Email Marketing for Real Estate Agents Part IV

In my last blog post I wrote extensively about how a real estate professional should use quality email marketing pieces and never, ever spam anyone for any reason.  Today I’m going to write to you about one of the lists that you should learn to put together called the “announcement list”.

The announcement list is just exactly as it sounds.  It is a list that specifically talks about blog updates, product announcements, or anything that is of a particular interest in your target subgroup or list.  (To see more about subgroups, go to one of my last blog posts on email marketing.)

Now, if you create one of those lists, you can then put on your salesman hat, because people want to know about new products that have either developed or are basically selling from your web site.  This list is probably one of the most profitable subgroups that you can have in email marketing because they are EXPECTING you to send them information on the products that you are selling.  Now, if you have a good readership, reputation and people have come to respect your sage advice, then chances are, you will make good money from a list like this and you won’t see too many unsubscribe notices from them either.

There are marketers that are out on the Internet that make considerable money from lists like this and there is nothing at all wrong with it.  As a matter of fact, there is everything right with doing business this way, just make sure that you have an opt-in list and that you never spam anyone for any reason.

There are however, several basic types of email announcements for real estate agents that can deliver these types of messages and they are as follows:

1. Free Trial Offers – If you are a part of an affiliate program or know of a certain type of item that you can backend and make some extra money, then you can get an individual to try the service or program out.  You don’t have to sell you own product or service and there are loads of companies that will have free trial built into their affiliate programs as well.
2. E-zine Articles – If you publish a regular online newsletter this can be a very viable way of delivering a targeted message to people.  You can easily disguise advertisements as product reviews and critiques without appearing too salesman like.  Also, this type of format could be seen as another entirely different subgroup wherein you could inform other publishers that you have an article they can use in their newsletter.
3. E-books – I have used this method extensively and it works great.  You can make e-books (.pdf files) on specific subjects and have them on your website available for free downloading.  You can put all sorts of affiliate links in those e-books and in some cases the affiliate companies will even let you customize them with your affiliate number so you can make money from it.

In my next post I am going to try to do a recap of some of the most important aspects of email marketing before moving on to another subject.