Over a week ago I began an email campaign in earnest.

I want new clients. I need new clients. I, of course, am my favorite client. But I don’t pay myself nearly what I’m worth.

Besides, new clients are fun! They have new ideas. It’s fun to help them with their business. I get a kick out of working with clients and creating products for them that promote their business, perpetuate their brand, establish them as authorities in their respective fields.

Email marketing is much like direct mail. Though for some reason people seem to take it MUCH MORE personally when you send them an email than if you sent them something to their home. To me, that’s weird. Got my address? I’m freaked. Got my email address? You and Lord knows who else!

But hey, I probably bit off a little more than I could chew anyway. Since I’ve been having a run of real estate writing (ebooks, web copy and such) I figured I would market myself to real estate professionals. And where better to start the campaign than here in Arizona where almost everyone’s sibling is a real estate agent?

So I emailed the 50,000+ agents in my spreadsheet. Yes, you read that correctly. 50 freakin’ thousand emails.

It has taken over 7 days to email them all out. And the program has crashed twice.

About 20% (maybe a bit more) of the emails are useless. Completely undeliverable. So that leaves 35-40,000 deliverable emails.

Then you’ve got your spam filters with their auto-respond features. When I could, I would actually respond so I could show that yes, I am a human being. But many wanted you to fill out information that make it clear that you should be a personal buddy of the recipient or something. Those I deleted.

And so far I have about 260 people who have asked to be taken off the list. (Don’t worry, my friends, you will be off the list this week!!)

As for leads? I’ve had about 15 people contact me. Some are warmer leads than others.

Where to go from here?

Work the current leads.

Create another message for Arizona real estate professionals that provides some information and a call to action…and generate another weeklong email campaign. But not for about 4-6 weeks. Email marketing (much like direct mail marketing) is about getting your message in front of the prospect on a consistent basis.

Without ticking them off.

Which I really, really don’t want to do. Because, like I said, I want new clients. New clients = FUN.