Making Your Auto Responder Your Assistant While You’re Away Part 1

December 24, 2009

Technology is amazing for boosting your real estate business, but it can work against you if you’re careless.  Many real estate professionals nowadays are using auto responders with their email accounts.  When your email account receives an incoming email, a reply with a standard message is automatically and immediately sent to the sender.  The purpose is letting people know what to expect from us.  If we’re available, we want to let them know when and how we’ll respond to them.  If we’re unavailable, we let them know until when we’ll be unavailable and let them know what they can do in the meantime (eg. contact our assistant, visit our website).  But just as your responses to clients who call you is never cookie cutter, you should try and make your automatic email responses do the same.  You could actually be losing business by not having a proper system in place, especially when you’re away for long periods of time (even a week).  So here are some ideas for using auto-responders so you’re responding to people in a timely and appropriate manner.

Outlook’s Rules Wizard

There’s a feature in Microsoft Outlook that works with auto responders like hand in glove.  This wizard allows Outlook to take different actions based upon the emails you receive.  It allows you to prioritize so that the people most important to you are dealt with first.  For instance, you can get a special notification email on your Blackberry when an email arrives from specific types of people.

Let’s say you want to prioritize any emails from your spouse, significant other or your children.  In the wizard you can specify the email addresses of these people.  You can have their email automatically directed into a specific folder (eg. Family).  Outlook can then send you a specific message via email with a subject line such as “MESSAGE FROM FAMILY” and have it marked urgent.  You can then set your PDA so that any incoming messages marked urgent (and few are) give a special notification signal (eg. a different noise) than normal messages.

A common mistake with auto-responders is making yourself unavailable to any and all people when you’re on vacation.  In most cases this is unnecessary and could be costing you new business.  What if a past client was calling with a referral to a motivated seller who needed to sell within the next month because they’re being re-located, yet your auto-responder says you won’t be answering voice mails or emails for the next 3 weeks?

Filed under: Using Email For Attracting Buyers/Sellers

Tags: email inquiries, email newsletter, email prospects, email subject line, email training tips, prospect, prospecting, qualifying, real estate email newsletter, real estate internet marketing tips