How to send an email newsletter in VaultRE (a simple guide for agents who aren't tech people)

Most real estate salespeople know they should be emailing their database. Far fewer actually do it. And when I ask why, the answer is almost always the same: "I'm not sure how, and the guides I found made my eyes glaze over."

I get it. I spent years before real estate working for a CRM company, watching us try to teach agents to send newsletters. Most never did. Not because they were lazy, but because the whole thing felt technical and fiddly, so it kept sliding to the bottom of the to-do list.

Here's the good news. If you use VaultRE (now branded MRI Vault), you already have everything you need to send a professional email newsletter to your entire database. No Mailchimp, no separate software, no monthly subscription to a third party. It's built in, and once you've done it once, the whole thing takes about ten minutes a week.

This guide walks you through it in plain English. We'll set up a reusable template once, then I'll show you how to send to your database and check who's reading. Let's get into it.

1. What you need before you start

Three quick things to have sorted:

Your contacts are in Vault. Every past client, every appraisal, every buyer, every open home visitor. If they're not in there yet, add them. Your database is the single most valuable asset in your business, and an empty one has nothing to send to.

A "from" address that's really you. When someone replies to your newsletter (and they will, that's the whole point), you want that reply landing in your inbox. Vault lets you pick the sender, and replies go to that person's defined email address.

A decision on how fancy to go. You have three sending options in Vault, and I'll be honest about which one I'd pick:

• Email - a straightforward email you write or paste into Vault. Simple, reliable, quick. This is what I recommend for a weekly newsletter, and it's what the rest of this guide focuses on.
• Designly template - Vault's design tool, currently for market reports and eCards.
• EDM Via URL - you host a fancy HTML newsletter somewhere else and point Vault at the web link.

Note: The instinct is always to reach for the prettiest option. Resist it. A consistent, simple text email every week beats a beautiful HTML masterpiece that you send once every three months and then give up on. Keep it simple, keep it regular. Perfection is the enemy of progress.

2. Set up a reusable template (do this once)

The trick to sending a newsletter every week without it eating your life is to build the template once, then reuse it. In Vault these are called Email Responses.

Here's how to create one:

1. Go to Settings (if you're an admin) or My Settings > eMarketing > Email Responses
2. Choose the Standard Template tab (Standard templates are the ones that work in the bulk email tool, which is what we'll use to send)
3. Click Create Email Response
4. Fill in the details: a template name (call it something like "Weekly Newsletter"), your email subject, who can see it, and the actual content
5. Click Save Response

Your template is now available to reuse on both desktop and the mobile app.

TIP: If you want your logo or a header image in the template, the image has to be cloud-hosted first. In Vault, go to eMarketing > eMarketing Storage, click Add/Upload File, copy the link it generates, then in your template click the insert image icon and paste that link into the Source field. Fiddly the first time, painless every time after.

3. Write something people actually want to open

This is the part that matters more than any button in any CRM, so I'm going to slow down here.

VaultRE will happily send an email to two thousand people in ninety seconds. That's the easy bit. The hard bit, the bit that actually generates listings, is having something worth reading inside the email.

Sending your office's latest listings out once a week, with nothing else, will not cut it. Most of the people on your database are not looking to buy or sell right now. If every email is just "here are our listings," they tune out, and by the time they are ready to sell in eighteen months, you're forgotten.

A newsletter that works gives them a reason to open it every single week. That usually means one genuinely useful piece of content, plus a few light local touches. Something like:

• One helpful article for homeowners or future sellers (how to add value before selling, what's happening in the local market, mistakes to avoid)
• A quick local shout-out (a great cafe, a tradesperson you rate)
• A "coming soon" line about listings you're about to bring to market
• A descriptive subject line that changes every week, so it's not just "Latest listings from Joe" sitting ignored in the inbox

This is exactly the problem Agent Monday exists to solve. Coming up with a fresh, well-written, homeowner-focused article every single week is a real job, and it's the reason most agents quit newsletters. Agent Monday members get ready-to-send content written for this purpose, drawn from twenty-plus years of actual real estate experience, not generic marketing filler. You drop it into your Vault template, add a personal line at the top, and you're done.

4. Decide who gets it (hint: almost everyone)

Before we touch the send button, one decision trips up more agents than anything else in this whole process: who should this newsletter actually go to?

Here's my strong recommendation. Send it to every single person on your database who has an email address. All of them. Past clients, current buyers, every appraisal you've ever done, the valuer you had coffee with, your brother's partner's mum. If they know you're in real estate, they should be getting your newsletter.

The instinct many agents have is the exact opposite. They want to slice their database into lots of neat little groups, with different content and different timing for buyers, past vendors, each suburb, and so on. It feels organised and professional, and it is the single fastest way to kill your newsletter stone dead. Because now, instead of one simple job every fortnight, you've built yourself five, and the time-poor version of you next month will do none of them.

The version that actually gets sent beats the clever, carefully segmented version that sits in your good-intentions pile forever.

There are a couple of genuine exceptions worth using occasionally, like a "just listed in your street" note to a single suburb, or a landlords-only update. Use those deliberately and sparingly. Just never let them become your default, and never let them replace the one newsletter that goes to your whole database.

Set this up once, the smart way

In Vault, the reliable way to send to your whole database is to create one broad category, then send to that category each time. A category sticks permanently, which is exactly what you want for a job you'll repeat forever.

Here's the one-time setup:

1. Create a single new category called something like "Email Newsletter." (Vault lets you add new category groups and categories in your contact settings. Their "Manage contact categories" help article has the exact clicks.)
2. Go to Contacts > Search and click the Filter Contacts tab
3. Under the Email criteria, choose contacts that have an email address defined, so you only capture people you can actually email
4. Click Search
5. Above your results, click Assign to Category and choose your new "Newsletter" category

That's it. Your whole emailable database is now in one group. From then on, sending is just: eMarketing > Email Communicator, select Category(s) > Email Newsletter, and away you go.

TIP: Keep the category topped up. Every month or so, run the same Filter Contacts search but narrow it by insert date to just the last month, then bulk Assign to Category again. That sweeps up everyone you've added recently, in about two minutes. This is the step that a saved distribution list can't do for you.

You don't need to worry about accidentally emailing someone who has opted out. Vault automatically skips any contact marked as unsubscribed from email, even if they're sitting in your Newsletter category. Your list stays compliant without you having to manage it by hand.

5. Send it to your database

Once your content is in your template, here's how you send to the whole list. This is Vault's Email Communicator.

1. Go to eMarketing > Email Communicator
2. Select your message type: Email
3. Choose who you're sending to, using any of:
   
   - Category(s) - your new 'Email Newsletter' category created in step 4
   - Use relationship - current owners/vendors/appraisals, or purchasers
   - Contact distribution list - any list you've built
   
4. Set your sending options:
   
   - From - pick yourself as the sender
   - Timing - it defaults to Send Now. Untick that if you'd rather schedule it (Sunday evening or Monday morning tends to land well for real estate)
   - Template - select the newsletter template you built in step 2
   - Subject - your descriptive subject line for this week
   - Message - if you didn't use a template, or you want to tweak this week's version, edit it right here
   
5. Click Next (Preview) to see exactly what recipients will get
6. Check it over, then send

6. Check who opened and clicked

One of the quiet advantages of sending through Vault is that every send is tracked and logged automatically. This is gold for follow-up.

To see how a newsletter performed:

1. Go to eMarketing > Track Marketing Campaign
2. Click the Campaign dropdown
3. Select your newsletter campaign
4. Click View Results

You can also see activity on any individual contact. Open their card, click the Other tab, then Campaigns. And every email you send is automatically logged in that contact's Notes > Notes Log, so you always have a record of what you sent and when.

Why does this matter? Because someone who opens your market-update newsletter three weeks running, or clicks through to an article about preparing a home for sale, is telling you something. That's a warm follow-up call waiting to happen, and Vault just handed you the list.

7. Handle unsubscribes and stay compliant

Two things worth knowing.

First, you'll get the odd unsubscribe, and that's completely fine. It's list hygiene, not rejection. Letting a couple of unsubscribes stop you from emailing is like letting one grumpy open-home visitor stop you running open homes forever.

Vault handles the mechanics for you: anyone marked as unsubscribed from email is automatically left out of your bulk sends, so you can't accidentally email someone who has opted out. If you ever want to see who has unsubscribed, you can pull that list any time under Contacts > Filter Contacts using the "Unsubscribed from" criteria.

Second, both New Zealand and Australia have anti-spam rules. In practice, for a database of people you have a genuine relationship with, sending useful content with a working unsubscribe option keeps you on the right side of them. Vault's built-in unsubscribe handling does the heavy lifting.

8. The real secret: make it a weekly habit

Everything above takes maybe ten minutes once your template is built. The system is not the hard part. The hard part is doing it consistently.

People unsubscribe from senders they don't recognise. If you email once every few months, half your list won't even remember who you are when your name lands in their inbox. Email every week or two and you stay genuinely top of mind, so when they, or their brother, or their neighbour, decides to sell, you're the only agent they think to call.

So here's my challenge. Build your template today. Send your first newsletter this week, even if it's rougher than you'd like. Then send one every week after that. Within a couple of months you'll have a communication machine running quietly in the background, and it will start producing listing opportunities that feel like they came out of nowhere.

They didn't come out of nowhere. They came from your database plus consistency. That's the whole game.

If the thing stopping you is the content, not the software, that's exactly what we do at Agent Monday. Members get ready-to-send newsletter articles written specifically for real estate agents to email their database, every week, so you're never staring at a blank screen wondering what to write.

Andrew Duncan
Founder, Agent Monday