Email Marketing - Avoiding the Pitfalls

The most popular usage of our lists is for email marketing.

Whether it be notifying other agents of special property listings or recruiting agents to your brokerage or promoting a seminar or other relevant product or service to agents, email marketing represents a potentially cost effective mechanism to get your message out to a large number of people.

However, many customers have expressed confusion about how exactly to implement an email marketing campaign in a manner than maximizes the benefits and minimize the risks.

The benefits are great, but first let's talk about the risks, which fall into two categories: legal and practical.

Legal Risks

The legal risks are real though remote and easily avoided.

The FTC details the requirements for commercial emailers here

There are four basic rules:

1. No misleading headers. This is a technical issue which generally doesn't apply to most emailers. As long as you don't "spoof" the originating email address or computer location, you are fine. You probably don't even know how to do this so, like I said, this is not an issue.

2. No deceptive subject line. Again, no self-respecting marketer has a motive to trick the recipient into opening the email only to have him discover that the email is actually about something different. Your subject line should clearly indicate what the body of the email is about.

3. Opt-out mechanism. There must be some mechanism to allow the recipient to opt-out of future emails. In effect, the law gives you one free shot at anyone, but you can't continue to send to someone who has specifically communicated that they do not wish to receive anymore emails. Ideally, the opt-out mechanism should be an automated link but a simple "reply" with the word REMOVE in the subject line will suffice.

4. Physical mailing address. This is probably the one that most people forget. You must identify your physical mailing address in the body of your email, usually at the bottom after your name.

That's it. Really it is very simple to comply with the law concerning unsolicited bulk email.

Practical Risks

The second risk is practical and this is really where the pitfalls occur.

While the law allows you to send unsolicited emails, subject to the rules above, there are organizations and software designed to reduce the prevalence of "spam." (Indeed you probably have anti-spam software integrated into your email program, which captures "spam" and puts it in a junk or spam folder.) Some people define spam as any unsolicited broadcast of emails to a large audience. I think that is too broad a definition. According to SpamHaus, "An electronic message is 'spam' IF the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients"

Our lists are not indiscriminate; they are highly targeted to a specific audience... real estate agents. Therefore the recipient's personal identity and context are HIGHLY relevant. People who buy our lists are interested in marketing products or services that a real estate agent, and no one else, might reasonably be interested in. Therefore, I do not think using our lists constitutes "spam" in the "I-know-it-when-I-see-it" sense of the term.

Unfortunately, most internet service providers, website hosting services, email services, and domain registrars cannot easily distinguish between relevant, highly targeted bulk email broadcasts and real spam (prescription drugs, mortgage loans and credit card offers, rolex watches, male enhancement, etc). Indeed, they really don't care about anything but complaints. You could send out 1 million emails and if no one complains, then you will not have a problem (unless you overwhelm their mail servers or get a lot of bounces). However, if you send a large email broadcast and receive complaints, you run the risk of having your internet connection terminated, website shut down, email account cancelled, or domain name suspended. None of these are a good thing. Furthermore, some internet providers have "throttles" in place which restrict the number of email messages you can send out in a day so even if you wanted to "blast" to 10,000 people, you couldn't do it from your personal computer.

Having said that, I have been sending approximately 1 million emails a week from my business internet account (which does not limit the number of emails I can send) with a large broadband cable internet provider for almost 2 years and have not been shut down. While there have been a handful of complaints, they have been small relative to the number of emails sent. I believe this is due to two things:

1) my email promotions do not read like "spam"; they are simple, direct descriptions of a product that the recipient might reasonably be interested in. The promotion is big on facts, low on hype. Treat your customer like an intelligent human being and he won't treat you like a "spammer."
2) I make it very easy to opt-out of future emails. If your recipient realizes you are an honest business person like you are, he is more inclined to simply opt-out of future emails than go to the trouble of filing a spam complaint.

Since launching real-estate-agent-lists.com in March, 2006, I have yet to have a customer contact me and say that their website or internet service had been suspended due to using our lists. That is a testament both to the targeted nature of our lists and the quality of the products and services our customers offer. After all, if a customer doesn't have a valuable product or service to offer, they are not going to invest in a real estate agent list to start with.

Execution Options

So how do you avoid the practical risks associated with email campaigns and, technically, how do you actually implement an email broadcast?

You have basically 3, maybe 4, options.

First, the method that eliminates practically all of the risks and is the easiest to implement utlizes a web-based email broadcasting service. Unfortunately, most of these services (e.g. Constant Contact, JangoMail, iContact, Vertical Response, etc) prohibit the usage of purchased lists. However, Elite Email, who we have an affiliate relationship with, DOES allow the use of purchased lists. You can reach them at the following link:

http://www.eliteemail.com?a_aid=f5c94b82

Once you create your account, simply call customer support and tell them you are using a list acquired from us and they can provide a dedicated ip address for a monthly fee. This protects their other accounts from any possible spam complaints due to your broadcast. Then, upload the agent list you purchased from us and utilize their very easy-to-use web-based email broadcast software to send your message. There is no setup fee; you simply purchase email "credits" in advance (see http://www.eliteemail.com/price/ for pricing). One of the benefits of Elite Email's service is that it will automatically handle bounces and opt-out requests so that subsequent emails are CAN-SPAM compliant. They also include many valuable reporting tools so you can measure deliverability, open rates, click-through-rates etc. Finally, they have a large number of email templates specifically designed for real estate that will make your campaign look very professional.

If your email contains links to your website, there is still a small risk your hosting service might receive complaints and suspend your website. To eliminate this risk, I recommend purchasing a new domain name which will host the "landing page" for your email campaign. For example, if your website is www.mydomainname.com, you could purchase the domain name www.my-domain-name.com (domain names with hyphens are more likely to be available) for less than $10 and Elite Email will host it for a nominal monthly fee. Then create a single web page for your new domain name that looks just like your website and link your email to this site. The landing page will contain menu options and other links that actually go to your main website. In other words, your "dummy" domain name page will look like a page from your real website and all of the links on that page will actually go to pages on your website. This inexpensive technique effectively insulates your real website from the possible consequences of complaints generated by your email campaign.

Furthermore, you can create a forwarding email address for this new domain name to send your email "from". In other words, not only will your email contain links to www.my-domain-name.com but the email will be sent from "account@my-domain-name.com". This "dummy" email address can then be set up to forward to your real email account. By linking to your "dummy" domain name and sending from your "dummy" email account, you eliminate almost any possibility of adverse consequences due to spam complaints.

Second, if this seems like too much work and you would just like to pay someone to handle everything for you, I recommend Barry Klein at www.realestateblasts.com. He is wonderful to work with, has broadcast our lists before and is very comfortable with our quality, and has reasonable prices. Hopefully, in the near future, we will be able to provide this service also.

Third, if you are willing to accept the risks of broadcasting from your own computer (which I have been doing for years), you can purchase an email program, such as e-Campaign (www.lmhsoft.com; $129.95/$249.95). The program is relatively easy to use. You can import one of our lists, create your email, and send one copy to each email in the list withe press of a button. You can also easily insert fields from the list to personalize the message. For example:

Dear <first_name>

As an agent in <city>, <state>, I know you ......

Such personalization not only improves the effectiveness of your appeal, it reduces the likelihood of complaints; the recipient, if not interested in your product, will simply opt-out of future emails.

Finally, you could just use your email program (e.g. Outlook) to send the messages. Copy and paste 50 or so email addresses from the list into the BCC (blind copy) field and put your own address in the TO field and send the email. Each of the recipients in the BCC field will receive a copy (but they won't be able to see each other's email address as they would if you simply pasted the addresses into the CC field). Most mail servers have a limit on how many recipients an email can have (50 is a common limit) so you can't just paste all 10,000 (for example) email addresses from your list into the BCC field!!! However if your list is rather small, and you don't require any personalization (i.e. merged field values), this manual method is very cheap to implement. Obviously, if your list is large, it could take quite a while to paste so many groups of emails and you run into some of the practical risks described above. However, if your list is relatively small, it is unlikely you will get enough complaints to interrupt any of your services (although you may get a warning!).

So, to summarize, email marketing is a potentially cost effective means of promoting your products or services. However, you have to be aware of the risks and plan accordingly or it could blow up in your face. If you follow the advice above, you will avoid the most common email marketing pitfalls and can focus on the actual marketing of your product.

Tips

With respect to actually putting together the content of an email marketing campaign, I recommend the following websites for tips on this subject:

http://email.about.com/od/emailmarketingtips/Email_Marketing_Tips_Tricks_and_Secrets.htm

http://www.emaillabs.com/best_practices/

http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/marketing_tips.html

http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing/direct-marketing-e-mail/2976618-1.html

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us at 877-485-5044.

Happy emailing :)