Understanding Email Marketing’s Potential For Real Estate Professionals Part 2

January 18, 2010

An interesting report recently came out on spam and fits well with email church doctrine.  The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) released its new spam report which looks at spam budgets, impact of spam and spam management.

The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries, throughout the EU (26/27 EU Member States); and 80 million mailboxes managed. The survey analyzes how e-mail service providers combat spam in their networks, and identifies the state of art in the fight against spam.  The report’s biggest claim is less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the vast majority of all emails (95%) are classified as spam and are either directed into spam folders or blocked (IE the recipient never receives it at all). 

Many of you will have email databases that are small – less than 200 people.  If that’s the case, you shouldn’t have much problem using your internet service provider for sending these emails to your opt-in (IE permission based) database.  Using Microsoft Outlook makes it particularly easy to import your contacts’ emails addresses into your emails so you can send to them quickly and easily.  You can build your database in a variety of ways (not necessarily using the internet) and I’ve described how to do this at length in recent articles.

However, if your database grows beyond 200, you’re really better off using an Email Service Provider (ESP).  Even if your database is smaller than that, you should seriously consider using an ESP.  These are companies who specialize in facilitating your email campaigns.  Using an ESP is a silver bullet solution to ensuring your emails are getting into recipient inboxes where you want them to be.   There are numerous advantages to using an ESP.  The six biggest ones are:

1) Your Emails Reliably Reach Inboxes, Not Spam Folders: an Email Service Provider knows there are literally hundreds of anti-spam technologies out there and that it’s impossible to get an email past all of them all the time.  So ESPs develop relationships mainly with the different Internet Service Providers (ISPs), especially the broadband carriers like Verizon and AT&T in the US and Bell and Rogers in Canada.  They do the same with as many anti-spam technology companies and popular free email account providers as they can.  The result: using an ESP gets your emails VIP entrance into your prospects’ inboxes.

Filed under: Using Email For Attracting Buyers/Sellers

Tags: branding, email inquiries, email newsletter, email prospects, email subject line, email training tips, marketing, prospect, prospecting, real estate email newsletter, real estate internet marketing, real estate internet marketing tips, real estate internet training, real estate training, realtor education, realtor email newlsetter