Advanced Email Marketing For Real Estate Professionals Part 9

April 22, 2010

Some people setup a new email account specifically for a single purpose like this and then have all emails forwarded to their main account.  In any case, consumer type email accounts such as these receive the most spam and so the email providers have the most safeguards in place to prevent spam.

Now how do you tell if you’re blacklisted by any major email providers?  If you use a professional email service provider then take a look at your campaign bounce reports.  Ideally your provider’s reports will tell you which email addresses  bounced and the reason for the bounce is provided by the receiving mail server.  Put these reports into an Excel spreadsheet in two columns and sort them by the bounce reason.  Each mail server uses its own unique wording for reporting, so doing this alphabetical sorting will help you see any blocking by an ISP.  For instance, the sorted report might look like this:

Email                Bounce Reason
jack@aol.com            Too Many Invalid Recipients
jill@aol.com            Too Many Invalid Recipients
john@aol.com            Too Many Invalid Recipients
bill@aol.com            Too Many Invalid Recipients
bob@abc.com            Blocked By Barracuda Spam Firewall
janet@abc.com        Blocked By Barracuda Spam Firewall
cliff@abc.com            Blocked By Barracuda Spam Firewall
steve@123.com        Blocked By Barracuda Spam Firewall
jon@123.com            Blocked By Barracuda Spam Firewall
steve@123.com        Blocked By Barracuda Spam Firewall
ace@123.com            Blocked By Barracuda Spam Firewall

First, confirm that you are in fact blacklisted by checking your deliverability report for the bounce reason.  Then take a look at your database and ask yourself the following questions:

- Are all your subscribers explicitly opted in?  People who haven’t explicitly opt-ed are the most likely to make spam complaints.  Just have a prospect’s business card doesn’t necessarily give you permission to add them to your mailing list

- How up-to-date is your list?

- Are your email addresses valid?  Check your bounce reports for typos.

- Is it easy for recipients to unsubscribe if they no longer want to receive your emails?  All of your emails must have an unsubscribe link at the bottom.  Email service providers automatically provide this for you

- Are you sending what they requested?  When you have people sign up for you mailing list allow them to choose the content they’ll receive, and only send them that.  If they only want to receive real estate info (IE your newsletter) and not listing updates then you’ll know they’re not in buying/selling mode just yet.

Filed under: Attracting Buyers/Sellers With Email,Marketing Tips

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