Best Email Practices

Email marketing for real estate is considerably different from the traditional types of advertising that are placed in conventional media (magazines, newspapers, radio, television, and Yellow Page ads). One of the most significant differences is how Federal and State law is generally applied to email marketing as opposed to conventional advertising. Email marketing is more severely regulated than the traditional media formats and the manner whereby real estate businesses may interact with their email newsletter subscribers is precisely dictated. It is a fairly conventional policy for real estate businesses to garner personal information from their customers through business card drop boxes, signup sheets, or a range of different methods. Federal law dictates that this information about your customers cannot be entered into your subscription email list unless clear and unequivocal permission to do so was previously obtained from the customer. Violation of this law is a serious crime, and it is one that any real estate business owner or manager should avoid at all costs. The CAN-SPAM Act in the United States controls email marketing in the country and it indicates exactly how all businesses have to deal with their subscribers. The CAN-SPAM Act is known as an "opt out" form of law as it dictates the terms that all email marketers must follow with any customer's solicitation to be taken off the subscription list. This action must be taken irrevocably and instantly following their very first request. Failure to obey with this law can leave the real estate business owner, manager, or agent open to the chance of severe punishments imposed by the courts including fines in the thousands of dollars for each event as well as prolonged imprisonment. United States federal rules determine that as an email newsletter provider you have to supply all your subscribers with a fast and easy to follow pathway to delete their email addresses from your subscription lists. Failing to act on a solicitation from a subscriber to be dumped is deemed a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Each and every one of your email marketing newsletter messages has to include an effectual and prominently visible unsubscribe link. When you send out an email, one of three occurrences can result:


In both bouncing cases you will get an emailed communication from the online function known as the Mailer Daemon that will notify you of the justifications for the bouncing email. A soft bounce is outside your chance to regulate it, but you should nonetheless take steps to set it right, maybe by communicating with your client by any other means attainable to you. If the bounce is actually a hard one, then it is distinctly your responsibility as you should be informed of the status of your recipients' addresses before sending out your email marketing communications. If you insist on resending to an email address that has already been distinctly pointed out to you as being a hard bouncing one, the ISPs that path traffic along the web will not falter for a second to set you on a spammer's blacklist. If that particular step is taken you will discover that it becomes effectively impossible to send out any emails at all, regardless of whether they are company business, email marketing newsletters, or even private communications to friends or family. A large number of company proprietors and managers think that the act of merely duplicating a rival's privacy policy and entering it on their own website word-for-word supplies sufficient protection against liabilities. That is emphatically not the case as this action only creates duplicate copy that is harmful to the elevated search engine rankings you currently have but could also open your company up to sanctions under the law. Your company attorney should plan a thorough and completely customized privacy policy that is uniquely created to fit the precise activities your company undertakes online. Segmentation is a critical element in the email marketing processes applied by any real estate company. Segmentation is the main process suggested by business specialists to concentrate on, which caters your content specifically to the demographic, geographic, and behavioral attributes of your clients. The primary justification for this emphasis is that segmentation is an essential procedure that allows you profound insight into the specific characteristics that the clients of your real estate business possess, and how they differ noticeably from one another. Experienced email marketers are well informed of the requirements to engage in uninterrupted testing on their email campaign content. One of the most common data examinations is called an A/B split test. This type of testing entails essentially identical newsletters being sent out to a specific section of the subscription list with just a single individual component substituted, such as the preheader, the subject line, a picture, or the location of a link. By correlating how these two distinct newsletters accomplish the task of generating satisfactory email metrics, you can acquire valid intuition in to what your real estate company clients are replying to in order to persist in the refinement of your content through further testing events. Just like the vast majority of the populace, most of your customers would prefer not to disclose private data unless they think it is justifiably required. This privacy necessity for the customer has to be equated against your requirement for large-scale demographic information that you could utilize to enhance your segmentation processes. Offering inducements such as particular discounts, specific proposals, or invitations to elite VIP events to your clients in trade for their basic demographic info such as age, gender, and a bit of data on their consumer favorites, can assist you in obtaining this important segmentation information. Open and click-through rates are the most critical and essential metrics that can indicate the extent of your subscribers' conduct toward your real estate company that they exhibit when they get your email marketing communications. Some subscribers display a rather obstinate tendency of declining to open your emails at all. Continuing to send emails to these email addresses is basically a squandered send. Pruning these names from your subscriber list is strongly recommended as repeated email sends are not apt to change their tendencies. Many other prospects open and read your emails but nearly always fall short to pursue with a click-through. It is suggested that these clients should be retained on your subscription list as the fact is that they are reading your newsletters. This behavior is of clear value to your business as it generally equates to a future promise of engagement with your real estate company, perhaps by telephoning your business for information or just stopping by. The customers who both read and click through to your website's pages are distinctly the most desirable prospects from an online promotion standpoint and should be appreciated above all other subscribers. Your marketing procedures should be geared toward supplying this category of customers the highest level of assistance, incentives, and unique consideration. Your email marketing campaigns have to integrate good email practices in order to arrange to maintain the utmost efficiencies, lessen client criticisms, and stand to produce a positive outcome on your company's profit base line. Subject lines, From lines, and preheaders should be carefully concocted; varying mobile and computer display capabilities must be acknowledged in your email template; and you have to supply a variety of differing landing pages that consist of specific targeted content that is suitable to coordinate with your segmentation and A/B split testing procedures. The statistics at the heart of this informational report divulge that more than one third or 36% of all real estate company proprietors and managers were not informed of their click-through rate, and nearly four out of every five or 79% were not able to adequately quote their open rate. This lack of knowledge of the key metrics that shape the performance foundation of any online promotional campaign has to be rectified, as without a clear view on how the email campaign is developing it becomes impossible to hone it to its finest efficacy.