Email Marketing

Kim Tucker

Many of our readers out there are working on putting together an email newsletter to their clients. Mortgage Lenders, Realtors, Contractors, Investors, Title Companies, and just about every other type of person who joins MAREI will at one time or another decide to have an Email Newsletter.

Sending out an email is fairly easy when you are sending to one or two people, but as the list of recipients grows the ability to send out an email lessens. So lets talk about how to send an email.

Let’s take a look at the steps:
(1) open up your email system, what ever it is
(2) click compose and a new email window opens up
(3) click in the “to” box and your address book opens up and you select the people you want to send to
(4) you fill in the subject line with what your mail is about
(5) you write your message
(6) you click send

Sounds simple, right? But many times we can still screw it up, many times with out even knowing it.

Go to your computer right now and go through the steps. After you have clicked compose come back to this article. Look at the top of your email box – do you have 3 different boxes to put email addresses in? Sometimes you need to click the “to” button, but how ever you get your email addresses in the “to” box, you should have three boxes or choices of where to put your email addresses when you insert them in the “to” box: “to”, “cc” and “bcc”.

The “to” box – if you put a bunch of email addresses in this box, you will send an email with every single email address at the top. Not ideal, especially if you don’t want to share your email list with everyone who receives your email. If someone wanted to Spam or send junk email to your list, you have just provided them with the addresses to do it. And in the same tone, if someone wanted to reply to you, but were not proficient on email and clicked “reply all” – they would send their response to you and everyone else who received the email. So don’t use the “to” box.

The next box where you can place email addresses is in the “cc” or carbon copy box. This is used when you send an email to one person, but want to copy a few other people who may also have an interest in the email. But again all emails in the “cc” box will work exactly the same as the “to” box, so avoid this one as well for email newsletters.

The last box is the “bcc” or blind carbon copy box and this is the one we want to use. We can insert a bunch of email addresses, but the only address that will appear a the top of the recipients email is their own and any emails we may have placed in the “to” and “cc” boxes.
Ok so now we have addressed the email. Now you need to put something in the subject line. Because of all the junk email out there, email companies have created Spam filters, so you have to put something in your subject line that will not trigger a Spam filter and get your email dumped in the trash. There are hundreds of articles you can look up online on how to get around Spam filters. (google spam filter avoidance)

Your next step is to compose your message and there are two trains of though – give them tons of info so they have to keep scrolling down in a lengthy email. Or keep it short and sweet so if they do have to scroll down it is only one screen. You will have to make your own decisions on this, but the longer it is, the more likely you will be to loose them before they get to the end. I like to offer a little information and then a link to a web site for more info. So as I am writing my email I will look up the exact web page I am trying to send them to and then copy the address in the little window at the top of the internet web page and paste it into my email exactly as it sits (or if you use an email provider program you may be able to clean this up a bit).

Now what if you do have a list of houses to send out or some other information or form? Should you include it in the email, attach it as a file, or post it on a web site somewhere and provide them a link.

This will be something you will have to decide for yourself as each has it’s merits, but here is what I have found.

When attaching as a file to an email, the email gets stuck in the Spam file much more quickly or even automatically deleted by many systems as emails with attachments are more likely to carry a virus into the system. Also if you are trying to email someone with an email at a big corporation such as hallmark.com or sprint.com you will find that your email may not go through with an attachment. So I would recommend posting your list or your attachment online somewhere and emailing out a link so that your readers can download the list.

You could also include your list within the body of your email which is great if you have a short list. If you have a lengthy list you may want to email out a few key houses or one house at a time as you add it to your inventory and then refer them back to your web site for more information.

Then it comes time to click send, and then you can have even more problems.

Did you know that many email providers will only allow you to send a limited number of emails in an hour? So in some cases if you want to send over 50 emails at once, you have to break them up into smaller groups and send a few every hour. Check your provider to see how many you can send.

You may also find that some of the email providers for your recipients will block your email because it has a bunch of names in any of the to boxes including the “bcc”. When I was using a regular email provider, my emails sent to AOL and Road Runner would be blocked. So I had to go to an email service.

I started by using a contact management system, TopProducer.com. With this I can put a whole bunch of emails into any of the to boxes and the system will send the one at a time automatically over a few minutes. It gets around the filters, but the problem
with this is that if I have over 200 or 300 email address I am sending to at once, the system tends to send so many and then lock up and not go out.

That is when I switched to an email service provider. These are services that allow you to load lists of recipients into their system either one at a time or by importing a list from an Excel Spread sheet. They allow you to manage your subscribers and send 1000’s of emails at once. There are many features of these services such as: formatted emails, categorizing your subscribers, automated sign up boxes, and more.

But what else can these services do for you? One of the great features I like is that I can prescheduled an email to go out on a specific day or time in many cases. I can create the email in advance, pick who should receive the newsletter, and schedule it to go out when I want it to. So if you ever receive an email from me when I am on vacation – no I am not really that dedicated. I just created it in advance the week before my vacation and the system sent it out at my scheduled time.

Another thing that services provide is many great articles and training tools to help you improve your email marketing to get the most benefit out of it. A few of the articles you may want to look at are what to put in a subject line to get your email past the Spam filters. Just using a service will help with this. Remember when I said that AOL and Road Runner tend to filter out mass emails? Since these actually are programmed to send them out one at a time, you get around many Spam filters.

And the last great benefit of these service that also help you get around the Spam filter is their inclusion at the bottom of the email with instructions for the subscriber to update their subscription – both what emails they are receiving and to change the email address that they are sent to. They also include an unsubscribe button so that your recipients can choose not to receive emails from you. Most services will track your unsubscribed people so you can’t accidentally put them back in.

The service I currently use is www.ConstantContact.com . Their pricing is very affordable: for 500 people or less in your list costs $15 a month, 2500 or more is $30 a month and it goes up from there. If you prepay you get discounts and if you are an School or a Non-Profit you can get even more discounts. They also offer a FREE trial of up to 100 subscribers for 60 daysl. And if you would like to subscribe to their service, we can refer you as a customer and get you a $30 credit toward your first billing.

If you would like to try out www.ConstantContact.com please email me at info@MAREInet.com and ask me to refer you to Constant Contact. I will send you an email referral with a link back to constant contact to get you access to the trial and the $30 credit.

While at Constant Contact’s web site, click on their Learning Center for more articles, visit their User Community, and check out their live Demo. Even if you don’t decide to use their services you will get a lot great tips to help you improve your email marketing you are currently using.
And if you have a better service that you would like to recommend, please email it to me to try out. I can always export my entire contact list from Constant Contact and move it somewhere else.