1. I am not a legal specialist, but I do want you to understand that the law has something to say about sending out mass emails as well. Click here for a summary… and with detailed questions, contact a lawyer.
2. Who will you be sending your email to? Is that address list of 1,100 realtors really the group of people you would like to approach? Or should you be more selective?
3. What is your email provider’s policy on mass-emailing? Do understand that some people in your mailing list aren’t that interested in your commercial efforts, and may report you as a spammer. As a consequence, your email provider may lock or even remove your email account. All the more reason to, as stated under 1), be selective about who you send your mailing to.
4. Think about frequency – if you overdo it, people may become less interested. An exaggerated example would be that guy that sends out 3 emails per day to 2,000 people, 7 days a week…
5. Put yourself in the position of the receiver, and think about what this mail should look like. While you’re at it, think about the emails you received from other realtors on their properties. What did they look like? Was it just text? Or maybe only a link to the property on another website (yuck!)? Or did it catch your eye right away because they chose the right words and visualized their mail with graphics and pictures?
6. As more and more realtors will choose to use this technique, being original becomes increasingly important. Now you may receive one or two of these emails every day – when it becomes 10 or 20, the most original and best looking ones are most likely to draw your attention.
7. Considering all the above – will you take time to do it right, or will you be firing shot hoping you hit someone?

Now you’ve taken all the above into consideration, let’s talk briefly about how you can actually do this. Without going into details, let’s go over the basic steps.

1. It all starts with a (quality!) address list. You may already have a list of real estate professionals you work with frequently. If not, you can download a full list of MLXchange users in CSV-format. Do keep in mind that if you download your list from MLXchange, you will need to do some filtering. Not all entries have an email address listed, and some of them have bogus addresses. More advanced users will find the use of filters in excel easy to identify empty cells, or for example include / exclude certain companies.
2. It is highly recommended you use the tools provided in the MS Office suite (you will need Word, Excel,  Outlook and possibly Publisher). You can compose your message in Word, or even make a full-blown flyer in Publisher. When you’re done composing, use the mail merge wizard to connect your message to your address list. The mail merge wizard will even allow you to personalize each email that goes out, based on the data you have in your list. For example, if one entry in your list is FIRSTNAME: John LASTNAME: Doe EMAIL: john.doe@supermail.com, the message that goes to his email can start with “Dear John Doe,…”.
3. For those of you who are cheap and don’t have the full MS Office suit installed on your computer, WorldMerge may be a good alternative. WorldMerge is a light freeware email editor that allows you to compose messages and mail them out to a large address list. I want to stress this is a lesser alternative – remember that bit about how becoming creative and making it look good becomes increasingly important? The editing options in WorldMerge are a mere fraction of what you can create with Office’s tools. Just sayin’.
4. Keep in mind, no matter what method you choose: depending on the size of the message and the amount of addresses you are sending it to, the process may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to complete.

And here’s a last tip for attitude: don’t give up! All the above may seem like a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo to you, but only those who persist will succeed! Your computer and software are tools… though classes may help, it is the individual effort you make, playing with it in your free time, that will improve your skills.