Love it or hate it, AI is here to stay in our industry. It's impossible to escape the constant drumming of AI content hitting your emails every day. 

As someone with over a decade of sales experience, I understand how essential human touch is for effective communication with your customers or prospects. My email marketing with the highest engagement is the content that I have personally written myself. Hyper-personalized email will always beat out generic content. 

That being said, there is only so much time in a given workday. Real estate agents are busy sales professionals without the time in the day to sit at a laptop and write 200 personalized emails to their sphere of clients every week. AI enables us to create hyper-personalized emails that can be run in bulk to your database. But you have to be able to put that content together the right way. 

At Delta Media Group®, we have spent the better part of two years identifying the best practices for putting together highly engaging email marketing, and I'm excited to share them. 

The first thing we need to recognize is that the email marketing landscape of 2025 is vastly different from that of 2015. The philosophy for online email marketing a decade ago was to "cast a wide net." Get as big a list as possible, blast your message out to as many people as possible, and you will see results from those efforts. However, a decade of this practice has resulted in a significant decline in email open rates from prospects. Your name being out on the internet means you've got dozens, if not hundreds, of companies that have placed you on a never-ending email drip campaign that overwhelms your inbox and makes it nearly impossible for you to break through the noise against these other emails. 

That's why the philosophy for email marketing in 2025 has changed. So rather than thinking of email marketing from a traditional sales funnel perspective that's wide at the top and narrows to the bottom, today you should be thinking about your sales efforts as less of a "funnel" and more of a martini glass. You're going to go much deeper on a smaller segment of your customers. The quality of your list is now paramount to your marketing success. Focus on fewer names, identify your core client base, and segment your list with 90% accurate data. This allows you to hone in on specific targets instead of trying to be everything to everyone. 

A recent study from "OutBound Squadâ„¢", which analyzed over 80 million emails sent from a variety of sales reps over the course of a year, reveals some fascinating insights:

1. Less than 33% of emails ever get opened
2. Emails are being read for significantly less time than in 2015
3. Prospects are inherently skeptical about the content of emails today. They look for signs that it was written by AI. If someone doesn't believe a human genuinely writes an email, they are much more likely to add it to an email blacklist. 
4. You receive a 41% increase in email responses when you do not pitch your products or services in an email, but instead share the experience of another customer whom you have worked with. The "Social Contagion," as they call it, is the #1 method to get prospects to engage. 
5. Avoid all industry buzzwords or statistics. It's typically a sign that you're a sales professional, and people don't typically want to talk to sales reps. 
6. Emails with the highest engagement are between 50-100 words. If you exceed 100 words, you are likely going to be instantly deleted if someone opens your email. 
7. Your email subject line has to stand out. You need something that's no more than 5-7 words, and it needs to feel like the type of subject line that would come from your prospect's workplace or friend. 
8. Personalizing your emails to the prospect in some manner will increase your engagement rate by 50%. Share specific details about something that's happening in your prospect's life, particularly if it's something related to their career or workplace. 

Keeping these tips in mind, let's think about how we can best leverage AI to maximize our email output without tipping our hand that we're actually using an AI content generation tool in our efforts. The first step is to identify the best AI engine for email content generation. Every AI engine in the marketplace has a unique niche. Claude, the AI model from Anthropic, for example, is great at building code and webpages, but struggles to create engaging content. Grok, the AI engine by X, is great at searching the internet and analyzing data. The team at Delta has worked with over a dozen different AI models, and what we have found is that ChatGPT 5.0 by OpenAI remains the best engine when it comes to creating content. 

Once you have your model selected, it's all going to come down to prompts. Being able to train ChatGPT to speak in your voice effectively is critical to your strategy. If you simply prompt it to "create an email explaining the benefits of working with a real estate agent in x market" you will end up with generic content that appears to be AI-generated. You should be spending your first 5-7 prompts training the AI model to understand who you are. What is your background? What is your history? Who are your ideal clients, and what is the unique niche you bring to the table to separate you from the other hundreds or thousands of agents in your market? The AI needs to be able to speak in your tone of voice; otherwise, the rest of the message is unimportant. 

Now, once you have trained the AI in your voice, you will need to have it start brainstorming engaging content. I mentioned earlier that the #1 way to get prospects to engage with your email marketing is not to pitch your services, but instead to share success stories from other clients you've already worked with. Especially if there is overlap in some of your former clients and people you are actively marketing to. It's not always about what you know, but who you know. I recommend creating a spreadsheet of testimonials from your clients and uploading it to ChatGPT so that it can access all your previous successes. 

At this point, whatever AI model you are using will be able to speak in your voice and have a history of your wins and former transactions. Now it's time to prompt it for what you need it to do for you. You will want to prompt your model to generate a highly engaging 12-24 step email drip campaign designed to be highly engaging to your database of prospects. The content of the drip campaign should revolve around sharing success stories from your former customers, and illustrating that, as their friendly local REALTOR®, you are here to help navigate the complexities of purchasing or selling a home. The subject lines for each email step should be under seven words, and each email in the drip campaign should be no longer than 100 words. 

If done correctly, you will be amazed at the quality of the content that has been given to you. Yes, you had to spend 15-20 minutes training the AI engine to get here, but the tool will have saved you dozens of hours of coming up with ideas, subject lines, and email content that you now have at your fingertips. This is where having a robust CRM/marketing engine comes into play. You've created the content, but now you need to load it into an email marketing engine so it can run in the background while you go about your day-to-day responsibilities. 

Most email drip campaign platforms enable you to select a segment of your database to receive the drip campaign and set the frequency of your email drips. I do not recommend sending more than one email every two weeks, as you are likely going to be considered "spammy" and end up in a lot of junk folders. We've also found that having at least one touchpoint per month is essential, or you risk being lost among other emails in their inbox. Additionally, you'll need to determine the best day of the week to reach your prospects when they're most likely to check their email. Anecdotally, I have found over the last year that we see our highest open and engagement rates on a Friday morning, while the absolute worst days to send email are a Monday. 

My final piece of advice is this. Once you've got your drip campaigns running to your customers, you will now need to pay attention to the results. Most intelligent CRM's will be able to tell you which of your prospects have opened or clicked on the emails you're sending in your drip campaign. I recommend checking the send history of an email that has run as part of your campaign two to three business days after it was sent, to identify which prospects have opened or clicked on it. These are your most engaged customers and the ones likely to pick up a phone and have a conversation. Segment your active customers, and spend time doing a call-down on those prospects, asking if they have any questions about the content of the email you know they've seen. 

It is tough to break through the noise and get traction in an era where every sales rep is trying to figure out how to automate their marketing with AI. I hope that with the strategies I've shared today, you can find some new success. 

If you are a customer with Delta Media Group and want help setting up these kinds of drip campaigns, please reach out to us at support@deltagroup.com — we're happy to help.