How to maximise your estate agency database to win new instructions

Maximising your estate agency database to win new instructions is one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to up your game. It necessitates adept data management, skillful communication, and savvy marketing tactics; but harnessing the powers of your estate agent software (CRM) is a bottomless goldmine.

Email marketing and automation is vital for inbound lead generation, repeat business and client advocacy. By leveraging your data, you stay front of mind for both your passive and active audiences within your existing database.  

A meager number of estate agencies make full use of the treasure they already possess within their database to unearth new leads. So we've crafted a few steps to guide you in extracting the utmost potential from your CRM, beat the competition and make 2025/2026 your best year yet.

Clean up your data

Start by cleaning up your database. Remove duplicate or outdated entries where possible and ensure that those who have withdrawn marketing consent are recorded as such.

Organise your database into different categories, such as leads, clients, past clients, and prospects.

Choose an email marketing platform

There are a ton of platforms out there. Many estate agents might look to use Brief Your Market or Spectre, due to their ability to integrate with your CRM and it’s easy-to-digest ROI dashboard.

When choosing your platform, don’t only consider cost. Used right, the ROI will far outway the initial spend. Think about your goals - why are you looking to use email marketing in the first place and what ability do you need your email marketing platform to have.

Some platforms, like Force24, are powerful enough to be able to track individual users website visits and automate communications based on their activity, for example.

Split your data

The marketing jargon here would be ‘segmentation’. Segmenting your database will look different for each business, but could include categories like location, branch ownership, on-market status, buying status and so on.

What this allows you to do is target your marketing efforts, making your emails more personable and increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Create a strategy

A goal without a plan is just a dream.

Having a strong strategy in place before you start sending emails willy-nilly will benefit you in the long run. You’ll need to consider how often you want to email, which segments you want to target, align campaigns with your overall business and marketing objectives and think about what content you’ll need to produce.

Free up more time

By using automation, you can free-up more of your estate agents time to do what they do best - sell houses.

Automation can be used for simple administrative tasks like valuation confirmations and legislative paperwork, to anniversary messages. But it can also be used to re-target website visitors, property viewers, old valuations, other agents stock and more.

You can literally get in front of hundreds more people, who you know are hot leads, without lifting a finger.

Feedback makes you stronger

A lot of estate agents are afraid to get feedback, in case it's negative. But then, how do you plan on improving if you’re not addressing your problems?

Knowledge is power. Use your database to conduct research from the people that have already engaged with you in one way or another. Identify areas where you excel, and areas where you could improve.

Learn from other industries too. Amazon, for example, have nailed their customer satisfaction. By collecting customer feedback from customer service interactions, they identify common customer problems and use that knowledge to train their representatives. Ask anyone you know, and they will likely praise any interaction they’ve had with Amazon’s customer service - because of their openness to accept critique and better their service.

There is no reason why you can’t do the same and, in doing so, give your reputation as a trustworthy estate agent a boost.

Get buy in from your teams

When you’re looking at using email marketing and/or automation, the output will only ever be as good as the input. Keeping the database up-to-date and ensuring that new entries are entered correctly will help strengthen your marketing efforts.

Help your estate agents to understand that the extra 5-minutes asking the right questions or ticking the right boxes will generate them more business. If you’re a larger agency, consider using one branch as a guinea-pig and sharing their success with your other branches before rolling out company-wide.

Email marketing is vastly underrated by many estate agencies, but it’s such an important part of keeping your real estate agent database engaged. Choose to stay ahead of your competition by leveraging your database in this way; and stay front-of-mind for homeowners in your community.

Check out how we helped Sims Williams get £252,500 in valuation leads and £95,000 in instructions through email marketing.

Magenta MAD is a creative marketing and graphic design agency concentrating on the real estate and recruitment industries. Sprinkle your business with a little bit of MADness.

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