DOING BUSINESS: Technology@work
Match your e-mail to your image
BY STEPHEN M. CANALE, CRB, CRS®
Not all e-mail services are equal when it comes to conveying a professional image. Many of the services you’re familiar with—dial-ups such as America Online, NetZero, and Juno, and e-mail options like Yahoo! and Hotmail—are fine for communicating with friends and family. But these services are less effective for business use.
In fact, using a consumer e-mail service is a risky business choice for three significant reasons:
1. Consumer e-mail services often don’t offer the professional e-mail applications—creating multiple attachments or sending messages to lengthy lists of recipients drawn from your contact manager—that you need for business. Such limitations make it difficult to use the integrated e-mail functions in ACT!, Goldmine, Top Performer, On-Line Agent, and other contact managers. This lack of integration severely limits your ability to perform such useful business functions as filtering your e-mail by subject or using autoresponders.
2. Consumer-oriented e-mail services are notorious for unpredictable message delivery. Sometimes these services delay delivery and often they return incoming messages to the sender, stating that the recipient’s mailbox is either not found or full. As a result, correspondence to and from customers, clients, and prospects may be needlessly delayed or missed entirely.
3. An e-mail address from a consumer-oriented provider doesn’t look professional to many of today’s more technologically sophisticated consumers.
Many real estate practitioners work around the domain issue by publishing the e-mail address of their brokerage
(joesmith@ABCRealty.com), personal Web site (joesmith@joesmith.com), or MLS (joesmith@RegionalMLS.com), which then forwards messages to their consumer-based service. Although this might appear to be a good solution, your true e-mail account is disclosed to the recipient when you use the reply function to answer an e-mail, undoing your redirection efforts.
Professional options
To create a truly professional e-mail image, you need to obtain e-mail access through an Internet Service Provider. National ISPs such as AT&T (www.att.com) and Earthlink (www.earthlink.com) are good options, as are numerous regional and local companies.
It’s even more important to choose an e-mail address that you control personally. If you don’t, and publish the address in your marketing materials, you’ll face substantial disruption and loss of brand identity if you later change ISPs.
If you have your own Web site, you can use an e-mail account provided by your Web-hosting service. Even better, most hosting agreements include the use of multiple e-mail accounts, usually without an extra fee. Designating different e-mail accounts for different promotional efforts is an easy way to track leads.
Even if you don’t have a Web site, you can purchase your e-mail domain through a domain registrar, such as www.register.com or www.godaddy.com, or through REALTOR VIPSM partner Internet Crusade
(www.internetcrusade.com).
There’s no need to settle for consumer-level tools when it comes to communicating with clients and prospects. You’re a professional; use the appropriate tools to operate as one in the electronic arena.
