Last year, I watched a webinar about email marketing which broke down some of the "Do's and Don'ts" as rules marketing departments should follow. I just came across those notes again at my desk, and wanted to share some of those here--as well as give a break-down on if I think those rules are still valid today.
DON'T let your email signature be too long. Some people still print their emails, and it can be overwhelming with ongoing picture/ text showing up on each message.**This is definitely still true. No one wants to see a really long signature. If you do have a lot of information you want to showcase in one single email signature, see if you have the option to put your long signature on the first email you send, and then have a shorter sign-off on any follow-up email to that same person. A lot of people are now making their signatures just the size of a postcard/enlarged business card that links to additional information (instead of having too long of a signature all in the email space provided).
DO have YouTube videos on your website. Neighborhood, property tours, and screen capture videos are also awesome. Testimonials from clients or introductions to your staff members are also great. **This is pretty standard for a lot of real estate marketers these days. You have to put some sort of video onto your website, or in the property listing to showcase the inside. You can even give tenants/ owners a link to your YouTube Channel with "how-to's" for certain topics. If you do this, don't just send them a link to your YouTube Channel. You can instead give them a playlist that keeps videos with certain words as their categories so they can easily pull up what is relevant to them.DON'T pay someone else to send emails for you. You can handle this...and if it looks like SPAM to the recipient because of where it's being sent from, it's not going to end up in their inbox anyway and you'll get a bad reputation of SPAMing people. **This year, I think this is still pretty true, but there is some more flexibility on this rule we can now consider. When you relinquish your control of sending your news out through a service that will do it for you, you run the risk of looking like SPAM to the recipient. I do, however, think that using a program to create your newsletters and keep all of your contacts in one place is a great idea. You send the emails out then from a true email address (showing you're a "trusted source"), and nowadays you even get the option to send out HTML rich and text only messages--as you never know if someone else is using an older email provider that shows text only. Here at PRANDI, I manually create and send our newsletters from iContact directly... but I did just try Act-On and definitely think they have some stellar options in their company, if you're looking to try out something a bit newer. Again, I do this myself...where the program stores and tracks my messages, but I have control over the content as well as the email address the newsletter is sent from.
DO email/ text to and from your phone. **Absolutely still a "do" more than ever! Let's say someone visits your website and puts in their contact information, you get that lead emailed to you. Well, if you're not checking your email all of the time (I'd say most people do this today, but not all), then you can instead schedule that those emails to be texted to you. Example, I have AT&T and I can just easily look-up my email-to-text address with them directly. We need to be sure to follow-up quickly with our leads and we don't want to lose them because we waited until the next day.
****For those of you who don't want to be bothered with work all of the time, I've spoken with other people who were able to set time parameters on when that should be happening. For example, they only do this during business hours--or on weekends from 10-4, etc. There were a ton of additional rules I have in my notes, but I thought these were 4 pretty relevant ones to share. Just something good to note is that while a lot of technology (and social networking sites themselves) have expanded/ changed, a lot of these "rules" from last year really do remain the same.
-- Kaylee Carroll, Brand Marketing Specialist
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