Email marketing tools for real estate agents: which is best?

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.

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].

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.

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].