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Email Marketing – With Permission

How to NOT Be a Spammer

Permission email marketing has become standard practice for legitimate email marketers because it is a key component for ensuring the deliverability of your email and gaining the trust of the recipient.

Email is a personal medium, like the telephone. As you know, telemarketing wore out its welcome with the majority of Americans, and unsolicited email has too.

When a real estate agent markets to people who have expressed that they want to hear from you, you can expect to see these results:

  1. Better response rates
  2. Increased trust
  3. Better deliverability

Yes, it takes time and effort to build a permission-based client list and create targeted, relevant offers and messages. Yes, your list will be smaller than if it was an unsolicited email list.

But email marketing isn’t about the size of your list or slamming recipients with a barrage of emails. It’s about getting great results and building relationships with prospective and existing real estate clients.

Put simply, permission gets better results and is the only way to build email relationships with your home-buying clients.

What is Permission?

At its most basic, ‘permission’ is the user’s consent to receive emails from you. But it’s not quite that simple.

Permission breaks down into “expressed” versus “implied” consent.

  • Expressed permission comes from the user himself, when he checks a box requesting your emails on a site-registration form , agrees in person or sends in an email request.
  • Implied permission is not actively given but is a by-product of another action, such as not removing the checkmark from a prechecked email-permission box on a site registration form.

If you’re going to do it right, expressed permission is the only acceptable way to go. Implied permission is just another name for opt-out.

There are legal considerations you may not be aware of: the 2003 U.S. law regulating commercial email, called CAN-SPAM, allows opt-out marketing but with a couple of conditions: All commercial emails must have a working unsubscribe function. Plus, emails sent to recipients who have not given “affirmative consent” must include language that the message is “a promotional email” within the message.

Beyond the legal criteria, there are also best practices to consider, which means opt-in only.

Even ‘opt-in’ has two levels:

  • Single opt-in: The recipient gets added automatically to a list after completing a Web opt-in form, sending in a postcard, emailing a request, etc.
  • Double opt-in : The recipient requests information, which generates an automated email message to which he must reply or click a link to confirm and be added to the list.

By doing it right, you won’t get branded a spammer, banned from your hosting company, or get nasty emails from people who don’t want you to contact them.

Your emails about the homes and property for sale in your community will be welcomed and will bring you more real estate business than sending out a huge number of unwelcome emails that will be branded spam.

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