Email Marketing is one of the most underutilized internet tools at a Realtor's disposal. Today, just about everyone sends email for business and/or personal reasons, so they assume that they are utilize it effectively. However, sending email correspondence with a collegue or client is far different from an email marketing campaign. Also, sending a text email advertising a new listing to a contact list through gmail is not the same as sending an HTML email campaign through an email marketing service or email marketing software. The advantages of email marketing apply to all businesses, but there are specific techniques that help the savvy real estate agent.

First, let's define email marketing. Wikipedia provides the following:

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
• sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
• adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers
  

Some examples of email marketing campaigns for a real estate agent include the following: New Listings, Price Changes Open Houses, Just Sold, Newsletters, Holiday & Birthday Cards, Thank You Notes, Events: Community, Charity, or  Office/Industry Party.

These are set campaigns scheduled to be set to a specific mailing list. Group your contacts into categories such as past clients, current clients, prospects, office collegues, brokerage community, website leads, newsletter/blog subscribers, community/business networks, etc.

Once you organize your contacts and develop a strategy of what you want to promote, then you can really utliize the benefits of an email marketing service or email marketing software. Most services have lots of HTML email templates that are essential webpages sent through email. You can customize them for your business or you can design custom HTML emails from scratch. Having design skills helps during this process, but template solutions are user firendly and provide a professional looking result.

So, now you have your HTML email and organized contact list, its time to let the campaigns fly. Email marketing services and software allow you to schedule the sending of emails at a time of your choosing and with whatever frequency you desire. For example, send your newletter monthly to your subscribers;send your event email a month before the event, then send a reminder a week before and a day before; send your price changes as they occur, etc.

After the campaign has been sent, you will receive all kinds of useful stats to help analyze and plan future campaigns. Example of stats are Open & Non-Open Rate, Links Clicked (optimize your content in the next campaign), Who opened, when, and how many times, Bounce Rate, Unsubscribed, Email Forward Rate, SPAM Reports, and Download report attachments, so you can forward them to clients or co-workers.

Anyone who has tried these campaigns knows how effective they are for the real estate agent. Even if you are an expert at Outlook or Gmail, you are just scratching the surface of what email can do for your marketing needs.