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Sending Effective E-mail Marketing to Your Clients and Prospects–Part 1

By Jim Gillespie | September 8, 2008

E-mail offers us some great opportunities to market to our commercial real estate clients and prospects. And it also offers us great opportunities to misuse it, too.

I constantly receive E-mails from brokers I’ve never met or talked to before telling me about the properties they currently have available in their own markets, and sometimes their own market is more than 2,000 miles away from me! So I’m not interested in receiving marketing E-mails from any brokers who I don’t know personally, but the E-mails just keep on coming.

With this in mind, you really shouldn’t be sending your marketing E-mails to people you’ve never met with or spoken with before. To drive this point home even more, how would you feel if an insurance agent you’ve never spoken with begins constantly sending you information about their company’s insurance policies? And your answer to that question will pretty much sum up how other people will feel when you send them unsolicited commercial brokerage E-mail, too.

Obtaining people’s permission to E-mail them on an ongoing basis can be as easy as adding one simple question to your prospecting conversations. Ask them a question like “Bob, I send out an E-mail newsletter to property owners in the area keeping them informed on important trends impacting the value of their properties. Is this something you’d want to receive from me?”

When you phrase the question like this you’re more likely to have people want to give you their E-mail address than if you had asked the question instead like, “Can I have your E-mail address?” The latter question may instead have them worried about what you’ll do with their E-mail address if they give it to you. The former question, though, tells them the reason why they should want to give you their E-mail address, and you’ll successfully receive their E-mail address from them a much higher percentage of the time.

In addition to this, if you’re doing your prospecting regularly throughout the year, constantly contacting hundreds or thousands of your clients and prospects, you’ll have hundreds or thousands of new people you’ll want to work with receiving your E-newsletter from you within the year. You’ll just need to add this one simple question to your prospecting repertoire.

So adding this one simple question, phrased as I’ve suggested, to all of your prospecting conversations with people, will make a huge difference in the number of people opting in to receive your ongoing E-mail communications.

In my next article I’ll discuss the two huge mistakes commercial real estate brokers are making when E-mailing their clients and prospects. These two mistakes are costing these brokers tons of money, and I’ll tell you what you need to be doing differently in your E-mail marketing instead.


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