Advanced Email Marketing For Real Estate Professionals Part 13

April 28, 2010

One way of reducing your spam complaints is by creating your own “mark as spam” option.  Put a message at the very top and bottom of your email stating “Click here to mark this email as spam” or simply “mark as spam”.  Within this message provide a link to your unsubscribe page.  The person will get taken off your list and the email provider won’t get a spam complaint from them. 

Some people are petulant and may see through what you’re doing here.  You could also put a message somewhere in the email stating “Report this email as spam” and provide a link within the message for them to send an email to an abuse type email account.  Setup an email account called abuse@your-domain-name.com and have the emails to this account auto forwarded to your main email account.  Be sure to remove these people from your database as soon as possible.  If they get another email from you they may take things a step further by reporting you to your ISP or a blacklist such as Spamhaus.

Sender Verification – if you have a Gmail or Yahoo email account you may have noticed very little spam reaches your inbox.  That’s because both of these providers have implemented sender verification protocols called DomainKeys and DKIM.  These protocols authenticate the person sending the email is who they say they are.  Spammers commonly fake the email address they’re sending from to avoid detection.  DomainKeys and DKIM tests to see if the sender is actually sending the email from the email address in the From: area of the email’s header.  If this can’t be proven then the email gets blocked or put into the junk mail folder.

Many email service providers now provide DomainKeys and DKIM when you send emails through them.  This is a big value add as many, many people use Gmail and Yahoo accounts.

Legal Compliance – though mass email campaigns are not allowed by ISPs, you can certainly send email campaigns to a permission based list of interested prospects.  However, email marketing is regulated in both the US and Canada.  The applicable US law is the CAN-SPAM act and the Canadian laws are the Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECP) and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).  CAN-SPAM basically has 5 requirements of anyone who conducts commercial email campaigns.  See the next article in this series for these requirements.

Filed under: Marketing Tips,Using Email For Attracting Buyers/Sellers

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