PoliteMail: News

Email Marketing Case Study

Virtual Tour Company Builds Real Business with Email

As agents sell more properties, Tally Tours gains more clients and keeps growing with 1to1 email.

Panoramic Marketing with Tally Tours

As recently as a decade ago, the only way for potential buyers to see a prospective new home was by visiting the house in person. But the age of technology and the limitless presence of the internet now allow new home buyers to see a panoramic view of both the inside and outside of an MLS listing online. This creates obvious benefits: saving buyer’s hours of looking and expediting the sales process for sellers.

The Service

In 2005, Tally Tours began offering this unique online video service directly to local real estate offices in and around Tallahassee, Florida. Tally Tours uses the most advanced Virtual Tour technology to produce high-quality interactive 360° panoramic virtual tours at a low cost. By combining professional digital photography equipment and expert video production experience, Tally Tours' Virtual Tours have become an effective marketing tool that is in high demand among realtors in Tallahassee. The virtual tours are especially popular because they can be used as a universal tool appearing wherever an agent or firm posts a listing to attract attention, from the MLS and the realtor's own website, to personal websites, and destinations like Homes.com, TallyTours.com, PlanetRealtor.com, and Realtor.com. Links to the tour can also be shared via email for additional promotional value.

The Marketing Need

Though the service was well-regarded by those familiar with it (and lacked competition in the immediate market), getting the word out to hundreds of local real estate agents was still a challenge for Tally Tours president Myles Lasco. Lasco knew he needed a powerful personalized email program that would allow him to inexpensively reach his large, targeted audience and allow him to analyze their response to his marketing messages. After trying several different programs, and painstakingly sending out personalized emails one at a time, he discovered PoliteMail, email marketing software designed to add direct email marketing capabilities to Microsoft Outlook to allow users to create, send and track personalized, 1:1 email messages to one person, a small targeted group, or a list of thousands.

Tally Tours’ email newsletter has become the company’s most effective (and efficient) marketing tool. Using PoliteMail, Lasco reaches out to about 1,500 potential agents each month and can track the open rate of the email as well as each contained link. It also allows Lasco to easily maintain and update his database with opt-ins and opt-outs. Lasco now makes the newsletter the centerpiece of his marketing efforts.

User Quote

According to Lasco, “I tried several different newsletter programs but they were expensive and hard to use. Using PoliteMail, we were able to implement a system that simplified tracking of emails, while allowing us to work in Microsoft Outlook. This was the main reason I tried PoliteMail. The software has been so user-friendly that we’ve had very little interaction with Salestream’s CSRs.”