Your Leads and Customers are NOT getting your emails

Do you wonder if anyone is REALLY getting your email? Sure there are tracking services and email sending companies that do there best to make sure everyone gets your email but what about your regular old email that you send yourself with your mail program?

The biggest problem I have seen and being asked how to fix is Realtors are sending out these cute emails with pictures in them or the emails are embedded with images that are actually links to a website to pull the pictures down.

Why are images in your email bad:

The reason for this is because spammers have been using more “image spam” to try to get you to buy their products.

What is “image spam” ?

“Image spam” is an email that actually has no typed text and instead has just a picture of the text and or message

Why is this a problem for you?

Its a problem because spammers using “image spam” is causing spam filters to catch any email that has an image in it and flag it as spam so this means that now your email gets flagged as spam and does not get to its receipient. Greg Swan talked about this. Greg, why are you using Cox servers? They should allow you to use other email servers outside of their network.

From my own mailbox there?s this: Along with millions of other people, I whitelist emails composed entirely of images or with images in the signature area as spam. I?ve been doing this since the financial and sex-drug spammers switched to image-based emails. What this means is that if you have a logo or a head shot attachment in your email, many, many people are throwing away your email without seeing it. Interestingly, lately my SMTP server (cox.net), is not accepting emails with images attached in the sig. In other words, if I fish your email out of my spam folder and reply to it, I have to cut your pix out of the sig in order to get my own email server not to regard it as spam.

Why are the fancy emails with the embedded websites also bad?

The reasons for these is also similar to the above problem. Most spam filters view any email with too many links in it as spam. Basically if you email is actually an embedded webpage then it has to many links. All those pictures and colors and tables that make up the email are actually links to the internet so the email can actually retrieve the images. The other problem with this is that email might come through but most email programs disable images and or links to try to protect the user from malicious content.

What do you do to avoid this problem?

Send plain text emails. Also stop sending emails with those STUPID template backgrounds that Outlook lets you use.

Loren Nason
Future of Real Estate Technology