How Do I Design a Newsletter for Free With No Experience?

A real estate newsletter is one of the best ways to expand your real estate business. Many real estate agents don’t know where to start. After all, a real estate newsletter leans on quite a few specialties, such as design, copywriting and marketing to get that beautiful and informative newsletter out into the world. And if you don’t have a large team behind you, it’s hard to find the time to develop these skills while you’re doing everything else you need to do on a day to day basis.

The good news is that real estate marketing works, and you’re likely to get a few dozen back for every dollar that you spend. It’s also 40 times more effective than reaching out on Facebook and Twitter, which means that if you’re going to put any money into reaching more people, you’re much better off creating a real estate newsletter.

“How do I design a real estate newsletter?” you may ask. Without taking some classes or spending your nights studying up on the internet, it’s not like you’ll be able to magically create that compelling newsletter without dedicating yourself to the task. However, you don’t have to. An email platform can do much of the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to send craft emails from slick templates, as well as track opens, clicks and conversions while you sit back and judge the success.

The problem is that the major players are not real estate-centric. You may be able to find a template that’ll work, but you’ll likely have to customize it quite a bit to suit your need, and you still have to create all that copy — you know, the reason that you’re sending out your real estate newsletter in the first place.

What Is Your Goal?

Before you can design an email newsletter and send it out to your email list, you’ll need to define your goal. Some agents just like to keep in touch, knowing that any excuse to reach out is an opportunity to connect and close on a sale, while others may only reach out at certain times of the year such as holidays and other important occasions. 

Unlike social media, a real estate newsletter or email is an excellent way to actually reach your audience. Up to 99 percent of your social media audience may not even see your most recent post, while almost everyone will see that email come through even if they don’t click on it. That’s why email tends to be four times as effective as social media marketing, though you’ll still have to decide how you’ll be leveraging your real estate newsletter.

Forget about the design for now. Are you interested in driving more traffic to your website? Do you want to inform your network of new listings in the area? Are you trying to get those buyer and seller guides out there? Each will require a different approach and design.

What About Free Designs and Templates?

After you’ve decided on your goals, the next step is to design your real estate newsletter. You could use something like Canva or Photoshop to design that template, but once you’re done how do you get that design into your email program? That’ll require another specialized service, and more money and time invested when you’ve got better things to do.

Your best bet here is to use the free templates inside your email program and tweak them for your intended use. It’s still time intensive work, but at least you’ll be working with what’s actually going out — bringing designs into an email platform is much more complicated and labor intensive, and you could easily spend your entire budget porting that design and making it work in email.

A template or design that you didn’t pay anything for is worth precisely that. Because it’s a template, it’s trying to do everything for everyone, but it ultimately does nothing exactly right for anyone. All those tweaks in design and copy will have to turn that template into a bonafide newsletter that you can call your own, and that means engaging in layout and design for making that sort-of-okay template right for your intended use.

Ultimately, the reason that free templates and designs don’t work is because they require you to rebuild and tweak everything in place so that it works for your needs. It may save you some time, but it’s definitely not turnkey or something you can knock out in short order.

The Better Way With Ready to Go Newsletters

Instead of trying to make it work with that lackluster template that doesn’t really do what you need it to do, why not partner with a real estate newsletter service made precisely for your needs as a real estate professional? Ready to Go Newsletters has been creating targeted real estate templates and content for over 13 years, and we know how important it is to get it all right. Contact us to learn how you can reach more clients with professional real estate newsletter services today!