Email is still one of the most effective and highest-return marketing channels that an organization can use. In fact, some studies have shown that email marketing can provide up to a $44.25 return for every dollar spent. Wow! But it can also be one of the most easily-abused marketing tools in the world as well. The key differentiator between having recipients who devour every word you send them, and recipients who reach straight for the "delete" button on every email you send, depends entirely on how well you're doing it. So let's dig into how to improve your retirement community's email marketing.
Using Email to Market to Prospective Residents
Once you have a prospect’s email address, she’s proven that she wants to know from you because she wouldn’t have given you her address unless she wanted to learn more. She’s interested in what you have to say, so there’s an excellent chance she’ll open your email messages to her.
People who are thinking of moving into a retirement or assisted living community (or their adult children) are going to do a lot of reading and researching the issue. They are going to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and they want a ton of information in order to make the right decision.
Emailing them links to blog posts, a free offer of an eBook that speaks in-depth on a topic of interest to them, and offers of a tour is the best way to get that information to them.
Take a look below for four email marketing tips for your retirement community.
1. Get to Know Your Prospects
Even if someone freely gives you her email address, your emails to her may remain unopened unless they offer the information she wants. So you’re going to need to know your potential residents/their adult children really well.
Find the answers to the following questions:
- How old is your prospect?
- How much money does she have/what’s her income?
- Is she 75 years old and a widow, or is she 53 with a demanding career and two ailing parents that she’s frantically worried about?
- Is she healthy, or does she have mild cognitive or health issues?
Knowing these answers means you can send the kind of information she wants to read. What’s more, chances are great that you have more than one “perfect prospect.” One could be an adult child of a senior, another could be a widow, and still, another could be a married couple (adult child). Each of these prospects will have different interests, questions, and concerns.
This is why you will be creating different personas so that you’ll be able to send emails of interest to each.
For example, you may not want to send a link to a blog post to someone who is just starting her buyer’s journey with you about how to convince a parent to move into an assisted living community. Instead, you would want to send her a link to a post on your site with tips on how to downsize from a large home into smaller quarters.
Remember: give them what they want depending on where they are in their decision-making process.
2. Automate Your Email Delivery
It can be hard to ascertain which prospect should get which email. So, automation to the rescue!
Once a prospect gives you her email address, you can then set up a series of email messages that will go out to her in an automated sequence:
- You first send her a message thanking her for providing you with her email while delivering the free eBook on “Financing Options with Our Community” you promised.
- The next week you send her a link to a video of several current residents talking about what they love about living in your community.
- You follow up in a couple of days with a blog post that your Google Analytics has shown to be popular with your website visitors.
- You continue over the weeks or months with links to more blog posts as they go live, invitations to visit your community for a tour, notice of free community events at your community, and so on.
3. Make Sure It’s Mobile-Friendly
With three out of five consumers checking their email on their smartphone, you need to make sure your messages are designed for viewing on mobile phones. (And don’t think that people over 65 aren’t using smartphones to check their email! Plus, their adult children certainly are!)
Yes, your prospects may just glance at the message (most seniors – 92 percent – report that they won’t open an email message while seeing it on their smartphone and will wait instead until they can get home and open it on their desktop/laptop), but you don’t want to take a chance they will wait: make all messages mobile-friendly!
4. Monitor Results. And Keep Doing So.
You can’t improve if you don’t know what needs fixing, so you need to keep a close eye on how many people opened your messages, how many actually did what you wanted them to do (click on a link in the email, call or more information, download a free ebook, etc.), and how many people asked to be “unsubscribed” from your email).
(VERY important note: You must make sure that all email messages offer anyone who has subscribed to your email list the option of unsubscribing. This entails placing a link in small type on every email that says something akin to “unsubscribe.” If someone clicks on that link, they can see instructions on how to unsubscribe easily. Don’t worry: all legitimate email automation services always place the unsubscribe link at the bottom of all your email messages.)
You also may want to write different email subject lines (on the same topic) to see which is opened more often. Try different locations where you place your call-to-action in the email body. Send one version of the email to one portion of your list and the other half to the second version, and note which email receives the greater open rate.
The beauty of email marketing is that it’s never set in stone; you can always tweak and test different messages to see which version gets the better response.
Run Your Retirement Community’s Email Marketing Efforts with Our Help
ClearPivot helps retirement and assisted living communities market themselves to potential residents (and/or their adult children). We are an inbound digital marketing company, which means our marketing tactics work to attract highly targeted prospects to you, then helps you guide them through their research and thirst for information until they become your resident. To learn more about our methods and strategies and contact us today.
