Hey, Nick.
Where’d you and Nigel go Monday night?
I got to the Blue Fire Grill at 6:28 and we waited there and at Legends until 6:50.
The cell phone number you gave me was answered by someone who had no idea who you were. He got pretty p.o.ed the third time I called the number.
Nigel and I were at the front entrance on the sidewalk from about 6:30 to almost 7pm. The joint had some kind of outdoor party going so we left and went into town to some fancy place he knew. The cheapest thing on the menu was $39. My dinner was $99. Lucky for me Nigel grabbed the tab 
. I have to return to San Diego next month so we’ll hook up then. I email you my cell #.
Max and I both were wearing HomeTeam shirts with huge HomeTeam logos on the back. We walked around looking for other people who were not wearing Thomson Group dingle-dangles around their necks. Oh, well. We went to Islands and had a bunch of mango margaritas while watching the USC-t.u. football game.
I think this is going to be a big boon to Inspectors, as well as the industry. I’m signed up!
Russ
The January issue of the newsletter will be sent the evening of January 10th. We expect to send out around 135,000 email newsletters. That is a small percentage of what our servers can handle.
We are planning for close to 250,000 newsletters going out for February’s issue.
We feel that it’s important to do an excellent job when we promote the inspection industry as a whole through our platform.
More positive public awareness of our industry is good for all inspectors!
Without a doubt, John!
Care to divulge how many HI’s have signed up?
Russ,
That’s one number that I will never talk about in exact terms but you can do the math to get a pretty good idea.
John…this is great! I used a similiar service years ago during my “other” life…I plan to sign up with you as well…one question:
I am new to the business, but have many many contacts in Real Estate as well as my own list from my other businesses…is it possible to create an introduction of some sort as part of my first email “blast” ?
Or do I need to do that on my own? Ugh…
Thanks
Gotcha!
Question John?
When I signup with you for the email e-letter,can I upload my email list to your server. Or do I have to type in every single one by hand?:roll: Thanks for a great service John.
Tony, as I had / have an active email HI Updates letter going out every month to about 1200, I simply told to look for the “New Format” . . .
It helped that I had an active list going, already.
Russ
Tony,
If you want to “introduce” the newsletter before you send it, you’ll have to do it on your own. Sorry. On the other hand might I suggest that you just send them the newsletter and let them opt-out if they want. The only purpose of sending an introduction (that I can think of) would be to have them opt-in. I think our reverse method is more successful.
You can import them into our system by the thousands.
Thanks John for the import email information. I didn’t ask though,can you tell me what type of format your system uses? Ie: outlook,or a MS excel.ect for the upload? Thanks again John.
You can export your address book from most email applications such as MS Outlook into a Comma Seperated Value (CSV) text file or a tab delimited file which can be imported into our system.
Data base files such as MS Excel or Access are easily imported into the system.
John Onofrey, President of Grail Media, LLC is pleased to announce the addition of Associate Editor, Katherine Hauswirth. Katherine has worked as a technical writer and editor for more than 6 years. She has edited journals, slide kits, and educational presentations for a wide variety of clients. Her articles and essays have been published in *The Writer, The Writer’s Handbook 2003, and Byline. *Katherine has a great resource for home inspection terms — she is married to a home inspector (Tom Hauswirth of Beacon Fine Home Inspections).
We ran the Feb. issue through a content checker which determines how likely it is that the newsletter may be considered as spam and rejected by different mail server spam filters.
The newsletter scored 1.5 out of 5 (5 being the worst) which indicates that the newsletter was likely to be received by most mail servers.
We have indentified room for improvement however, and we will be adjusting accordingly for the March issue. Our goal is to acheive the lowest rating possible.
Here is the commentary from the content checker:
COMMENTARY:
Well done! Your email scored less than 5.0. the assessment suggests your email is likely to reach your audience.
Take a careful look at detailed results, particularly if your score is close to 5.0.
- What techniques or content made your email look like spam?
- How important are the high-scoring design and content elements to the core message?
- What changes could you make so the email is less likely to be mistaken for spam by filters?
Deliverability of your newsletters is very high on our priority list and we will be working diligently to receive the best possible deliverable rates for our users.
A couple days after the last release, a former client called to book an inspection.
Yesterday, it happened again with another out of state investor.
Good initial service, with personal and Home Hints e-News followups, have been helping here; our home sales market has been dead here for at least a couple of weeks.
After 2 years of explosive growth, the out of state investors are looking elsewhere. So are many of the natives, who cannot afford to purchase homes here. Same thing I saw in Colorado several years ago.
Great service you offer, John; just one of those 2 inspections during this “Dry Spell” pays for a year’s HHN. The other ensures that the next mortgage payment is on hand.
Unfortunately, there are other inspectors who are not doing even this “well” in our area - a sad state of affairs for mid-June.