Real estate brokerages – do you pay careful attention to each and every time your brand and logo are exposed to a consumer? Probably not – but one specific place we regularly see brokers forget is in their agents’ email signatures both in regular messages and in real estate brokerage email marketing. A Realtor email signature is a great place to create a consistent brand feel across all of your agents, but few real estate brokerages have a policy in place on how to set this.
How much of your day do you spend on email?
Saving the perfect Realtor email signature will limit the amount that you have to spend typing when you bring an email to a close. For your real estate brokerage leads and clients, it can make an easy way for them to locate your contact information and website.
When used incorrectly, an email signature can be a real disaster.
You want to be as concise as possible. Don’t scare off your recipient at the very end of a wonderful email because you included a signature equally as long as the original email itself.
What should be included?
Realtor email signature must haves:
- Who you are
- Where you work
- How someone can contact you
Short, and to the point. Ideally, you can showcase all of that in about four lines or less. The key here is simplicity.
Adding paragraphs of bulky info may help the reader get to know you the first time you communicate with them by email, but if you correspond frequently it is likely to get very redundant.
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Example of a good Realtor email signature.
—–
John Smith, REALTOR®
Premier Brokerage of California
(123) 456-7890 | [email protected]
Search for Homes: www.myhomesearch.com
Of course, ‘simple’ doesn’t have to be boring. Feel free to add a personal touch or some creativity to your email, but be careful not to get carried away!
Do you have an iPhone?
Learn how to change that unnecessary (and quite frankly irritating) ‘Sent from my iPhone’ message!
- Click ‘Settings’ on your home screen
- Click ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’
- Click ‘Signature’
- Decide if this new signature will apply to ‘All Accounts’ or one specific account
- Delete the default and add your signature (repeat for each email account)
Other items you should consider.
Disclaimers
Check with your Broker and your MLS to see if any disclaimer, disclosure, or other additional information is required. Once you find out, only add the extra text if it’s mandatory that you do so. Lots of agents want to include much more than the basics listed above, but before you do this, there are a few key points to consider.
Website Links
Make your link into a call to action that will take the visitor exactly where they want to go. To your real estate brokerage IDX: ‘Search for homes’, to your real estate market update emails ‘Download free market reports’, to your AVM or perhaps to integration partners like Buyside: ‘What’s my home worth?’, To your real estate brokerage blog: ‘Community blog articles’. Depending on the strongest information that your site can offer, link your reader to that page directly.
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Social icons/URLs
Are you adding a link to your personal social profile? Or is it a business page? If it’s a professional page on which you are an active user and update the page consistently, then by all means add the link.
Images
Adding images, graphics, and logos will increase the overall email file size dramatically. There are also many email clients who block images or load them as attachments by default, so your reader may not be seeing exactly what you think they are. Remember that your contact info cannot be copied from an image, nor is your website link itself clickable from an image. Plain text emails have a higher proven open rate and are far less likely to end up in the dreaded spam folder.
If you need to add an image in as your whole Realtor email signature, use html and make sure that you include the ‘alternate text’ which will be displayed if the image is blocked for any reason. All you would need to do is upload your desired image to your website’s media folder so that it is hosted online and can be located via a link. Next, switch to the html editor of your email signature and add something like this- of course replacing the link and your name with real information.
Excess Text
Keep your signature brief and relevant. Famous quotes, jokes, and other unrelated information are most likely not necessary. If you’re tempted to add your full testimonial text in as well, consider adding a link to read your testimonials page on your website instead.
Examples of bad email signatures.
To drive home the point of a simple, yet informative Realtor email signature, we’ll give you some examples of what not to do.
Too long:
Too short:
Too much going on:
