Estate On Air—a deep dive into one theme, broken into tactical, easy-to-implement episodes. Every Friday and Saturday, we unpack the strategies, scripts, and systems agents use to win more business—without the fluff.Catch every episode in the series to get the full picture, and put these moves into play by Monday.SummaryThis episode is a comprehensive guide to mastering email marketing, revealing why it remains one of the most powerful and scalable tools for real estate agents. The discussion goes beyond simple newsletters, providing a strategic blueprint for boosting engagement, nurturing leads, and driving more sales. You'll learn how to build a profitable and predictable business by treating your email list as a valuable asset and providing consistent, high-impact content.Key TakeawaysSegment Your Audience for Success: Understand that a "one-size-fits-all" approach to email is a fatal mistake. The episode emphasizes the power of segmenting your list into groups like buyers, sellers, past clients, and hot leads so you can send highly relevant and personalized content that speaks directly to their needs.Master the Art of the Follow-Up Sequence: Discover how an automated email sequence can work for you 24/7. You'll learn how to create a series of emails that nurture new leads with valuable information, consistently stay top-of-mind with past clients, and move prospects further down the sales funnel.Content Is King: Learn to provide value in every email. The discussion highlights the importance of sharing hyper-local market updates, home maintenance tips, and client success stories, rather than just listings. By giving more than you ask, you build a foundation of trust and position yourself as a trusted advisor.Optimize for Engagement and Conversions: Get tactical advice on how to improve your email's performance. The episode provides a blueprint for crafting compelling subject lines, including a clear call-to-action (CTA) in every email, and using data from your CRM to track open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to see what’s working.Topics:Real estate email marketingEmail marketing strategiesLead nurturingReal estate sales funnelCRMCall-to-ActionReady to unlock the power of your email list? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and start nurturing your leads to success! Ready for more? Subscribe to KGCI Real Estate On Air and grab the Always Free Real Estate On Air Mobile App for iPhone and Android. Inside, you’ll find our complete archive, 24/7 stream, and every Friday Focus mini-series—ready when you are.

Clarity, strategy, and step-by-step moves. Here's what you need to know from this week's Friday focus on KGCI, real estate on air. Welcome back to the high-performance real estate agent podcast. I am your host, Tina Beliveau, and I am so excited to dive into today's topic, which is super tactical. And as you get to know me better, you will find out that I am the queen of tactical training and giving you the actual details to like go and do something better than you've done it before and not just get sort of big picture recommendations that are hard to bring into reality. And today what I want to share with you is how to have bomb digity email marketing.

Now, I tend to keep it very positive. I don't like to be snarky, but let me just tell you, the real estate industry is filled with absolutely terrible marketing that hurts my soul. It hurts my eyeballs a lot of the time. And I feel like email marketing is one of the worst problem areas in our industry as far as, like, agents just doing it well and having like the right resources and education around that. Social media can also be a trouble spot as well. But today we're talking about email. And I, you know, I say this with love because I want to help anyone who's listening.

I think there are so many agents out there that are spraying craft. marketing across the internet and people's email inboxes that makes no sense. And, you know, issues can run the gamut from being just super ugly or perhaps really irrelevant information. And I'm going to say more about what I mean about that in a couple minutes. Hitting the wrong target audience, one of the biggest issues I have with email marketing is a lot of real estate agents send content to people about buying or selling. And the people that they are messaging have no interest in buying or selling right now. Like depending on what's happening in the world,

maybe 5 to 10% of your database wants to buy or sell a house in the near future. The other 90% they're good. They're like sticking and sticking. So there's just this phenomenon of like sending out all kinds of messaging of just listed, just sold, come to my open house. And it just has zero relevance to your target audience. So if there's one thing you take from today's podcast, maybe it's that, that if you're doing that, can you cut it out? Can you shift and do something a little different?

I'm going to tell you how and give you some really good tactics. Other issues that I see with email marketing is often that it can be way too frequent or it's frequent, but the value isn't coupled with the frequency. So that's something we're going to talk about. And there's a lot of like canned content that is very tempting to use because, you know, we're all busy people who have a lot to do. And it would be so nice to have an easy button for marketing. And in my experience, nothing in business that's truly worthwhile is there just like a magic wand where it all just takes care of itself. So I think it's, you know, getting in touch with, are you in a place with your email marketing where you need to make a change and you know it? And I will just say this. If you're sending out recipes,

you might not enjoy the rest of my podcast. But what does that have to do with anything? To me, that's like the pinnacle of real estate marketing that just doesn't make sense, unless it's literally part of your brand because you're like really into cooking and you're like sharing something with people that actually has to do with you and not just like, here's a random chocolate chip cookie recipe. You know, happy May. So anyway, these are the problems I want to help you solve. Hopefully you're laughing a little bit. And I have not always been the queen of email marketing. That's a fact. I have. always had a desire to curate content that is relevant to my audience. And really, I think,

what has transformed for me over the last however many years of my career is that I've spent more time educating myself, studying best practices, and just being conscious of it. Because I kind of got into a spiral for a multi-year period where I was very bought into getting a certain number of touches in per year. And by touches, I mean, you know, like reach out to your clients, whether it's email, social media, phone calls, text messages, mail, whatever else I'm not thinking of in that list. An email is such a convenient way to get in a lot of touches. And that's actually why I love it. But I got to a point where I was sending out two emails a month that were what I would just call very newslettery, right? And when someone's like, oh, can I send you my newsletter? Are you

like, ooh, I can't wait to read your newsletter. Like, I feel like we're in a culture where all of us are so busy. We are inundated with eight billion inboxes in our phones, multiple email accounts, tons of stuff coming our way. It's like, who has time to read a newsletter? So I think you can do newsletter well. Don't get me wrong. But I feel like I had newsletter energy going for a long time. And it just was not relevant to my target audience at times. And it wasn't that interesting. So that was kind of the sin, I would say, that I was committing with my email marketing. I also wasn't necessarily hitting the right target audiences at times.

I didn't have my segments set up that well. And don't worry if you have no idea what I'm talking about. We're about to unpack that. So basically, at the beginning of 2020, and this is just kind of part of my like story in the last few years, I hit this point where I just decided to level up everything I had been doing for years with all of my systems. My website, my social, my email marketing, my Google review strategy, a ton of other things. So email was just kind of one of the many things where I was like, I need this to be way better. Because what had happened is over the years, my newsletter energy had caused a lot of people to

opt out. So I had an unsubscribe problem where, you know, past class, clients and people that I actually had good relationships with weren't getting the bulk of my marketing because the bulk of my marketing was email and it still is email plus social media as like a power combo. And I was just kind of missing the boat. I actually started doing more direct mail for a while to just get back in touch with people. That's a topic for a whole other podcast. But my point is I had some issues that needed to be addressed. And now, while I'm maybe not the best email marketer in the real estate industry, I do think I've got a lot figured out. I have leveled up so seriously. And I want to break down for you today the three key things that I fixed to improve it.

Number one, I changed my content strategy to make it highly relevant and interesting to my sphere. So we're going to start with that. The second thing was that I implemented email marketing best practices to ensure my emails are delivered, opened, and have calls to action. So that's the second thing we're going to talk about. And then the third is I selected a way better platform to create and send and deliver my emails. We'll end with that. You're going to love it. So that's where we're going to go today. And I will just say, like, I love email marketing because it's free or very low cost, generally. And it is your lowest hanging fruit to get a lot of those touches in per year, as long as those touches add value to your database. I really consider an email to be an essential

piece, a foundational piece to your marketing systems for those exact reasons. It just has to be done well or it's not going to do anything for your business. So if you're bought into making some changes or perhaps if you have a team or an assistant or a marketing person and you're bought into bringing them aboard to make some changes, keep listening because I'm going to break down these three things. So number one, what I said I changed was I made it highly relevant and interesting my emails. So first of all, the first thing you have to do is stop the crap, turn it off. If you have bad drip campaigns that are ugly, not in alignment with the brand or

the image that you want to portray or anything else, stop the bleeding first and foremost and regroup. It's going to be okay if you take a little break as long as you keep moving on setting up a better system. You know, when you're sending crap, it hurts your brand. And like you said, like I said, you might start to have that opt out problem like I did. And really like the bigger opportunity costs that is so hard to measure, but is happening is when your email marketing is spraying crap all over the place, you just, you're losing the opportunity to actually leverage email to help you grow your business, build engagement, build loyalty, grow the no like and trust factor. And all the things like that. So, you know, first, so that first you stop the crap. And then the second thing,

especially if you have a lot of like automated stuff going out that you know isn't really relevant, but you thought it was better than nothing. My advice would be to kind of cut that. Then from there, you know, I would really, this is where you have to do some work. And it's less fun, but it's important if you care about your marketing. And if you don't care about your marketing, again, this is not going to be a priority for you. But if you care about your marketing, you do need to make some conscious strategic decisions about what you would like to send people that would add value, interest them, educate them, and further your relationship with them. Because basically the way that I, like the kind of email that I'm talking about would be your

general sphere marketing. Now, there are also, there's definitely a need to have campaigns for specific buyers and sellers that are in your pipeline. That's a whole other topic. That's a whole thing I teach in my academy, which at some point I'm probably going to explain a little bit more on this podcast. But the thing is, if we're talking about just getting general touches out to your entire network, you do need to make some executive decisions of what you want to get out there and how frequently. I think it is important to get to a point of having at least one email per month go out. I really think the gold standard could be two emails per month as long as they're valuable. Depending on where you are with that, you've got to meet yourself where you are.

and make small improvements over time. Generally, when I try to do too much at once, I overwhelm myself or I feel like a failure and then nothing sticks. So if you're not sending any email out right now, I would say maybe start with quarterly. Or another thing that I've helped a lot of the people I've coached is to just get one email out and then figure out how to iterate on that the next time, make it a little bit better and build off of that. So just kind of think about that. But ultimately, there are a few tried and true content areas that I have found are more interesting to my sphere than the canned stuff. Number one, I love a quick hot take on what's going on in the market from the perspective that most of the people in your database are probably a homeowner.

So this could veer into sending content out that's like, hey, it's a great time to be a seller and just sounding very like broad and salesy. I come at from a very different place of like my role is to interpret all of these macro and microeconomic forces at the national and local level that are impacting home values and kind of just the immediate future of where the market is going. And then I interpret that for people. And I don't overwhelm them with 85 paragraphs or huge like social media graphics with, you know, seven different stats on them, like digestible. Boil it down.

Don't dumb it down, but boil it down into layman's terms of like, here's what's happening right now. Here's the impact. If you're a homeowner, if you're, you know, looking at getting a home equity line of credit, et cetera. I just think there's a great opportunity to do a quarterly update of that nature. We're like, here's what's going on right now. If you want to dive deeper and this is where you insert your call to action, which is the next thing I'm going to talk about, you know, click here to have a call with me or reply to this email and, you know, tell me what questions you're you have specifically. There's so many different ways to invite engagement, but guess what? When you invite engagement, you're going to get more engagement. So that's another little suggested takeaway for

today. So that's number one is the quick hot take of what's going on in the market. I think that could be a great quarterly foundational piece to any real estate agent's campaign if you're comfortable kind of interpreting data. And I have a lot of other tips I give my coaching clients on how to do that. The second thing I recommend is if you have any local news that's sort of real estate and development oriented, basically if you come across an article where you're like, oh, this is kind of interesting. And I'm a sharing-minded person. I'm always like, ooh, who would love this? So you kind of have that natural inclination to forward articles to people that you've kind of curated and things like that. Start looking at both the local and national news to basically share someone else's item of value.

and then I'm a big believer in obviously linking to that source, but giving my one to three sentence interpretation of what it's about and why you might find it interesting to read and basically become a resource shareer. That has been a huge part of my email marketing. I love reading the New York Times personally, and they tend to have really good real estate articles that are kind of like a snapshot of what's going on. I tend to see one like every month or every other month. So whenever I see one of those articles come up, I'm always like, oh, that's a good one. I'm going to get that out to my database. And I just make a note to self and I work that into my next email campaign.

I've also shared some great articles from the Wall Street Journal. Basically, whatever you come across that kind of inspires or interests you might be of interest to your database. And that is something that you could also build. If we were going to try and get to 12 emails a year, maybe you've got a quarterly hot take on the market and then a quarterly new to. article. And they're easy to find. So whether you find it organically, as you know, you're reading through your life or if you go and seek them out, they're absolutely there. That I can promise you. Couple other things, depending on your business model, if you do client events, that becomes a very natural piece of your email marketing, depending on how many events you do per year. That can definitely

be a gap filler within your campaigns. And then beyond that, there's a lot of different options. I do a lot charitably in various ways. Some of it is just like making my clients aware. Other pieces of it. And I actually just recorded an episode on this. We do a lot of engagement where we invite our clients to come and do charitable things with us. So that is something that has been a very powerful call to action in our email saying, hey, if you want to come and cook dinner with us at this nonprofit, our next date is X.

Fill out this little form or reply to me and let me know. And I love this. And I did get into this on the other episode, but I have gotten such great engagement off of that. So basically, like, creating opportunities for people to engage and have experiences and be a part of our community. Our team is called the Bellevaux Group. And I, a while ago, branded the TBG community. That actually connects to our company mission statement, which is to create community. That's like our mission as a real estate team is so simple. I just love bringing people together, creating community. and we've branded the TBG community. And then we really bring people into that by saying, hey, you know, come be a part of this, come be a part of that. And that's just sort of the building effect of everything that has become our brand. So you might have your own completely different version of that. But what I'm encouraging you to do is start to become conscious of what your version of that might be

and how you can start to communicate that in your marketing. And if you have no idea what that is, that's okay. You're going to figure it out in the activity. When I am preactivity, when I'm like at that point where I'm like knowing I want to do something different, but I'm not sure what and I don't know what direction it's going to go, it's so hard to forecast what it's going to end up being. But if I can find my first action step to just get going, get that first email out where I'm like, okay, I'm going to do the news article.

I found one that I like and I'm going to do my two sentence snippet, just like Tina said. Like you're going to, by doing something new like that, you're going to discover what your next step is. So for me, it's like, I've got to be in action and then the answers start to reveal themselves, especially if it's something where it's important to me and I've kind of got my radar on in the back of my mind that I'm like looking for, not signs, but I've got my mind open to just scanning for the next thing that would align with where I'm trying to go. And then suddenly I see it. So hopefully the way I said that made sense, but that's really how I figured out my marketing to some degree is just being kind of intuitive of what I think is interesting and how it

can add value to other people's lives without being salesy, cheesy, and just like everybody else. So there are a lot of other things you could put in your email campaigns, but hopefully I've just given you some good starting ideas for content, and you will start to discover more and more about your brand, the more that you dive in and really put that effort in. So I said there were three key things I changed. we just went over number one, which was making your content highly relevant and interesting. The second thing I did was I implemented email marketing best practices to ensure that my emails are delivered, opened, and have calls to action within them that cause people to actually do the

things that would move my business forward, aka hire me, refer me, introduce me to someone, and, you know, all the different things that calls to action can do. So I just want to educate you on just some, like, core components of email marketing that probably aren't brand new to you to hear about. But what might be new for you would be to take a minute to zoom out and notice what some of these things are, like how they've manifested in your business and how you could start to improve them. So there are a couple core metrics with email marketing.

There's three primary things that I've found it the most helpful to focus on. The number one thing is my open rate. That is what percentage of people open the email? So if I send an email to a thousand people and I have a 10% open rate, that means 100 people opened it. The industry average for open rates is around 20% in sort of the sales and real estate space. So what I would say is like a first benchmark. The first thing is to figure out what your open rate is if you've been sending email and if your platform shows that, by the way, I'm going to help. you solve that problem if you're not loving your email platform. But the first thing would be to find out what your open rate is. Are you above the industry standard? Are you added? Are you below it? And by, you know, by what? And then from there, you can start to problem solve a little bit. But, you know, the first task with email is to get people to open it. There is something to be said for them just seeing your name and your brand in their inbox. But opening it creates those opportunities to build trust, to build brand awareness, to create all the calls to action. So you want to get people to open it. Then from there,

another metric that can be helpful to include is a click-through rate. So that is how many people who did open your email clicked on something. And there's like a lot more that you could kind of get into with all of this. But essentially, you know, great email marketing has some link in it that leads people to a step that would take them deeper into your sales or your relationship funnel. So it could be getting them to click and follow you on Instagram if you're an Instagram person because someone opens your email, follows you. And then, you know, when they follow you on Instagram, they're seeing you every day, not just your emails. So I think that's a great thing from like a relational standpoint, even if you're not necessarily moving them through a sales funnel. Maybe it's sending them to your website.

Maybe it's sending them to calendar booking software to set up a call with you to have a preliminary chat about buying or selling. That is in like my tech tool list of things. favorite things that I love to teach people. So we'll definitely touch on that in a future episode. But ultimately, if you put some thought into the links you're using and make sure that they're leading people on a logical path to connecting with you deeply in some way, probably on social media or surfing your website, maybe hopping on and browsing real estate because even though most people aren't actively in the market to buy or sell, pretty much almost everybody seems to just like to look at listings online. So that is a great strategy just to kind of

pull people into your website and make sure that maybe they get hooked up on your website instead of redfin, zillow, et cetera. So we talked about open rates. We talked about click through rates. And then the third thing is minimizing opt-outs. Because the problem with once someone opts out, you're done. You're not going to be emailing them some more. You can't. Your platform won't allow it. So I don't like to make this too heavy, but I like to say like once you're dead to them, you know, you're dead. So unless you're going to like get a new platform and market to them again, isn't really what they wanted if they opted out. So you do need to understand that some people will opt out. What you need to do is work to minimize it to continue to have the opportunity to, you know,

maintain your brand and your marketing. And that is really going to come through everything else that I'm teaching in the podcast. But basically, if there were three things you were going to look at to just get like a non-emotional read on how your email is doing, you would look at your open rate, your click-through rate, and your opt-out rate. Hopefully, if you're in a decent platform, you can find those numbers. If not, we're going to solve that. Now, I said that I implemented email marketing best practices. There are so many things that you can do to make your emails more readable, more interesting, and more effective. I'm going to run you through a couple of my top tips. I already talked about calls to action, but this is your big opportunity to maximize

engagement. And I say this about social media for real estate agents also. Like, if you don't give people a task to do, they're not going to do it. It's sort of like real estate 101. If you never ask for referrals, people will probably still refer you to some degree, as long as you're good. If you let them know that you would like a referral, and there's so many ways to do that in a way that is cool. But like the act of asking people to do a preferred behavior just makes it way more likely. They might review you on Google, but if you ask them to do it, they're way more likely to do it. Same thing with email marketing. If you direct them to a certain place or a certain activity, they might actually do it. So calls to action are as simple as click here to call me.

Tap here to read more. Book an appointment with me now. Save your spot here. Find out the value of your home here. Browse real estate here. Look at this house. That's a great one. Look at this house. Click to see the rest of the photos. Follow me on Instagram. Friend me on Facebook. my group for my clients. Those are all calls to action. You only want one in your email because the more you give people to do, the less likely they are to do any of it. So the art is to figure out what is the call to action that would actually be a difference maker in either your short, mid, or long-term strategy and then implement that. And that's just something that you can work with. You can measure the clicks. And I just love marketing from the perspective that everything's an

experiment. Until I try it, I really can't predict how it's going to do. I have sent emails out where I'm like, this is the best one I've ever done. And then my open rates or my clicks are really low. I have other stuff that I'm like, oh, it's okay. And I have this with events, giveaways, all kinds of different marketing initiatives. It's all an experiment. And until you try, you don't quite know what the reaction is going to be. You can certainly strategize and work off of best practices and all of that. But there is this unpredictable part of marketing that can be kind of stressful, but is also a very beautiful thing. So calls to action, that would be my number one thing is to say, you know, are you using any calls to action? Are they effective? Are they the appropriate ones for where you really want to go?

And there are a lot of other things you can do to make your emails more interesting and readable. Some of my favorites that have benefited me the most, number one, fun subject lines, whether they're attention grabbing, interesting, really concise, or maybe a lot of include their first name. If you have a bomb-diggity email platform like I do, you can insert someone's first name in the subject line that definitely gets their attention. My second tip is strong copy is key. Less is more. So basically, take whatever you wrote, and this is a copywriting lesson I learned from an expert. Reduce it by 40%. Get to the point faster, make it fun or interesting or just concise and very readable. And that's really the third tip that flows from that is we are all on mobile devices

at this point. You need a lot of white space in your email. It can't be too long. People do not scroll to the bottom. They don't have the time and the interest. And that is actually such a gift. You don't need to make an eight section newsletter with 85 different content pieces and analysis and graphics. One really good piece of information delivered well and beautifully in an aesthetically pleasing way will take you so much further. So once you kind of get your hands around this, the freedom of doing it this way is it doesn't take that much time once you figure out your ideal template. Now, the last thing, and I've been teasing this the whole time, is my magic email platform that solves all of the problems I've outlined for you today. So everyone asks me what I

use for email. It is not my core CRM. I use a completely different CRM. That is fine, but it is not good for email delivery. So I, for email exclusively, use a platform called Flowdesk. And it is awesome for a lot of reasons. They give you gorgeous templates that are very, very easy to use, that are very modern, lots of white space, well designed, calls to action embedded where you just customize the book now box to say, call me now or whatever the case may be. So it's basically, if you just don't know how to market, it's really good because it'll kind of teach you how by using the templates and just adapting the best practices that are embedded within them. The second thing is that you can segment your audiences really easily. So you can have someone in there.

It's kind of like Gmail or a good CRM where you could label something three different things. So I can have a segment in there for all my past clients, but also my current buyers, my seller pipeline. So I can target my messages to go to the right audience. And that is really helpful. I have a tag, called out of state. So if I'm sending an email out about an event that I'm hosting, I make sure to exclude the out of state people so they don't opt out from my emails because I'm inviting them to something they're never going to come to. Just a good example of that was actually one of my main opt-out problems at one point. So I love the segmenting and that's basically putting your audience into buckets. And then the last but certainly not least thing is it's an amazing price

point, there are a lot of email platforms out there that get more expensive, the bigger your email list gets. FloDesk just has a flat fee. So it's $38 a month, at least as of this recording. And I have a promo code where you can get 50% off for the first year. And there's also a free trial. So if you are just inspired by this podcast and you're like, you know what, it's time for me to try something different. I want you to dive into Flowdesk. You'll see the link in the show notes, give it a shot and tell me what you think. They have these really great email templates in a category called Up My Email Game. So this is your like takeaway of like, what do I do next Tina? I want to try this. Use my link. Go to Flowdesk. Sign up for a free trial and then go to the

templates under Up My Email Game. They're really clean with a lot of white space. Pick out one of them and then start editing it to match your brand. Keep it simple and short. Find something interesting to say or share or promote your upcoming event or whatever charitable thing you're into and you're golden. My group is called Relationship Driven Real Estate with Tina Belabow. So find that on Facebook. Let's get connected and chat about this more. So truth be told, I've given you the highlights. I've committed to 30 minute episodes to keep these really like doable and not super long with way too much information. There is a lot more to doing this really well. So if you want me to mentor and teach you the ins and outs of all things marketing, email, mail, social media, systems and tech,

out the wazoo, you should join the wait list for my high performance agent academy. The high performance agent academy, by the way, same name as my podcast, because I love helping people be at a level of high performance, whatever that means for them. Generally, that means more efficient, more profitable, and happier than you were before you came into contact with me. and I really teach all of my systems, my key systems and strategies, the most important things that have made the biggest difference in my business. I give you my playbooks, my templates. There is nothing that I hold back. And I actually coach a lot of agents in my own market, which is Baltimore.

I don't have a scarcity complex about it. I'm like, hey, like, take my stuff and thrive. There's enough room for all of us. So doors are going to open for the Academy this fall. And if you want to join the wait list, you can just go to the show notes, get on the waiting list. And as soon as I have like a clearer time frame for the start date and all of that good stuff, you'll hear from me. So if you're like inspired by this, but you're like, wow, this is great. But I could also use a little mentorship and I have 85 questions. That's where the academy really comes in. So either way, I just want to encourage you to go forth and prosper. Go slay your email marketing. Stop sending the crap. I believe in you. You can do.

it and I am cheering for you. Thank you again for listening to this episode and we will speak again soon.