Add Holiday Cheer to Your Inbox

It’s the holiday season! Christmas lights have begun to go up, snow is falling, cookies are baking and Christmas music fills the radios. This time of year is a great time to engage with your client base and spread some holiday cheer while still growing your business. Here are some fun and engaging ways to keep in touch with your clients this holiday season.

Holiday photo contest

If you’re on social media (which we highly encourage you to be), then you know the importance of a photo. Why not take advantage of that and host a holiday photo contest? Ask your clients to send in their best holiday photo - from ugly holiday sweaters to funny family photos! You can even post a few to your social media channels and ask your followers to vote on their favorites. Give out a free prize to those with the best pictures! A simple $5 gift card to a local coffee shop can make someone's day.

Best dressed door

The holiday season is a time for decorating. Start a contest with the neighborhoods in your area and see who can decorate their front door the best! This won’t just provide engagement between you and your clients but it will also bring excitement to your local area (the decorations don’t hurt to look at either). You can offer a prize for the best dressed door as well. Happy decorating!

DIY decorating tips

Aside from holding a decorating contest, you can also give your followers some decorating tips! These tips can be anything from the best ways to strings lights on a tree to ways to decorate your favorite holiday cookies. Create a mini guide with your favorite tips and even include some craft ideas for your local families to do together. Ask your clients to send you photos of their final decorations!

Best Christmas lights in your area

Many towns offer holiday light display such as community tree lightings that are so much fun! If not, there are often individuals who go above and beyond with their holiday decorations. Some even sync their displays to a radio station playing holiday music for an all-out fun viewing experience. Do some research and compile a list of the best places to view Christmas lights in your area. Your followers will appreciate it!

End of the year update

While all of the previous ideas provide helpful and tactical information to your clients, providing them with a recap of your year is a nice touch as well. You are hopefully maintaining contact with these individuals throughout the year and they care about how your business is doing as well. Provide them with a quick update on what you’ve accomplished, your goals for the upcoming year or any fun things you’ve done with your team throughout the year!

Winter fix-it tips

The weather is getting colder.

This means that home maintenance is more important than ever. Send your client base a list of winter tips to keep their homes in tip top shape. These could include things like cleaning out gutters, checking for drafts from leaky doors or windows, and getting a roof rake to help with snow buildup. These are all things that are important to keep the home that you helped them purchase safe!

Holiday preview

Lastly, a preview of homes hitting the market in the new year is something that your clients may want to know about. If there is a list of homes coming to the market in 2019, share it with them! Who knows, some of them may be looking to buy but are waiting until the new year to do so. Getting a sneak preview of the 2019 market is always an exciting thing!

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The holiday season is coming into full swing, and we want you to engage with your following! Implement some of these email ideas and let us know which you think are the most successful. If you have other ideas that have worked for you in the past, let us know. We’d love to hear what you are doing!

- Alicia, Marketing Assistant

How to Host a "Not so Average" Open House

Are you an agent considering hosting an open house for a property that is on the market? This may seem surprising, but you don’t have to spend a fortune to make the house feel like home. We have some simple but effective tips on how to host an event that will not be forgotten!

1. Come up with a theme

First things first, you need to come up with a theme! Brainstorm annnnnnd ………..GO!

Your goal is to make the visitors feel at home, while still providing an experience that they won’t forget.

A theme is important because it helps establish the atmosphere. Your goal is to make the visitors feel at home, while still providing an experience that they won’t forget. While you can do whatever kind of theme you would like, we suggest that you stick with something that is fun without being too corny. Think about the type of home you are showing… is it Spanish hacienda style—if so, consider serving an assortment of tapas and some fruity sangria. Are you hosting in a Tudor style home? Try serving drinks in goblets for a medieval vibe (without all the beheadings and black plague). If you are hosting in a ranch style home maybe try serving buttermilk biscuits and fried green tomatoes (with ranch dressing of course!). The point is to commit to a theme and really adhere to it; everyone loves a good theme especially when there is free food and drinks. Am I right or am I right?

2. Involve the community

A great way to take your theme and run with it, is to involve community members when hosting your open house. 

Reach out to a local business and see if they want to join, or maybe even contribute to your open house! The local baker, coffee shop, winery, or local cheese shop can solidify that sense of community for your hopeful homebuyers. This little push from the community could be just what you need to spark a memorable dialogue between yourself and the potential buyers.

If you want to have a bit of an artsier event, you could invite a local artist to show some of their pieces. Not only could you do this for relatively cheap, if not for free, but also it adds an air of sophistication and class to any event, while still involving the local community.

3. Make it an experience

Don’t just stand around and let the visitors tour the home on their own.

Who knows more about this home than the owners? Consider talking with the owners and learning the history of the home. Hear their stories of the time they spent there, and share those with the guests of your open house. Don’t just stand around and let the visitors tour the home on their own. Walk with them through the house and have a great story about each room, a story that changed the house into a HOME for the owners. Personal stories like these can help the potential homebuyers to picture themselves in the house, making memories of their own. The most important thing you can do is allowing the potential homebuyers an experience that they will not get at any other open house. It is important to help them see the house as a potential HOME for them and their family.

There you have it! Make sure to have a theme, involve the community, and above all else be sure to provide an experience so that everyone who walks through the door can’t forget your open house! Oh yeah… and have fun! If you enjoy yourself, your guests will too!

- Brittany, Marketing and Customer Support Associate

Keeping up With the Terms

In a world where we work to make everything faster and more efficient, we have also begun to shorten our vocabulary. We use more slang terms and acronyms in our texts, emails, and especially on social media. If you feel like you’ve fallen behind, don’t worry – we’re here to help you keep up. Here are the 10 social media acronyms and hip terms that we think you should know.

1. DM vs. PM

In the world of Twitter, DM’s are “direct messages” that are shared between two users who follow each other. On other platforms, these messages are called PM’s, or “private messages”.

2. GIF

Aside from the controversial topic of how this term is pronounced, GIF stands for “graphic interchange format”. A GIF is an image (usually enticing a laugh) that moves as an animation and is used to add emotion and emphasis to your thoughts.

3. Meme

A meme is a concept, catchphrase, idea, or piece of media that spreads like wildfire across social media channels. The purpose of memes is typically to spread humor from person to person on various subjects by adding texts to comical images. If you are active on social media (which we highly suggest) it is likely that you have seen various memes spread across your social feeds.

4. RT

There is a plethora of information on social media. Twitter for example is a strong platform for things such as news and even just random intellectual thoughts. See something you agree with? Repost that users tweet, or rather “retweet” (RT) it.

5. TBT

Otherwise known as “Throwback Thursday”, people utilize this day to show off their best childhood glamour shots, or the lunch they ate last week. It helps other users relate to you, and encourages them to post a TBT as well!

6. SEO

Is your goal to get more people to your website? “Search engine optimization” is the best way to get there. SEO refers the key words a business chooses to use in their content that will rank them higher in search engines. Take some time to think about keywords you should be using, and get more action on your site!

7. CTA

If you are an active marketer, it is likely that you have a website, or have run some type of advertising campaign in your career. A CTA is a “call to action” that entices people on the web to either purchase your product, click on your ad, or request more information about your services. Popular CTA phrases include “Learn More”, “Sign up Free”, “Get Started”, and more. Do any of these ring a bell? They were likely the phrases that convinced you to sign up for that free 30-day trial of a new program. Start utilizing these CTA’s and start gaining more business!

Popular CTA phrases include “Learn More”, “Sign up Free”, “Get Started”, and more.

8. CPC

Another important term for a marketer is CPC. Defined as the “cost per click”, this term will tell you how much you are spending each time a user clicks on an advertisement that you are running. Whether on Facebook, Google, or other advertising platforms, the cost per click will tell you how relevant your advertisement is to your audience. The lower the cost per click, the more clicks you can receive with your given ad budget. Take a look at this number the next time you are in your Facebook ads manager, to see if you should be making changes to your ads.

9. ROI

Anytime you run an advertisement or purchase something to help grow your business, you are likely hoping to make some sales in return. ROI, or “return on investment” is the monetary value that you gain in relation to the money you spent to make it. In other words, this number will tell you if that investment you made last year really paid off.

10. UGC

People trust people. UGC is “user generated content” – essentially posts, reviews, videos, etc. created by consumers. It has been shown that 70% of people trust images taken from ‘people like them’ over brand created images according to Reevoo. Take this tip and create a contest, or promotional idea and get your consumers involved. Repost their content and see how other consumers relate to it!

70% of people trust images taken from ‘people like them’ over brand created images.

If you felt out of the loop with your social lingo, we hope this cheat sheet helped. Let us know if you learned something, or have another term that you think should be in the top 10. We love hearing from you! Like we said, UGC is important, and we’d love to share yours!

- Alicia, Marketing Assistant 

3 Ways to Dominate Your E-mail Campaigns

If you aren’t utilizing e-mails or e-mail drip campaigns, you’re missing out on a huge marketing opportunity! E-mail is an excellent tool to be using especially because they can be automated- which means you’ll have more time to focus to other areas of business.

Before you start setting up automated e-mails there’s a few things you should and should not be doing that can make or break your e-mail open rates, click through rates, and percentage of people who unsubscribe. Let’s break some things down.

1.  Treat Your First E-mail Like Your First Date

Just like a first date, your first e-mail is potentially the beginning to a beautiful relationship. And first impressions matter!

It is going to be worth spending the extra time to polish the first e-mail your subscribers will read. Make the welcome e-mail: fun, structured, easy to read, and make sure your reader understands what they are getting themselves into- what can they expect moving forward?  Who knows -maybe you’ll get that 2nd date!

2.  Your Subject Lines

This is arguably the most important part to any e-mail you will ever write. Why? It’s the first thing people read when they get an e-mail! Most business owners don’t devote enough energy into writing a good subject line- don’t procrastinate this step!

Here’s the thing- if someone doesn’t make it past your subject line, they never have the chance to make it to the content, offer, etc. that you are providing in the body.

So what kind of advice do we have to offer you?

-Keep it short (10 characters or less have a 58% open rate)
-Drive urgency (use words like Urgent/Important/Limited Time)
-Stay Casual (Emojis are your friend!)

3.  Get Personal

You may be shocked to hear that customers and clients want to hear from you most often by e-mail. What is more shocking is that 80% of consumers also expect those e-mail communications to be personalized according to MarketingSherpa.

80% of consumers also expect those e-mail communications to be personalized

Here is the thing- you don’t need a crazy amount of data to send a personalized email. Their first name, zip code, birthday, and home purchased anniversary date are all enough to get their attention!

Birthday emails are 235% more likely to be opened and also have 300% higher click-through rates than typical promotional e-mails according to Experian white paper. Too bad you can only send those once a year!

Another simple way to stay personalized while using their first name is to use this merge field in the body of your e-mail in addition to the greeting.

Most people tend to read the beginning and end blocks of e-mails, so go ahead and close your e-mail out with their name once last time.

Going back to what I mentioned in the beginning- if you aren’t using e-mail campaigns you’re missing out on a super simple way to keep in touch with your clients! And if you are using e-mail campaigns, you now have 3 new pieces of information to apply to your campaigns! Keep making good impressions so people look forward to seeing your e-mails in their inboxes!

- Michelle, Sales and Marketing Assistant

Instagram vs. Snapchat - The Endless Battle

There are many difficult choices in life: hot dog or hamburger, cat or dog, pen or pencil, Kendall or Kylie (do you see where we’re going with this?) But, while these choices are tough, there is typically one option that we will choose over another. In the world of ever-changing things, some choices are not so simple to make. Lets take the battle of Snapchat vs. Instagram for example. These two opponents have quickly taken over the social scene and have consumers and companies alike asking, “which one is better?” While you may already have your own personal opinion on the matter, we thought we would share our insight as well.

In the early years of 2011, Snapchat showed its face to the world for the first time. They introduced the idea of disappearing photos to us, and made us just a little less vulnerable to show people the “behind the scenes” moments of our lives. The app also gives you the option to put a filter over your face and become a dog for the day, you know, if you want a break from the human life. Of course, this took the world by storm, and before we knew it Snapchat had grown into the hub for quick social updates – cue Snapchat stories. It may have started out being the place that millennials would go to see what their friends did the night before, but it has now grown to provide consumers with entertainment, political, and world news.

While Snapchat took off with immense success, Instagram was not far behind to follow their lead. In 2016, Instagram launched its own version of “stories” – including many of the same features as its rival. This has led them to grow even more, bringing us to their latest update, Snapchat’s facial recognition filters (sound familiar?) 

Businesses have begun encompassing the features of both platforms and have been trying to master how to use them to their advantage. This seems like a tough job, but understanding the benefits of using one over the other is important. Take Snapchat for example. The user base is mostly millennial (at a whopping 60% of users under 25), meaning that if you business model speaks mostly to that age demographic, focusing on branding through Snapchat would not be a bad call.  Also, the app tends to be used for more “fun” and “unfiltered” content as opposed to pre-planned and designed photos shared in Instagram. In addition, Instagram showcases its “stories” feature based upon who viewers engage with the most on the platform. By showing the stories at the top of the news feed, brands have a higher chance of being viewed by their audience, which is often much larger on Instagram as stories are publically shown by default.

So what's the point? Well, while both platforms help to promote your brand, it’s all about where the eyeballs are. As Instagram continues to release new features, people will continue to be drawn to what is new. While these features may mimic Snapchat, users will still be drawn to check out the newest Instagram features – so why not utilize these and let your brand be what they see?

- Alicia, Marketing Assistant