By Mark Brodsky
Whether you call them auto responders, drip campaigns or just scheduled emails, they are a thing of beauty and a great addition to everything else you’re doing to convert new prospects.
Why? Telling a prospect you’ll send them a series of emails – and then doing it – establishes a relationship of trust from the start. You did what you said you would do – and the best part is the whole thing was automated. Once you’ve entered their email address into the system, the emails are scheduled to go out. The majority of the work is at the start when you decide what content you want to share and how often you want it to be sent.
The emails serve two purposes. They build awareness of you and your expertise while they educate your prospect on the buying or selling process.
One reason you want to spread out the wealth of information is that it’s hard for people to digest a lot of information at once.
For instance, once someone has made the decision to sell their home, there’s a lot to do. One email a week for four weeks can help get people focused and prepared while letting them know what needs to get done. It’s easily digestible.
For buyers, you can set up a series of emails that will educate them (especially first-timers) about what they need to know when purchasing a home, whether it’s calculating what they can really afford, or hidden costs such as legal fees, land transfer taxes and more.
The larger email service providers (Constant Contact, iContact, MailChimp) all offer some sort of autoresponder service.
One of the reasons to choose one of these systems is because they’re solely designed to send email. As in previous articles I’ve extolled the virtues of these systems. You can produce esthetically pleasing, brand matching emails and receive reports showing you the effectiveness of your campaigns.
You can also tweak the emails over time as you see which emails get opened more and what people are clicking on, making it a passive way of gauging how effective your email campaigns are. You should also include links to any social media platforms you’re on so people can follow you on Facebook or Twitter and connect with you on LinkedIn.
Mark Brodsky runs Mark Brodsky Digital Communications, a company that specializes in email marketing and social media. In addition to email newsletters and targeted campaigns, MBDC co-ordinates the setup for major social networking sites and ensures that they’re co-ordinated, so one piece of content gets shared many ways. www.mbdigitalcommunications.com; Email [email protected]
