The love/hate relationship with email.
Email is a funny thing…
On one hand, it allows you to communicate with someone on the other side of the world in the blink of any eye.
One the other hand, it makes communicating about something as unimportant as the blinking of your eye so easy that most people don’t even think twice before “shooting” off an email, or 2 or 5 about the most pointless of topics.
It’s just so easy that often the “filter” that is present for other forms of communication, like writing a letter, is simply thrown down the drain.
Imagine if you forced everyone in your world to communicate with you only via fax or written letter.
How do you think that would change the quantity and quality of the communications you receive?
Plus, these days, email is so flaky. With AOL blocking Yahoo’s mail one day and the reverse happening the day after, getting your message through is like hitting a moving target.
Unless you check your open rates religiously, you aren’t really going to know if your message is getting through. That’s also why you shouldn’t only be depending on email… You need to be contacting your market from as many angles as possible. Email, postcards, phone calls, printed newsletters, audios, videos… There is no perfect medium, it’s the mix of all of them working together that will give you real leverage.
But I have another question for you:
How often should you email your clients?
If you have an email list of any size, you know that unsbuscribes are just part of life. As a professional that is choosing to go out into the public, make yourself known and do your best to attract business, every now and again, people are going to give you the electronic equivalent of saying, “Hey buddy, I never want to hear from you again.”
So when people start unsubscribing to your newsletter, to your listing announcements, to your open house announcements, does that mean you are contacting them too much?
Not a chance…
Consider this scenario…
Picture a world where 80% of people are infected with a terrible, debilitating disease. We’ll call it the “I need real estate help so I don’t make a stupid decision, waste money and get sued.” disease. And you have the antidote… But they don’t know it.
Is there anything in the world that would stop you from helping everyone you could? From insisting that they consider what turning your offer down really means to their health, wealth and well-being?
Do you view your business that way?
This is the line of reasoning that I subscribe to:
You contact your clients/prospects etc. when you have something of value to share with them. And that includes you telling them when you feel it is in their best interest (and why) to invest in your services (and/or products).
Unfortunately for them, this approach might offend some people. But rest easy, because it’s none of your business to care about what others think about you. Their opinion of you is irrelavent.
Dan Kennedy, one of the great marketers alive today always says, “If you haven’t offended somebody by lunchtime, you probably aren’t doing anything important.”
Let me tell you a story from my personal experience:
Every week, I send out an email newsletter called Prof-IT. In each issue there is a long article about marketing and technology and how to apply the principles to grow a real estate business. In each issue I also make recommendations to my readers for my products and services that I know will help them to create more results than they are currently getting from their technology and marketing.
A few months ago, I decided to take my recommendations more seriously. I started emailing my readers more often.
My new subscriber rate went up, my sales went up, and my unsubscribe rate went up. Which one of those stats do you think I care about least?
When you are clear about what you stand for, what your goals are and are committed to reaching them, you tend to polarize people.
And when you are communicating via email, that can lead to someone tapping the “Unsubscribe” button if your message hits them in the wrong way.
Do I care? Do you care? Should we care?
No, no and no.
This is why:
My business exists for a reason. So does yours. Some of you are in it for the money. That’s fine. Money does a lot of good in the world.
But a lot of you are in this business for a much larger reason. A reason that transcends money, status or power. A reason that is specific to you and you only.
My goal is to help real estate professionals earn more money in less time.
So if I do my best to offer my help to the market at large and some of them tell me to get lost, that’s their problem, not mine.
It’s the reverse scenario I would really be worried about. If every real estate professional was knocking at my door, then I’d have a problem. Most likely it would mean that I wasn’t doing anything really important, really worth a ton of value. Because if it appeals to everyone, that’s a bad sign… That means you’ve got a commodity on your hands.
I feel bad that I can’t help them. But that is not something I ultimately control. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want your help.
So when you are emailing your clients/prospects and everone else, don’t let another Realtor® or some other internet guru of the month tell you how often you should email.
It really depends on your goal and how dedicated you are to reaching it.
If your goal is anything worthwhile, ruffling a few feathers here and there isn’t a problem, it’s just a clue that you are moving in the right direction.
