7 Reasons Your Email Might Be Going to the Trash Dump!

The following is a point list prepared by one of our associates involved in Real Estate and it has valid points that could be used for all of us who use emails to attract new clients:

1. Most Clients hate HTML rich emails.  If your drip emails have lots of colorful HTML and banners, they might just get dumped into the spam folder.  If you want people to read your emails, then keep them simple with no banners and pictures of your happy home selling face.  Nothing says “SPAM” like a colorful email that looks like it came from a discount retailer.  People are more likely to respond to auto-responders if they don’t know it’s an auto-responder.
2. Long emails go to the dump.  You don’t read long emails from anyone, not even people you like.  So why would anyone want to take 5 minutes to read an email from a real estate agent?  I’ve found that the most effective emails are about 3-4 sentences.  If a prospect can read it in 15 seconds, he might actually take 5 more seconds to reply.  (I sometimes use emails with no caps in the sentences. That looks authentic, though a little amateur.)
3. Give people a reason to respond, or your email is dumpster bound.  If your email doesn’t ask a question, cater to their specific needs or otherwise give the reader a good reason to reply, will they?  End your email with something like, “When are you thinking of moving?”  Or, “Let me know what you think of this house.”
4. Emailing too frequently and I’ll toss you in the trash.  If you email me every week, I’m eventually going to mark you as ‘junk’ in my email account.   Don’t email people every week if they aren’t moving for a year.  If a buyer has no time frame for moving, then once a month is plenty, maybe even too often.  Early on in my career I had everyone getting a weekly email with properties.  The vast majority of those people opted out of my emails within a few months.
5. Irrelevant emails are Dumpster material.  You can’t just have one email campaign, because you don’t just have one type of client. Buyers should get buyer emails, sellers should get seller emails.  Prospects with no set time frame should get long term, spread out emails that just remind them you are there.  You want a custom email campaign for each type of lead, prospect, and client you are working with.  And by the way, those are 3 very different types of people I just mentioned.  A lead is not a prospect, which is not a client, yet.
6. If you don’t send properties, your emails might be dumped as junk. We all know it that over 80% of the website traffic is searching for property!  I say “might” because not every drip email needs to show properties. But if you have a buyer, chances are they would rather see properties of interest than your pretty face.  Sellers want to see homes sold or listed in their neighborhood.  If you know anything about the recipient, sending properties of interest is your best bet.
7. And lastly, for the love of all things email, don’t forward jokes or trite little stories about your cat.  I am actually on one brokers email list and he forwards jokes to his entire sphere of influence (including me) about once a week. I have sent him to the trash dump even though he is a personal friend. So, now if he really has something to say I’ll never get it!  And, please don’t force your political ranting’s on me, not everyone is going to feel the same way you do and this will not only send you to the dump but may send your relationship to the dump as well!

Good luck and happy e-mailing!