If you don’t use BCC in your Real Estate Emails, You Might Be a Spammer

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It’s amazing how many spam messages are sent per month. Trust me when I say… It’s in the millions. However, there’s one particular type of spam email that I really hate getting. I’m sure the real estate investors and agents who do this have good intentions, however it’s just not great email etiquette in my opinion.

Mass Messages that Expose Email Privacy

It just really annoys me when someone sends me an email about a great deal or some good info that they have about real estate, then I look in the “To” line or “CC” line and I see 50 other email addresses all in that same email.

Now 50 random people you don’t know have access to your email address and can email you whatever they want.

You could only hope that good can come from it, but typically what I’ve seen is just more unwanted spam from people who I never requested to get an email from.

But isn’t this list building?

Now occasionally what you’ll see is investors or other real estate professionals hopping all over this. What they do is copy all the emails and add them to their “investor database”. Then they start sending emails to 50 more people. I heard that one guy was able to build his list to 10,000 people because of people who kept exposing other email addresses.

So what’s the big deal? It sounds like a winning list building strategy right? In one respect, yeah its cool to instantly get 50 leads. However, the concept behind building a list is to email people who want to receive those emails — those who have specifically asked permission. Those people typically include someone you met at a networking event or someone who responded to your ad, or even someone who came to your website and opted in (signed up) to your website.

If you don’t acquire someone’s email address through some type of permission source, then you are basically spamming them, and it can have an adverse affect on your reputation.

If you want to build a reputable long term business, then this type of practice isn’t going in the right direction…in my opinion.

So How Do You Send a Mass Message While Protecting the Privacy of Everyone’s Email address?

It’s simple, use the BCC line. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. What it does is allow you to include multiple people in an email while ensuring that all recipients of that email are “blind” to what everyone else’s email is.

For example, If someone sends you an email and they Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) someone else, then you will never know that the other person received that email. You will be literally “blind” to it.

Therefore, it will appear as though your recipient is the only one who has received the email and they may take you more seriously now that they know you didn’t expose their email address to the world, making their email vulnerable to spam.

The Benefits of using BCC for Real Estate Professionals

• You’re protecting their privacy
• You’re keeping the spam volume low
• You can maintain a good reputation with your list.

This will allow you to build more relationships. If you’re wondering why the response from your massive list is low, then this could very well be the reason.

Of course, this is only for investors who still use Free Emails like Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail to grow their contact lists. If you’re able to, you should consider investing in some type of contact management system, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software, or a list building database system like Aweber.com

Automation is definitely the best way to go and can really be effective for following up with your clients. However, if you’re not ready to make that move, then please use the BCC! Not a big deal? Why would they make a website called www.JustBCC.me! It’s a site that shows you how to nicely let your friends or associates know that they need to use the BCC!

Note: If you have difficulty finding the BCC line, then look for a link within your composed message called, “Add BCC” or you can also try clicking on the “CC” line which should bring out the BCC as well. FYI

To Our Success,

J. Lamar Ferren

“New Breed” Investor

ps. Am I alone in this BCC rant? Please leave a comment below and tell me what you think about people who don’t use the BCC when sending mass emails. Is it that big of a deal to you?

Note From the Editor: Be sure that your commercial emails (any kind of your real estate business emails would fall into this category) are in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act, and give the recipient a way to opt-out! Failure to do so can piss off the people on the list, can get you into trouble, and can cost you serious fines!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.