In today's world, email marketing is one of the easiest ways to reach the community and promote your business. However, email marketing can quickly take a turn for the worse. I've outlined a few of the key components of how and why to integrate a successful email marketing campaign into your brokerage:

Spam

Have you built yourself a high-quality email list into the thousands, or tens-of-thousands? Give yourself a pat on the back—it's something that takes clever marketing and years of hard work. Wouldn't it be a shame if something, nay, someone, were to put this list in jeopardy? Enter, rogue real estate agent.

Everyone knows that real estate agents are notorious for sending out spam email messages. At best, spam gets filtered out before it reaches the recipient's inbox. At worst, it gives the company and agent a bad name among clients, leading to unsubscribes and blocks, which can decimate the sacred email marketing list that took years to build.

Save your agent's time

Agents are frequently busy with the day-to-day of selling real estate–showings, open houses, glad-handing and slapping backs at networking events. The vast majority of agents do not have the time to craft well-written, tasteful, targeted and effective email drip and blast campaigns.

Brokers have started to wise up to this issue recently. Shrewd brokers are offering email marketing services as a major value-add, giving agents a huge reason to stay put at their current brokerage or to jump ship to ones that are offering it. Sending emails on behalf of agents will also insulate your brokerage from the agent that could potentially wreak havoc on your company/brand with poorly constructed emails ill-suited to your overall strategy.

How do you send emails for your agents en masse? With the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM), brokers can push emails to their agents that are branded to the company, the agent's group and the agent themselves. The CRM will be able to bring in the name of each agent dynamically, along with his or her email signature, contact information and social profile pages.

Use transaction email

If you like to crunch data, you might want to think about the best way to analyze your sends. Consider Mandrill, a transactional SMTP email service with analytics built in the system. It tracks the open rates, click-through rates, bounces and unsubscribes—arming you with vital information on the effectiveness of your email marketing strategies. It is also great for ensuring high deliverability rates to your recipients. It does things like sending out e-mails in batches and not all at once, thereby avoiding the spam filter and helping to land your email in the recipient's inbox.

Outsource your email marketing

If you don't have the time or the inclination to manage and write email blast or drip campaigns, outsource it to someone who knows what they are doing. They should know the optimal subject line text, formatting, content and time of day to send these emails. If they are really top-notch, they will be comfortable and familiar with A/B testing, which is a data-driven approach to email marketing that tweaks one variable each time it sends out an email to a list of recipients. The performance of the lists over time tell a clear story as to what is working and what is not.

Do you have a successful email marketing story to share? Tell us below!

To view the original article, visit the Tribus Group blog.