As a real estate agent, you need to keep your name in front of current and prospective clients to promote your business and ensure its success. How can you economically and effectively market yourself and your services to clients and prospects? By using e-mail.

Using e-mail can help you "ensure a steady return of repeat and referral business," say Saul D. Klein, John W. Reilly, and Mike Barnett of InternetCrusade. "Because most of your clients will need your services an average of only once every five to eight years, you need a way to maintain consistent contact during a long period of time." E-mail provides a convenient and effective way to stay in touch with clients.

Marketing yourself with e-mail couldn't be easier. First, you need to collect e-mail addresses from as many clients and prospects as possible so that you have an audience to market yourself to. By using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, you can easily store and retrieve your clients' e-mail contact information.

Second, send out regular e-mail communications to your clients and prospects. In your e-mail newsletters or messages, include information that your clients will find valuable, such as events and happenings in their neighborhoods. These mailings can help you maintain consistent contact with your clients over the years. You can use the templates and features in Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Outlook 2003 to send e-mail messages to your clients and stay in contact with them without a lot of time and effort.

The following tools and information can help you successfully use e-mail to market yourself and your services.

• Create an e-mail marketing strategy (Article)
  Learn how easy it can be to market your services through e-mail by following these tips from InternetCrusade.
• Create a contact (Article)
  Collect information on all your contacts in Outlook 2003.
• Create Outlook e-mail templates for sales letters (Article)
  Save time by creating e-mail templates for letters that you send again and again.
• Use mail merge for mass mailings and more (Training)
  Send out mass mailings efficiently by using mail merge in Word 2003.
• Automatically reply to incoming messages while out of the office (Article)
  Keep clients informed when you're out of the office.