Home Builder Nurtures Leads & Closes Deals with Email Campaign

Background

In a digital landscape where there are multitudes of third-party marketing platforms that determine who sees your content and who doesn’t, there is still an arena where you control your audience - email marketing.

I know about half of you just rolled your eyes because not 10 minutes ago you deleted at least one promotional email because it’s not relevant to you. The good news is, you have also probably opened a promotional email recently because it WAS relevant to you. Therein lies the key to successful email marketing.

Talk is cheap, but data is rich. Let’s take a look at real data from a three-email lead nurture series sent by a home builder.

The Strategy

For privacy reasons, we cannot show the emails themselves for this home builder. However, we can describe our strategy and the key components that made this email nurturing sequence successful! Here are the key factors that made this email marketing strategy successful...

1. Simple

Excluding the greeting and signature, the first email is a grand total of 42 words composed into 3 sentences. There are only two clickable options; one to view the PDF and one to Schedule a Tour (which is in the signature). 

It takes less than a minute for the recipient to read it and decide if they need to take further action. Because your entire message is shorter than a Twitter post, it comes across concisely.

2. Timely

This email sequence is triggered when a lead downloads the community eBook that showcases the floor plans and information about the area for people interested in building a home there. The first email gives them a link they can use to view the eBook at any time. It then ends with an “open door question” that gives room for the recipient to respond and start a conversation. 

The first email is sent after 3 days of submitting the website form to download the guide. The second email is sent 7 days later. Then the final email is sent 9 days after that. This pattern of delays ensures your home-building business stays top of mind but does not feel like Aunt Sally on Facebook.

Further, the last two emails are only sent if we know the recipient did not respond to the previous email already. If they did respond to a previous nurture email, they will not receive the remaining nurture emails.

3. Personal

The cherry on top with these emails is that they look and feel like the sales rep just wrote the email personally and clicked send.

If the recipient’s first name is known, the email subject line and email greeting will address them by name. There is a smiling picture of the sender next to their name and contact info in the signature. And, again, because it is short, simple, and all text, it looks like it was hand-typed and manually sent.

As such, these email nurture sequences have influenced 2 closed deals from 46 total recipients in the past month. Nurturing your leads will keep your brand top of mind and encourage them to get in touch when they are ready.

The Results

In this nurturing sequence, open rates are 1.5 times higher than construction industry average open rates of 45% and 2 times higher than overall open rates of 32%. (Source) The click rates are on par with industry average click rates of 20-30%. (Source)

Sure, open and click rates are nice, but here's the real dish on these emails. Put simply, 46 leads enrolled in this email sequence in the first month. Of those 46 leads, two have become closed customers during that month.

Key Takeaways

How can you reach the right people at the right time with the right message in the right place where they are ready to take action? While there are many ways to reach your ideal customers, email marketing remains one of the most effective methods for reaching your perfect clients.

If you are not following up with your form submissions via email (including follow-up and nurturing emails), just getting something up that is simple, timely, and personal will help you immensely. Beyond that, we'd love to talk shop! Builder Funnel can help you integrate email marketing into a holistic inbound marketing strategy reaching hundreds, even thousands, or people, shortening the time-to-buy for your ideal clients, and helping your business reach the right people at the right time with the right message in the right place where they are ready to take action!