Email marketing tools for real estate agents: which is best?
Overview
Choosing the right software to help your agents stay connected to their sphere can have a huge impact on productivity and the experience consumers have with your brand – both critical drivers of brokerage success. It can mean the difference between agents winning business while they sleep or struggling with clunky email triggers and bad personalization.
While you can accomplish some of the same workflows with other marketing software, we think MoxiWorks’ ActivePipe product is the best — and most intelligently automated — nurture software on the market because of the way its smart AI eliminates so much of the time and guesswork in building successful real estate marketing programs — without removing the agent from the process. Let’s dive into a comparison between ActivePipe and another popular marketing tool, kvCORE and its Marketing Autopilot features.
 |
 |
Marketing Autopilot is a nurture marketing tool within the kvCORE platform that automates follow-up and creates follow-up tasks for agents in your brokerage. The primary focus for the tool is nurturing new leads that come into your CRM — monitoring and identifying opportunities in your existing sphere is manual and time-consuming. It is required that your brokerage uses kvCORE as your CRM in order to leverage the tool. |
What you get with each tool
*Note that many of these solutions are available in a tiered pricing structure. For the sake of this comparison, we’ve selected ActivePipe Nurture and standard features of the kvCORE Platform Marketing Autopilot.
| ActivePipe by MoxiWorks | kvCORE’s Marketing Autopilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Included Content | Content library of journeys crafted by real estate professionals, organized by the different phases of homeownership. They come fully loaded with branded content, but can be completely customized. | Campaigns with pre-built content, primarily focused on new leads and how they came in to the system. |
| Contact insights | ActivePipe notifies agents about potential clients thinking of buying or selling based on interactions across emails and landing pages, including categorizing them as upsellers, first-time homebuyers and more. The tool also shows the quality of your contact info, including unsubscribes, bounces, and missing information. | kvCORE Autopilot notifies agents after a prospect raises their hand. Users must turn on triggers like moving a contact from Lead to Active if they reply to a specific email. (source) |
| Dynamic Content | ✓ Automated content and data that can be formatted and customized by the agent. ✓ Merge Tags ✓ Market insights* ✓ Listing details ✓ Populate emails with content via RSS feeds ✓ Create newsletters to automatically share information from your favorite RSS feeds, built from a single template. *capabilities dependent on location and data provide |
✘ Dynamic options only include basic merge tags, listing details, and some market reports*. RSS Content is not enabled. (source) *capabilities dependent on location and data provider |
| Building Emails | ✓ Easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor that formats emails beautifully, including dynamic and embedded content like videos, links, and blog snippets. | ✘ Editor is less full-featured, and agents are unable to preview most content directly in the editor. Advanced editing gives more features, but requires some knowledge of email building. (source) |
| Touchpoint Management | ✓ In ActivePipe, contacts are only enrolled in email journeys when the agent opts them in. This opt-in makes ActivePipe act as a service your agents can leverage, instead of extra emails that compete or interfere with other communications. ActivePipe SmartSend also keeps track of contacts and how often they’re messaged and if they’re opening content. If ActivePipe identifies a less-engaged contact, we will automatically pause or adjust journey content to not overload inboxes. |
✘ Contacts may be enrolled in mandated campaigns, making it likely that contacts will be over-communicated with. |
| Open Platform Capability | ✓ ActivePipe can work independently of a CRM – allowing brokerages to pair this service with their CRM of choice. Easily integrate with MoxiEngage, Cloze, Follow Up Boss, and more. | ✘ Marketing Autopilot is only available for customers of kvCORE Platform |
ActivePipe vs. kvCORE’s Marketing Autopilot: Key capabilities
Finding opportunities within your sphere
On any given day, 3-4% of your sphere is likely thinking about buying or selling. ActivePipe helps you find them, and make contact faster.
ActivePipe and kvCore both monitor your database’s activity and let you dive deeper into what active contacts are viewing, but ActivePipe pulls ahead by combining this activity data with the information you already know about the contact to generate intelligent predictions about what the customer’s needs are. Knowing that a contact is considering downsizing, investing, switching neighborhoods, or starting to evaluate their home relative to their neighbors’ who have sold recently is much more powerful than digging through a crowded activity stream [source].
Nurturing new leads that come in
Knowing the customer — and their wants and needs — is much more important to converting them than simply reacting to what they clicked on.
kvCORE is commonly set up to automatically enroll leads that come into the brokerage in one of its smart campaigns, which are pre-set email, call, and text cadences that the brokerage sets up on an agents’ behalf. These have the ability to be mandated, which means that all leads that meet the criteria are contacted automatically [source], but because agents can create their own competing nurtures, it can also easily result in over-emailing contacts. Default smart campaigns can be built for sphere contacts, but typically, they are established for new leads based on which source the lead comes in from – an ad, social media, your website, Zillow, etc. ActivePipe’s technology is much more focused on uncovering where a contact is in their homeowner journey, and using that information to suggest email journeys that are a good fit. This results in much more relevant content for your sphere. ActivePipe also operates on an opt-in basis, which lets your agents enroll contacts into the journeys they want and get the power of automated marketing without losing control over their contact list or unintentionally spamming clients. If they want to go their own way, they can also create their own custom emails and journeys from scratch or using the extensive library of content written by our in-house team of real estate professionals. This allows brokerages to offer marketing services that are automated but still respect the agent’s relationship with their sphere.
Building a new email campaign
You and your agents shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you create an email. ActivePipe’s proven templates and simple editor make it easy to build successful emails, fast.
When it comes to building a new email campaign, there’s simply no comparison: ActivePipe’s email editor is far superior to kvCORE’s. For starters, in ActivePipe you can actually see the email as you build it, so your agents can feel confident their emails will be beautiful and functional. Agents can customize their email with photos, text, videos, merge tags, and even dynamic data that can be configured to show exactly what you want in impactful charts. Agents can even quickly pull in articles from blogs or other sites via RSS, so their content never gets stale. In kvCORE’s email editor, you can’t preview many types of content (you have to send a test email to yourself to see them), dynamic content modules are unable to be edited or reconfigured, and RSS is not enabled [source].
Staying connected with past clients
Are your agents adding value when they reach out to past clients? Are they remembering to reach out at all? ActivePipe makes staying in flow automatic.
In kvCORE, the focus is primarily on working new leads that come in, so while there are some features that allow agents to trigger campaigns based on sale anniversaries or the contact’s birthday, the sphere nurture features are far less dynamic than ActivePipe and campaigns require a lot more savvy to build [source]. ActivePipe gives your brokerage so much more than just an email platform – it actually uses the information available in your agents’ databases and their contacts’ interactions with their marketing to surface highly active contacts and predict the client’s needs. This helps your agents swoop in at just the right time — for example, ActivePipe will let your agents know about downsizing opportunities when contacts are looking at homes with less bedrooms than their current home.
Keeping your database up to date
Your marketing programs are only as good as the data you feed them, and ActivePipe makes keeping it all in sync a cinch.
To make your nurture programs as effective as possible, you need the most up-to-date information on your audience. ActivePipe functions independently of a CRM, and while it can read data from and write updates to many of the top CRMs on the market like MoxiEngage, Cloze, Follow Up Boss, and more, it isn’t dependent on CRM updates to keep your agents in contact with their sphere. In kvCORE, leads are validated and scored automatically when they come in, but any ongoing scoring and data validation that could trigger a contacts’ inclusion in a smart campaign is all manually updated by agents via kvCORE’s CRM. [source].
