It's end of year clean up time and I have decided to sell realtymarket.com.au.

Realtymarket.com.au would be a great domain name for all things Real Estate.

Included in the sale is the .net.au version - realtymarket.net.au. This is good, as it prevents competitors from sneaking up behind you with a .net.au counterpart.

We've partly developed a 'real estate' listing style website for this domain. This can be included in the sale or if you wish, you can only purchase the domain name.

If you are interested, please feel free to email me, or check out the domain's listing at NetFleet.

Oh, and Merry Christmas and best wishes for a prosperous 2011!

Q: When is email marketing not email marketing?

A: When it's spam, of course!

Email marketing can be a really effective means of communicating and maintaining a relationship with your clients and potential clients.

However, to stay on the right side of the law (and in your recipient's good books), it is really important to conduct email marketing through a permission based approach.

In other words, if you are mass mailing promotional emails, your recipients need to have agreed to be on your list, either by subscribing, email agreement, verbal agreement or similar.

The exception (legally and ethically) is sending individual messages to specific people, in order to start a dialogue. As opposed to sending mass mail to a random list of addresses.

Don't Eblast. Ever.

I cringe whenever I hear the term 'Eblast'. The name itself screams spam, and implies something akin to blasting a shotgun into people's inboxes.

There are several problems with this:

1. If the recipients haven't agreed to be on the list, it is spam. If you are using the term 'Eblast', it probably is spam. (which is illegal)
2. If said recipients haven't agreed, they probably don't want to see your promotional material. In which case you're not really marketing to them. It becomes more 'antimarketing'
3. A targeted approach is nearly always better. Identify the groups you wish to communicate with and hold a dialogue. Your message will be much more focussed and to the point.

Eblasting is not the same as Email Marketing. I would see the two as antithesis to each other.

It really is important to make the distinction between email marketing and spam. From a legal and ethical point of view, as well as from an effective marketing perspective.

Just my two cents...

We can help! Studio Lucid deploy email marketing systems and design promotional emails. For help with setting up effective and ethical email marketing campaigns, please contact us.