Using an email database is a great tool in today's modern world. For estate agents it is a great way to approach companies or individuals to try and drum up business, find out house prices and look at sold house prices. Essentially, it gives them the opportunity to spread their message far and wide, through targeted electronic messaging. However, maintaining an email database is important in order to effectively (and ethically) market your business in this way. Here are some tips on managing your email database.
Give the opportunity to opt out
Email addresses are not hard to come by these days - many consumers have to input an email address in order to sign up or register for access to websites, so if your company operates something like this, then you already have customer emails on file. They are also available from surveys, comment cards or by purchasing them from a third party. In order to practice ethically, however, it is prudent to give consumers the option to unsubscribe or opt out of email marketing. While this may seem like a backwards step, it is far more important that the company maintains a good reputation and isn't seen to be bombarding its customers with unwanted emails.
Keep a clean list
Over time, you may notice that you get 'bounce back' emails and/or delivery failure reports. This tends to mean that the email address you have attempted to send mail to is invalid - perhaps because it has been shut down, abandoned or is full to capacity. Each time this happens, your sender reputation is affected and it creates a log of failed attempts. As you can imagine, this log for spammers is usually very high, because they are sending bulk mail to numerous email addresses, without taking the time to check they are valid. To ensure that your company doesn't end up with a 'spammer' reputation, it is important that you keep a clean list by removing any invalid email addresses from your database as soon as you get a bounce back or delivery failure.
Create good content
Ensure that the material you are sending out is relevant, well written and easy for customers to share with their family or friends. Including social sharing buttons or 'forward' options in your emails is a simple way to do this. If customers are not interested or engaged by your emails, then they won't read them and if your mail goes unread multiple times then this can land you in the junk mail box, once again affecting your sender reputation.
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