Email Newsletter Mistakes Can Cost You More Than You Think

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I’ve been working closely with my wife lately. She is a real estate agent. She’s actually a top producing agent, but spends absolutely no money on marketing. Which is very typical for agents. This causes many arguments  between us when I try to help with my experience with blogging, email, and social networks. Her business runs off referrals, which isn’t a bad thing, but you still need to fill your database with new leads, turn them into passionate clients and get even more referrals… Social Media 101.

being that we spend nothing on marketing, the marketing that she does involves thing that she can do for free. Mostly emailing her newsletter. I’ve very happy that at least she has a newsletter. Most Realtors don’t and they are missing out on valuable touches. The problem is that her email newsletter is all about getting her face in front of past clients to keep her in the front of their brain. This is what every Realtor is taught when they first  join a brokerage. Repetition wins.

Send out postcards and you will get absolutely no response, but keep doing it, and eventually you will be in their brain and they will use you… Maybe. This is what they tell you to do at real estate brokerages. She treated her newsletter the same way.

She is always complaining that she has no time to blog or tweet, but then spends hours grabbing links from wall street journal, realtor.com, sfgate to put in her newsletter. I make me furious, but it’s not worth the argument… I’ve tried telling her to blog about the links she finds and then link to those blog posts. Kill two birds with one stone…Well, I finally got her to change!

I normally use Aweber.com to send email newsletters. They are highly rated and very good. The problem with Aweber is that you have to opt in all your imported users. So for my wife to move her email list to Aweber, they would all get an opt in email, and she would probably lose 3/4ths of them. Therefore I decided to try mailchimp.com. You can import your list without opting them in, but there are warnings, and you definitely can’t import a commercial list.

I really had to take control of this because again, she only cares that the email goes out… With that being said, she was using outlook to send to groups. Of course she also doesn’t realize that people could be reporting her as email abuse, or putting into their junk mail. As soon as I set her up she could see the importance of being able to monitor that.

Here are the biggest mistakes:

1. No Tracking – most importantly you are not removing people that are complaining because you don’t know. They have to reply back to you, but most won’t. The problem with this is as people accuse you of abuse, the ISP get’s updated and eventually you are going to get blocked. So if your sending emails from your primary business account, with too many complaints it will stop working
2. No Tracking – I know #1 was the same thing… In this case I’m talking about link tracking. What are people clicking on. This is very important because you can build trends. If everyone is clicking on your mortgage information, then blog more about mortgages. You will engage more readers when they see you blogging about the things they care about.
3. No Tracking – Ok, it’s nut funny anymore, but do you get my point. Email newsletters can provide so much information about your clients. Who opened it, who clicked on what, who opened more than once, who forwarded to a friend. All these are so important.
4. No text version – when you send with outlook, not only does the HTML look bad, but there is also no way to make a text version for people with none HTML email clients. They get a big glob of code they can’t read. This is also helpful for getting around spam filters. Most spammers don’t take the time to really make a text and html version, so if you have one, you must be human

Technically, mailchimp is very cool. Has tons of reporting and features. We used the A/B test,  which allowed us to created 2 subject lines, send out to 50 random people on her list. The subject that got more clicks, was then sent to the rest of the list. Very good feature. The other feature I liked was that I could design the email online, and just point the url to the email body. This will allow me to dynamically update the email newsletter and just resend the campaign saving a lot of time. You can see the email newsletter here

We use the free version which allows 500 emails, and 3,000 emails per month. They just put a logo in the footer of the email, which we don’t mind at all.