In 2017, email is not going anywhere – and the same is true for writing email subject lines. Crafting a really good one is among the biggest challenges agents have to overcome as their emails spin into new campaigns each season. Let’s explore some of the words that you’ll be better without in your real estate email subject lines.
With such limited space an email subject line provides, you can’t afford to waste a single word. For one thing, a subject line should be enticing to trigger people’s curiosity and compel them to open your email. For another, you have to beware of spammy words that can potentially trigger spam filters and drop your deliverability rates.
Below are 10 words to remove from your real estate email subject lines at all cost.
10 words to avoid in real estate email subject lines
1) Your company name
The problem with putting your company name in the subject line is that most of your leads have never heard of you. So branded terms carries zero value for them – although some may argue it does work for raising brand awareness. You could do yourself a lot of good if you use that space to craft a benefit-driven email subject line that your prospects will care to further explore in the email.
However, you can safely use your company name when communicating with existing customers who are well familiar with your company. In this case, you’re actually making it easier for them to filter through their inboxes and quickly spot valuable messages. The other positive instance is using your company name in your newsletter subject line.
[Related post: 8 Real Estate Email Prospecting Tricks Top-performing Agents Use]
2) “Great deal”
The deal might indeed be great but talking about it too early might put people off. Again, the timing is going to make a huge difference. For your recent leads (who know little about you just yet) this would look like another promotional email urging them to make a purchase they are not sure about.
Overall, you’d like to avoid these Black Friday associations. The exception is when both of you have already talked a couple of times and you’re contacting to offer the latest listing, mortgage opportunity or reduced price to someone who previously showed an interest.
3) “Hi, First Name”
In most cases, this is simply a waste of space because you’re going to repeat those exact same words in your email body (although some data confirms such personalization might work, so the only way to find out is to test on you own). Still, personalization goes far beyond inserting a prospect’s name in the subject line and hoping this will trigger familiarity strong enough for people to open and read your email.
A much better and meaningful way to personalize emails is to deliver relevant content and optimize your subject lines according to the prospect’s position or industry – but, again, you might give the first name a try.
4) “Re:”
A simple logic behind using “Re:” is to evoke the feeling the prospects are continuing an on-going conversation which is supposed to prompt them to open your email. This technique may backfire because the moment people open the email and realize that was not the case, they become angry and confused. Plus a growing number of companies have already incorporated this trick into their email campaigns which make people immune to it.
Another example is “Fwd:” which is less tricky but still not the best technique to use since people might see through it right away and delete your email.
5) “10 minutes for a call”
Huge mistake if you’re sending an email with this subject line before sending an introduction email (or engaging in communication with your prospects elsewhere) first. Since people don’t know much about you, they see little point of talking to a stranger and even if they do, you’ll have to handle more objections than usual.
This subject line is acceptable later on, though, when you’ve already talked with your prospects and agreed to get in touch again.
6) “[First Name]”
We all make mistakes and those of us dealing with email personalization know it all too well. Indeed, custom fields like “[First Name]” help agents easily send a large number of emails and scale their campaigns. But fail to handle this properly, and it’ll turn into a huge “uh-oh” situation.
Double-check your settings before sending your emails and send one to yourself to see if all works properly.
7) “Touch base”
A “touch base” has turned into a sales cliché you should avoid at all costs, no matter if you’ve already talked with your prospects or not. It provides no real value whatsoever and sounds much too salesy.
8) “Outreach”
The same applies to “outreach”. It’s a good, precise term to use internally among agents but email subject lines can definitely do without it. Collective experience shared by marketers from various industries proves this kind of language doesn’t work in the world of inbound marketing where people want helpful answers to their questions first, sales second.
9) Third-party brand names
It might be tempting to try to reinforce your message with the name of a third-party brand, for example developer of household appliances, successful local mortgage professional or cleaning company. The two drawbacks being:
- people may not know about these businesses and that information will be useless for them (which equals less email opens);
- what if people had a bad experience with that product? Or know someone who had? Better not to try your luck just in this particular instance.
[Related post: 6 Tips on Creating a Local Real Estate Brand to Outrank Large Portals]
10) ALL CAPS
While this is not a word itself, we feel it’s essential to give a heads up with regards to this one. It looks promotional, spammy and unprofessional. In fact, all caps can trigger spam filters and your message will be forever lost in the trash. Do not use it and it’s the equivalent of SHOUTING.
What’s next?
As much as all agents would want it, there’s no universal solution to the perfect real estate email subject line. In some cases, certain subject lines perform better but fail in situations you were sure they’d work. In this post, we tried to outline some of the most low-performing words but some of them, like #1, 2,3 or 5, might work given the right context.
Try them out and test them on your campaigns.
