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Newsletters are a great brand building exercise, and an opportunity to share useful, engaging content with your database. Almost all of our clients have tried doing a newsletter at some point, and that first edition is always a great success. In fact, we’ve written about what makes a good newsletter before.

The thing is, creating one quality newsletter is just the first step. Delivering a new newsletter month after month or quarter after quarter is another story – and often, that’s where things fall over. As soon as business booms, agents get busy listing and their newsletter gets forgotten. 

There’s no sugarcoating it; newsletters require a serious investment of time and energy. Often the first edition is created in a burst of enthusiasm that quickly peters out when the day-to-day concerns of running a business take over. But a newsletter is a valuable branding tool, and making the effort to keep it up is worthwhile. 

Here are the keys to delivering quality newsletters time and time again.  

1. Appoint a project manager

Choose someone within your organisation to oversee the creation of every single edition – that includes organising content and liaising with external stakeholders like designers and distribution companies. Agents are generally too busy to give a project like this the attention is needs, so enlisting someone on your marketing or administration team to run the show is crucial to keeping the project on track.

2. Keep it simple

It’s easy to go overboard and include every scrap of conceivable information – market wraps, recent sales, statistics, graphs, suburb profiles, lifestyle content, testimonials, recipes, fun facts, quizzes … the list goes on and on. And on. Including all these things definitely makes for a fantastic newsletter. It also makes for an overwhelming workload. Heading down this road all but guarantees that your second newsletter will never reach the letterbox.

Limiting the amount of information you include in each edition makes the task easier to replicate on a regular basis. Narrowing your focus also makes it more likely that you’ll really capture the attention of your database. By selecting three to five key messages and delivering them in an engaging way, people are much more likely to pick up your newsletter and take the time to read it. 

As for the great ideas that don’t make it – well, hold on to those.

3. Plan content in advance

Use the overflow ideas to create a content plan. Plotting a year’s worth of newsletters in advance will save you time down the track. It means you begin each edition with a clear idea of what needs to be done, making the process a more streamlined one. 

Planning the content ahead of time makes it easy to deliver timely, relevant and interesting information across a range of topics. Don’t lock it in 100% – it’s more than likely that trends and stories will crop up over the year that you’ll want to cover. But in a pinch, it’s good to have a clear idea of where you’re heading. 

4. Personalise, within reason 

Creating customised versions of your newsletter for different agents is a great idea. But when you have more than two or three agents involved, this can quickly become an unwieldy, and expensive, process.

Streamline it by sharing as much content as possible. Each agent is likely to want their own message, contact details and key sales, but other elements – like suburb statistics, market wraps and lifestyle advice – can be shared to minimise the amount of time involved in creating each edition. 

What works for you when creating your real estate newsletters?