Messaging Software Articles
Email Basics ; Internet Marketing Tools
By Shelley Lowery
Electronic mail, better known as email, is the most important tool used on the Internet. It’s much faster than snail mail, less expensive and enables you to instantly communicate with your visitors and customers.
Although most Internet Service Providers include email accounts for their customers, these accounts really aren’t adequate for a Internet business — especially if you get a large amount of email. Not only do the email addresses contain your ISP’s name, but they are also very limited on features and options. There are many email programs available on the Internet. However, the best program I’ve found is Eudora. Eudora is a standalone email program that works with any ISP. It will enable you to easily organize your email by filtering your messages into specific mailboxes. This feature alone can save you a great deal of time. What’s more, your email address will be your own domain — not someone else’s. One of my favorite features is the ability to create an unlimited number of personalities. What this means is that you can specify the “from” address depending on the message you’re writing. For example, if you’re answering a support request, you can set up a personality that displays support@yourdomain.com or whatever you’d like as the “from” address. Best of all, it’s free. For further information about Eudora, visit:
http://www.eudora.com
Other Suggested Email Clients
Basic Email Guidelines
Although writing an email message may seem simple, there are some important issues that need to be taken into consideration.
Subject Line
The subject of your email is the most important part of your message. Your subject should be short and provide a summary as to what your message is all about. This is especially important if you need to grab your readers’ attention. For example, if you send out a mailing to your ezine subscribers, you want the subject to instantly grab their attention and intrigue them to open your message. Just because they subscribe, doesn’t mean they’ll actually read your publication.
Formatting
Although there has been a great deal of controversy over the best email format — HTML or text, text is still the best option. HTML messages may look nice; however, not all of your readers will be capable of viewing your message. If you’d really like to use HTML, the best way to accommodate all of your readers is to create two versions and allow your readers to make the choice.
Line Length
When you begin typing your email message, keep in mind, some email programs don’t automatically wrap the text. What this means is that although your message may look great to you, your email recipient may receive your message as one long sentence or it may look something like this:
Thank you for your interest in our
products.
We are dedicated to providing you
with quality
products to assist you in your
endeavors.
To prevent this problem, limit your line length to under 65 characters per line. This can be accomplished by using a hard carriage return (hit enter) at the end of each line.
If you’d rather not have to manually format your text, you can do so online at the following web address:
http://www.web-source.net/format_text.htm
Linking
When placing web addresses within an email message, some email programs will automatically create live links with web addresses beginning with “www.” However, other email programs will only create live links when the web address begins with
http://. To alleviate this problem, always include the full URL beginning with
http://.
The America Online email program is in a class of its own. Their email program won’t create live links with any form of web address. In order to create a live link within AOL, you must include a complete HTML link. To accommodate all of your readers, consider including two links for each URL — one beginning with
http:// and the other with the complete HTML link code.
When including an email address within an email message, always include “mailto:” directly in front of the email address. This will enable most email programs to create a live email link. AOL will require the complete “mailto:” HTML code.
Another important consideration is the use of punctuation with web addresses — especially periods. Some email programs will include periods within a live link. When clicked on, the browser will return an error. There are a couple of ways to alleviate this problem. You can enclose your web address with brackets and place a period after the closing bracket
<
http://www.yourdomain.com>. Or, you can place your web address on a separate line like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com
When including a long web address within your message, some email programs will force part of the URL to the next line. When the live link is created, only a portion of the URL will be live. When clicked on, the browser will return an error. To avoid this problem, try to keep your web addresses short. If necessary, you may want to consider creating a redirect HTML page with a shorter URL.
The appearance of your email message is an important part of your professional image. If you follow these simple guidelines, you can almost completely alleviate these potential problems.
Copyright © Shelley Lowery 2003. All Rights Reserved
About the Author:
Shelley Lowery is the author of several successful ebooks including Web Design Mastery - An in-depth guide to professional web design. Ebook Starter - A Complete Ebook Design Kit, and eZines: A Complete Guide to Publishing for Profit. Subscribe to Etips and receive a free copy of her highly acclaimed ebook, “Killer Internet Marketing Strategies.”
http://www.web-source.net
Email Client Software Suggestions
By Lauren Baier Kim
A drop-off in buyer demand and rising home inventories has made putting a house on the market trickier for homeowners whose properties appreciated during the boom and who hope to retain their gains.
House hunters can now afford to be choosy. “Not everyone can set a price and figure buyers will come,” says Rob Gross, a senior vice president with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Manhattan. “It’s a transitional market.”
Sellers are lowering their price expectations. Take one South Kohala, Hawaii, homeowner, whom real-estate agent Ric Rocker ofKamuela, Hawaii, says he convinced to chop off $10 million from his asking price. The owner, who is asking for $35 million, lowered his price in part to speed the sale, Mr. Rocker says. “He wants to send the message that he wants a fair deal,” Mr. Rocker says. He adds, “We’re not in a market that buyers will pay what sellers want.”
Attracting a shrinking pool of buyers without losing too much financial ground can be tough. To make the most of your real-estate dollars, follow these tips:
1. Size up the playing field. Study your local market and investigate other homes for sale, local asking prices and what buyers are paying. “Be savvy to market trends and know what things are worth,” Mr. Gross says. Use Web sites likeRealtor.com, or look up listings in your local paper or real-estate publication. Ask your realtor to show you area selling prices, or find them with RealEstateJournal.com’sComparable Sales Tool, orZillow.com.
Kayser Dixon, a real-estate agent with Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy in New York, suggests visiting area open houses to evaluate your competition. “If you look at a [price] on a piece of paper, it doesn’t do anything for you,” he says.
2. Price competitively. In recent years, sellers were able to set a price and wait for the bidding wars. No more. “If a home is overpriced, a buyer will dismiss it and move on to the next one,” Mr. Dixon says. Because of the growing number of properties on the market, buyers have a greater number of homes from which to choose, he explains.
Mr. Gross suggests pricing a residence just below what the market will bear. For instance, for a $1 million home in Manhattan, he would ask for $995,000 to “get traffic,” he says. “You want to be perceived as a real seller,” he explains.
Homeowners mistakenly think they can get housing-boom prices, Phyllis MacBeth of Main Street Realtors in Long Beach, Calif., says. “I have to work hard to convince people — without offending them — that their house isn’t better than the one that just sold for $1 million,” she says. Again, check with your real-estate agent or go online to research local selling prices, and set your asking price accordingly.
3. Do legwork. Instead of letting his agent do everything, home seller William Casper, who recently put his Pikeville, Tenn., house up for sale, is using the Internet and some networking to locate a buyer. He has been emailing a property brochure to real-estate investment groups, he says, and encouraging friends and relatives to talk up his house to anyone interested in purchasing a vacation residence in the Smoky Mountains. According to the deal he worked out with his agent, he will pay a 3% commission (instead of a more typical 6%) if he finds a buyer on his own, Mr. Casper says. He used a similar deal four and a half years ago when he sold his former home in Port Washington, Wis., he says, paying his agent 3% on a $176,000 sale.
4. Don’t snooze. Time is money. The longer your house takes to sell, the more money you lose, Ms. MacBeth says. “I was talking to an agent whose client turned down an offer when her house first came on the market,” she says. “That amount is what the homeowner has lowered her price to now, two months later, and the house isn’t selling.” Don’t be too quick to turn down an offer, she suggests, because making a deal now, instead of later, can save you money in the end, especially if the housing market maintains its downward trend.
5. Negotiate. Offer concessions to potential buyers, such as making minor fixes, Ms. MacBeth says. These gestures will repay you and may earn you more money in the long run, she says. “People have to weigh the cost of doing minor repairs,” she says. “All those little things, especially now that there is more inventory, are things that make a house more appealing. People forget that.” Small expenditures, by possibly speeding a sale, can go a long way in preserving the substantial home-price gains that property owners experienced during the housing boom, she says. For example, in her area, she explains, some homes have appreciated a few hundred thousand dollars in recent years.
Strike a deal with your agent. Even if he can’t find a buyer himself, Mr. Casper won’t pay a 6% commission, he says. He has negotiated to pay 5% if his agent brings in a buyer, he says. “Homeowners don’t want to spend the 6% — it is a lot of equity,” he says. You might also want to consider using adiscount broker to sell your home — these providers typically offer fewer services than traditional real-estate agents do, but in exchange, charge a reduced commission.
6. Play up assets. Now that there are more properties on the market, sellers must impress buyers, Manhattan homeowner Jim Savio of New York says. He says he hopes to sell his residence for $1.2 million. In anticipation of putting his property on the market, the fiction writer and professor has repainted the interior and has pared down the artwork on the walls. “The strategy is to allow a new owner to imagine himself in the place,” he says.
Ms. MacBeth encourages removing clutter. “Clean out the closets and the garage,” she says. “Send it to storage, donate it to charity or have a garage sale. You want to enhance your home’s appearance and make it look bigger.”
To attract buyers, determine what the popular “look” for houses is in your area is and mimic it, Mr. Rocker suggests. “I go to the most expensive model homes because they use interior decorators,” he says. “I ask for the actual code of the paint they used and steal their colors. I put them in the exact same rooms they did.”
Pay for landscaping, Ms. MacBeth says, but not too much. “Use the cheapest thing you can find,” she recommends. For her own home, she opted for flowers at $15 a flat instead of ones at $30 a flat, she says. “Cost is an issue,” she says.
7. Take the money and run. If local sales are sliding, you might want to get out while you can, Mr. Rocker says. “People don’t know when it’s time to take a loss and move on,” he says. “They will keep their prices up for two years, and at the end of the day, lose 35%.” If a cooling market translates into a smaller gain than you expected upon the sale of your home, consider relocating to an area with cheaper housing prices to make your money go further. “In California, people are driving an hour, two hours, to work so they can have more house for their dollar,” Ms. MacBeth says.
Join a reader discussion about the residential real-estate market.
Send links to articles about residential-real-estate markets to Lauren Kim at lauren.kim@wsj.com.
Email your comments to rjeditor@dowjones.com.
– June 15, 2006