I can’t tell you how many times I have had to “coach” real estate agents about the dangers of sending mass emails from their personal email accounts.  I understand why you would want to send your latest listing or fabulous newsletter to all 350 people in your farm via one email. After all, it is incredibly easy to do and it would save so much time!

But, here is the danger, the recipient’s Internet Service Provider or email host (Comcast, AOL, Yahoo etc) can see that the same email is being sent to hundreds of people and will assume that it is spam (Well, if you think about it, unless you are sending it to a list of people who have pro-actively opted in, it IS spam!).  In that case they will mark your missive as spam and your recipient may not ever see it.  Worse, you could be blocked by your OWN ISP or email host as a spammer.  Then none of your emails would be delivered.  Even the non-spammy ones!

What to do, what to do?  Well, you could use a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact.  You could sign up for a free news letter service (or a paid one).  Or you could explore another possibility.

If you have a Gmail account and if you use the Chrome browser to access Gmail, a new service may have just the answer for you.

It’s called GMass and it is an EXTENSION to the Chrome Browser.  It’s free (for now) so it it should appeal to you for that reason too.

Here is what it does:

Send email campaigns to your existing Gmail contacts. Personalize based on name and email address. Track opens. Create instant recipient lists based on search results. And the killer feature – emails can be sent as replies to the last conversation you had with each recipient.  You can send up to 20 emails at a time (well below the spammer trigger most ISPs apply)

Enter a few addresses in the To field, compose an email using {FirstName} and {LastName} as your personalization fields, and then click the GMass button (instead of the Send button). Individual, personalized emails will be sent to each recipient.

Use Gmail’s powerful search feature to find messages containing recipients to whom you want to email. Then click the “Compose from Search” button, and a Compose window will load containing the email addresses found in those messages.

Choose to either have emails sent as new messages or as replies to the last conversation you had with each recipient. The latter will create the impression that you manually replied and typed a message to that recipient individually, which should increase your response rate.

I can see you using this to stay in touch with past clients, farm areas, and other prospecting by email methods.

Since you can get a gmail account for free, Chrome is free and GMass is free, there is absolutely nothing to stop you from giving this a try…unless it’s your own inertia!

So, here are the steps:

1. Obtain a gmail account if you don’t have one at http://www.gmail.com
2. Download and install the Chrome browser if you don’t already have it at http://www.chrome.com
3. Open gmail in Chrome and go to http://www.gmass.co and follow the directions
4. Read the FAQ section on the G-Mass website to have all of your questions answered.

Start using email to send your spam, oops I mean new listings and/or newsletters, and rest easy knowing that you have a tool that helps you get your mail delivered and will track the opens!  You can thank me later!