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Is Your Email Signature Memorable?

By Ruth Ann Macklin

Services for Real Estate Pros with myREassistant.com

June 17, 2008 10:18 PM

As a real estate professional, your email signature is as important as your business card. It may even be more important, if you think about how many emails you send in a day compared to how many business cards you hand out.

You probably wouldn't hand out a plain white business card with simple black lettering...no color, no logo, no photo. And you shouldn't send a plain email signature...no color, no logo, no photo.

If your email signature needs a little help, you might be interested in this new product I came across last week...eCards being offered at www.EmailIdeas.com.

ecard

eCards are an electronic business card that goes in your Email. It contains links to any websites you wish, and your contact information. The site has loads of free templates or you can customize for a price.

Additional features of eCards include:

• Statistics on link traffic

• Personalize your email

• Promote your TextMe or RealPing

The eCards are eye catching and you sure can't beat the price.

As a real estate virtual assistant, I like to tell you any down side I see. When I tested the links for any of the samples on the EmailIdeas.com website, they worlked just fine. A friend of mine sent me an email with an eCard in it and the links opened another window with the following text:

You have reached this page because some email programs (e.g. Outlook 2007) do not supply full support standard HTML. Please click the link below to continue...

I opened the email and links in Outlook 2003, so this may be something you might want to ask about before using the product.

Except for the above glitch...which hopefully can be overcome...eCards look like a nifty product giving you a memorable email signature without breaking the bank.

Need help implementing this idea into your real estate practice? As a real estate virtual assistant, I'm glad to help. give me a call at 757-271-6047 or visit my website, www.myREassistant.com.

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Chip Jefferson

Gibbs Realty and Auction Company - Columbia, SC

Dependingon the email server you can have a good bit of difficulty with the cards. But I do agree that the signature is very important.

Jun 17, 2008 10:32 PM

David Daniels

Owner of FlyersToYou, Inc. and former Top Realtor - Hemet, CA

We used to offer highly customized email designs to our real estate customers...and even had a very cool looking HTML based design of our own we used.

UNTIL...

Our customers on Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, MSN and virtually everywhere else stopped receiving our emails!!!! Here's what happened.

HTML programming gives its programmer an incredible amount of "hidden" power. You can hide all sorts of stuff in HTML...tracking cookies....what kind of browser was used to view the email....the ISP and IP address of the user and even the general location of the person who downloaded the html or graphics contained in the email.

Most people in the real estate profession, of course, are not using email signatures, nor HTML links and programming for any kind of harm's sake. BUT, virtually every email server out there has implemented anti-spam software that PREVENTS THE EMAIL FROM GOING THROUGH!!! At best, it will alert you of the potential dangers of opening the email...and give you the option of proceeding or not.

Most people don't.

It was a tremendous idea in the beginning, but due to rampant abuse, it's days are coming to an end. There are several real estate oriented "custom email" sites trying to figure out what to do with their entire existing business model as the effectiveness of their campaigns has dropped from about 70% to less than 5%.

We now send out plain old text emails. I hate that! But at least we know they reach their intended recipient...and we can still include a link to some bright and colorful website for any additional marketing we wish to do.

Be careful buying the custom email stuff. It doesn't work like it once did.

Dave

Jun 17, 2008 10:52 PM

Anonymous

John Cannon

Ruth Ann, thank you for your post regarding our product. We did indeed have a recent problem with Outlook 2007. If the sender of the email was using Outlook 2007, Outlook would convert the html to something that would not work with other email systems. We found a work around to this problem and recently published an update. We have been testing and will soon notify our customers that they can upgrade their eCard free of charge via our website, www.emailideas.com.

Jun 18, 2008 01:35 AM

I would like to reply to the post regarding html signatures and SPAM filters. I think it is really important to clearly educate this audience with facts.

Just because an email is an html email with an image does not mean it is SPAM. If a SPAM filter blocks one of my emails, then there is a problem with the SPAM filter and not my email. We need to shine a light on the problem. The problem is with the bad SPAM filters.

The most important thing I can share with this audience is the clear message that html email is NOT the same as SPAM.

Even though there are bad SPAM filters, it does not mean emails are being undelivered. Constant Contact, one of the industry's leading bulk email services, who uses html email, claim: "Constant Contact's overall email delivery rate is consistently above 97 percent". If you know of services that have dropped from 70% effective to 5%, it sounds to me like they are not very good services.

If anyone in this audience wants to find out for themselves if our eCards work, go to our website and try it for free. www.emailideas.com.

Jun 18, 2008 01:38 AM

Albert Clark

We have boatloads of realPING users who put their realPING button in their sig area and many more now coming on with E-Mail Ideas. If there was a systemic problem we would be having dramatic effects.... and advise our clients not to use signatures..... About 25% of all our button clicks come from agents who deploy their realPING button IN their emails!

We are seeing no problems..with EMail Ideas

Thanks,

Al Clark

Click to PING ME

Jun 18, 2008 02:07 AM

Is Your Email Signature Memorable?

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