Simplify your online marketing strategy

Yes, that's an excellent point. I have a couple of answers for you.

1. It doesn't matter if some people hit delete; it's the ones that respond that matter.
2. This is where ROI comes in. As long as email is lower ROI than something else, it will continue.
   
3. However, you're right. The more people get marketed to, the more they ignore it. But that doesn't make it hopeless. In the end, people need to buy and sell houses, and if you can get in front of them at the right time, you'll get business.
   
   The key to fixing this problem is improving relevance. You can't sign up every visitor to your mailing list and expect them to enjoy it.
   
   To me, the best way to do this as an agent is with an IDX search on your site. A good property search is the most important thing to buyers. They will bookmark it and keep using it until they're ready to deal with an agent. Then they'll most likely call you.
   
   A good property search should be easy to use, not require registration, but encourage it through special features like emailing the buyer when new properties match. You can't get much more relevant than that.
   
   Depending on your MLS, you will have 0 to many choices for IDX vendors. My company makes an IDX search called MyDX that services several Georgia and Florida MLS's. The customers of ours that generate the most leads do it by combining online marketing (to drive visitors) with our MYDX product (to generate leads). The best customers have generated hundreds of leads in just a few months.

One more note about drip email...you should think of drip email and blogging in almost the same exact way... you have "fresh and relevant" content to draw back visitors in hopes of a future transaction. That is the only point of it. So over-dripping content or blog posts that aren't relevant to get "branding" or just "stay in front of the person" isn't a good strategy b/c people will unsubscribe or ignore your messages. Make sure that when you say something, it's relevant. 

Renae-

Thanks for the comment! You are exactly right about website content, it also needs to be relevant. I see customers all the time wanting to post content about local tourist stuff for the city, or links to the Chamber of Commerce. I can't imagine that being very relevant to someone looking to buy or sell a house.

I'll talk about this more in the future, but there are a ton of web site statistics you can use to measure how relevant your audience thinks your site is. Things like your bounce rate, total time on site, total pages viewed, % of repeat visitors, these are all a great measure of relevance.