Understanding Email Marketing’s Potential For Real Estate Professionals Part 4

January 20, 2010

These are the people you want to follow up with via a personal email or via telephone.  If you find some of your prospects are consistently clicking on links to your emails advertising current listings, you can be pretty sure these people are close to or are actively seeking to buy or sell their home.

5) Legal Compliance: There are laws regulating how commercial email marketing is done in North America.  In the US it’s the CAN-SPAM act, in Canada it’s the Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA).  ESPs ensure your emails are compliant with the laws regulating email marketing in your country.  This is important because if your emails are not compliant with these laws then your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can give you major headaches, even pull the plug on the services you use them for.

6) Branding Consistency: Some ESPs such as Vistaprint have a great number of professionally designed graphics readily available online that can be used in a variety of promotional materials: email templates, business cards, print fliers, print newsletters, and so on.  These companies often have a huge array of designs to choose from.  Pick a design that suits your branding and use that image consistently in your promotional materials.  This can save you thousands of dollars by not having to hire a professional graphic designer to create your graphics from scratch.

For ensuring your emails are reaching inboxes, there’s a simple step, very important step you can take to improve email deliverability.  It’s registering yourself with Microsoft’s Sender ID program (you can register here).  No doubt the most important deliverability factor with your email campaigns is getting into prospect inboxes who use Microsoft Outlook with their email since Outlook is among (if not the) most popular email software in the world.  Outlook comes bundled with the Microsoft Office suite along with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc..  Microsoft’s SenderID program is essentially an email reputation service.  The better your reputation as a legitimate, non-spamming commercial emailer, the more likely it is your emails will get delivered into Outlook inboxes.

Here’s how the SenderID program works.  If your emails to Outlook/Exchange mail server environments and hotmail accounts are consistently opened and read and few spam complaints are made, your email deliverability rate gradually improves.  Exchange servers rate each incoming email between 1 and 9 with 1 being definitely not spam, 9 as definitely spam.  As your email reputation improves, your rating keeps going down.  If you get spam complaints or few opens, your rating goes up.

Learn much more about email marketing and how it can boost your real estate business by taking my course The Awesome Power Of Email.  This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 4 credits.

Filed under: Attracting Buyers/Sellers With Email

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