When realtors and agents market online to their customers, e-mail inevitably comes up. There must be a good reason that your friendly neighborhood title companies, appraisers and mortgage pros are filing your inbox with newsletters and weekly/daily/monthly specials. It is one of the swiftest, and most personal, paths to leverage the power of the internet. Customize it with their name, first, last, or both and you’ve got a highly targeted and personalized message being delivered to a captive audience. Today we are going to talk about the top 3 pros to promoting your services this way.

Pro 1
You can reach ten or ten thousand folks at the touch of a button, and will have no more time invested to reach them all no matter how massive your list grows. Simply type your message, load it into your formatter or broadcast service, hit send, and each one of your clients or possible clients are notified of your message. And the better part is is costs nothing more than your subscription. Try doing that offline!

Pro 2
When done properly, email marketing can have a far higher close rate that other selling tactics. Your potential client is hit with a type of ‘in your face’ strategy whereby you are speaking to THEM. Unlike an ad in the paper or a commercial on television that’s common, email is private. Get their attention by including their name. Write as if you are addressing their particular problem, and you have the battle half won.

Pro3
Private emails work well as pre-sellers. Autoresponders are wonderful in that you can load up your messages and set them to go out at certain intervals. You do this once, and they continue to go out for each new potential customer that signs up, without you lifting another finger. Fundamentally, it’ll be warming up your possible customers while you are free to do other tasks - even sleep!

If you are already using this great tool in your business, great! But if not, you HAVE TO start, and you need to do it sooner rather than later.

There are a lot of great services out there : Aweber, VerticalResponse, and Constant Contact are three that we have used and would certainly recommend. Do your homework and look around. Make a list of the features you need and see which providers have them available, in your price range. This should not be too hard, as many are full of all the bells and whistles and start as low as $19 a month.

Good luck, and stay tuned for the next post in which we’ll be sharing some guidelines about e-mail etiquette, and why it is particularly significant in business…