Building relationships with your subscribers is the key to email marketing. If you stop interacting with your real estate leads, your whole plan will fail, even if you have a large email list.
Even if you are still emailing them, there can be low or no engagement. One of the biggest reasons why people don’t respond to your messages is that they don’t care about what you have to say.
They signed up for your list because they’re interested in learning more about real estate. However, they’ll quickly unsubscribe if you don’t give them something to keep them interested.
Telling stories is an effective way to capture someone’s attention. We’re talking about emails with stories that can be seen, not just stories that can be read.
We will be looking at visual storytelling as a way to increase the open and click-through rates of your email campaigns. You can revive your email list by doing this, and you will get responses back from them.
What is Visual Storytelling?
In visual storytelling, the customer is the center of the story. This is a narrative device that marketing uses to make the customer feel more connected to the story. This is important because it allows marketers to create a more appealing story using visual elements.
Examples of visual content that real estate agents can use in concocting a story for their email campaigns are as follows:
- Images – Pictures of the property for sale or photos of yourself should help create a more personalized experience with your subscribers.
- Video – Create a video of yourself presenting the featured properties to your subscribers and embed them into your email instead of linking to them.
- GIFs/cinemagraphs – Use these moving pictures to emphasize a point in your email or convey particular emotion readers are feeling.
- Infographics/presentations – Show statistics or slides from your presentation regarding the real estate industry to prove a point and help move the story forward.
It’s not just about the images used in this case. It’s how you use these images to tell your story.
To create an effective marketing campaign, you need to craft a story that will pull your audience in and guide them through your buyer’s journey. Your goal should be to turn your leads into clients, but that won’t be possible if you don’t have an interesting story to tell.
Why is Visual Storytelling Important?
Telling stories is a great way for marketers to connect with their audience on a more personal level. When you add visuals to your campaigns, they become even more effective.
Below are reasons that explain the value that visual storytelling wields.
Information is Processed Faster
People process visual content much more quickly than words. In other words, a single image can convey a large amount of information.
Marketers should use visuals in their marketing campaigns to better communicate their message to their audience.
Breaks Down Complex Ideas into Simpler Messages
If your campaign is difficult to explain or understand, visual content can help by breaking the message down into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Make sure your recipients understand your message. Your campaign will have a more lasting impact if you consider these results.
Create Unique Experiences for Your Segments
There are different types of content that can help you improve your real estate business. Each type of content serves a specific purpose and goal. On one hand, blog posts are generally speaking at the ToFu (top of the funnel) stage. The goal is to help you increase your online presence so that you can generate leads and customers for your business through ranking for your target keywords.
The phrase “BoFu (below the funnel)” refers to the bottom of the marketing funnel, where email campaigns are often found. The people who would be most interested in your business are those who are already subscribed to you, but need more information before they become clients or customers. The purpose of your campaigns, therefore, is to convince people to convert into customers or clients.
The objectives of each content type are not the same because each content type is at a different stage of your sales funnel. And to help bring your audience members further along in your sales process, you need to tell stories that are appropriate for each content type. If you want people to move along your sales funnel, you need to create a compelling email campaign that speaks to them at each stage.
How to Use Visual Storytelling to Boost Email Open and CTR Rates
Now that you understand how visual storytelling works, it’s time to start using it in your email marketing campaigns.
The emails you send should prompt people to take action, since you’re dealing with prospects who are in the bottom of the funnel stage. The goal is to get more people to open the email and read its content. The next step is to include a call to action in the email. This could be something like asking them to click on a link.
The following are ways that visual storytelling can play a critical role in the success of your emails.
Segment Your Audience
Even though your subscribers are in the same stage of the same funnel, you should not treat them all the same.
Some people in your email list may have signed up for different reasons. Some people may want to sell their property with your help, while others may want to have access to your list of properties.
It is important to know how and why the person signed up at this stage. By using the list management feature in your email software, you can segment your lists into groups and profile each one. This will help you to keep your lists organized and make it easier to target your messages. When you do this, you can send emails that are relevant to the people you are sending them to, and you can avoid sending emails that are not relevant to these people.
Therefore, the email campaign to be launched to property buyers should be designed to be different for sellers. Since the purpose of each campaign is unique, the visual storytelling will also be unique.
Determine the Tone of Your Email Campaign
Your buyer persona should dictate the general tone of your campaigns. Looking at who your persona is in regard to age, hobbies, desires, and interests will help you determine the right tone to use in your emails. The data from this campaign can help you make future email campaigns more effective.
This is closely related to your brand identity. The things that you believe in and the goals that you have set for your business should be appealing to the customer that you have in mind.
If you want to maintain a professional image for your brand, it is important to carry this over into your email communications.
This means that when you are telling a story visually, using presentations, charts, and infographics should help keep your audience engaged. There are certain types of visual content that will be a good match for your target audience and your brand’s image.
If your brand is lighthearted and up-to-date with current trends, it’s best to use a casual tone in your marketing campaigns. This means that you can use less formal photos of yourself. You can even insert GIFs in emails if you think your target audience would enjoy it.
If you want your campaign to be successful, you need to create a strong tone and then connect it to a story.
Putting Everything Together With Stories
You should have everything you need to tell stories to your subscribers by this point. Even though there is no one-size-fits-all storytelling template that you can use for every segment, you can still use a free trial template. To ensure the success of your campaigns, you need to take the time to formulate the pain points.
We want to put our subscribers in the driver’s seat as they take the buyer’s journey, with the goal of making a sale. To help you build the skeleton of your story, ask yourself these questions:
- What is/are the pain point/s of my audience? Are sellers having problems setting the right price for their property in the market? Or are buyers being priced out for sought-after properties in desirable areas? There are many pain points to choose from for buyers and sellers, so make sure to select one per campaign.
- What language do they understand the best? Going back to tone, you need to align your email campaign with your brand and audience demographics. Identifying how they communicate and express themselves gives you insights into how you can share the story more effectively in your emails.
- How do they see themselves? Knowing what the majority of your segment feels as buyers or sellers allows you to position your story where most of them can resonate with.
- How can your services solve their problems? Your purpose in this story is to bridge the gap between points A and B so your subscribers can get to their desired destination. Therefore, by leading the story toward what you can do as a real estate agent and how you can help them, you also lead them to hire you for your services.
As the story progresses, do not promote or sell your product or service. It’s better to let the subscribers, who are the heroes of their own story, make their own decisions.
Additional Tips for Crafting Winning Email Campaigns
Storytelling is only a small part of the entire campaign. Even though you have a great subject line, you can’t rest on your laurels when it comes to your email content. You need to make sure that your subscribers will actually open the email once they see it in their inbox.
Below is a quick rundown of the best email marketing practices you should observe on all your drip campaigns:
- Write curiosity-driven headlines that encourage recipients to open your email and find out about them. Just make sure to deliver on your promise and never leave subscribers hanging.
- Put everything in your email’s first sentence to get recipients to take notice.
- Proceed with your story here. Use techniques like bucket brigade to help readers on their toes and read until the very end.
- Showcase your call to action. Each email should have a single CTA to prevent distracting recipients with multiple choices. Include the CTA in the middle of your story (to help tie the story with your CTA) and at the end. If you don’t have a particular CTA to include, use email signature for sales so they can still connect with you in more meaningful ways.
- Use images. Here’s where you can increase the click-through rate and take it to a whole new level. Use images according to your story. Using GIFs from GIPHY help break the tension and draw out a particular emotion from readers. For more professional readers, featuring a portion of your infographic or presentation could serve as a curiosity driver (similar to the headline).
The above-mentioned strategies should help you get started with your campaigns and see results.
STEPS TO CREATING MEMORABLE VISUAL STORIES WHEN YOU LACK THE SKILLS
STEP #1: IDENTIFY THE MESSAGE YOU WANT TO CONVEY
What main point are you trying to share? After you have figured out your main message, think about the benefits or different points you want to include.
Pictures always have a story to tell, even if you didn’t mean for them to.
STEP #2: CREATE YOUR IMAGES TO CONVEY YOUR STORY.
Too much visual information can be overwhelming, so it’s best to keep your images clean and simple. Use muted colors and minimal patterns to help your audience focus on your message. I’m not interested I’m not interested. Anything else is irrelevant and should be trimmed.
Three things to keep in mind:
- The quality of your image is determined by the average quality of each visual element. The quality of an infographic with excellent illustrations but poor typography will be seen as 50% lower than it actually is. If you don’t pay attention to the small details, the overall quality of the image will suffer. You are always telling a story, even if you are not trying to. If you use a low-quality image, it’s like you’re choosing to tell the wrong story. Which apple would you like to eat?
- The use of stereotypes is important. Visual stereotypes are any visual representations of a concept or idea. For example:
- Power plugs to represent WordPress plugins
- A lamp to represent an idea
- Cursor arrows to represent page access
- Radio microphone to represent podcast.
- Since you can’t explain concepts like “hero,” “good,” “evil,” “danger,” and “action” using words, you have to rely on visual stereotypes when creating visual narratives. The cover image should tell the reader what the article is about. Just like the hero of a story, the cover image should be easily identifiable.
- The image should not take away from the blog post. You already know the importance of your headlines. The cognitive process of reading happens quickly. Your image should not compete with it.
Conclusion
One way to ensure your email marketing campaigns are successful is to focus on creating a cohesive narrative that puts the audience front and center. To make presentations more effective, tell a story with visuals to engage the audience.
In other words, the success of your visual storytelling will depend on how well it aligns with your brand and your audience demographics. When planning your campaigns, keep these variables in mind to ensure the success of your emails.
