Understanding deal marketing sends

A deal marketing send (also called a campaign) sends one deal to a list of buyers at once — as an individual email to each buyer, sent from your own connected mailbox, never a single group email. It's built for protecting your mailbox's reputation, so a large send doesn't get you flagged as spam.

Buyer tiers

Every buyer contact or company can carry a tier — VIP, Gold, Silver, and Bronze by default — so you can rank your buyers and target the best ones. A tier is separate from a contact's star rating, which is a review average, not a ranking. A buyer you haven't ranked yet sits in the built-in Unverified tier, which is never part of an email sent to a tier — and neither is anyone marked Not a buyer (see Verifying buyers). See Ranking buyers and setting up deal marketing for how to assign tiers, manage your team's tier list, and set up the footer address, daily cap, and send interval a campaign needs before it can go out.

Sending to a contact list

Instead of tiers, a send can go to one of your saved contact lists. In Send this deal to buyers, set Audience to A contact list and pick the list — or open the list on the Contact Hub's Lists tab and select Send a deal in its bar. The send goes to whoever is on the list when you select Send (a smart list runs its filters right then). The usual skips still apply: anyone opted out, marked do not email, with no email on file, or still in the Unverified tier isn't emailed. If the list was archived or is someone else's private list by the time you send, you'll see "Couldn't send — that list was archived or isn't shared with you. Pick another list."

Skipping buyers already emailed about a deal

Tiered marketing usually means more than one send per deal — VIP buyers first, then a wider list a day or two later. An automator's buyer list step has Skip buyers already emailed about this deal (ticked on new steps) so the second round goes only to buyers who haven't heard about the deal yet. A buyer counts as already emailed when an earlier send on the same deal went out to them or is still queued to; a buyer whose earlier email failed or was canceled is included again. Sends on other deals don't count.

A campaign card shows how many buyers it left out this way — for example, "12 skipped — already emailed about this deal". See Automator step types for setting it up, including a tiered-rollout example.

What a buyer email can include

A deal marketing email goes to buyers, so only some merge fields can be used in its template. These fill in:

• The deal and property — name, type, status, address, city, state, zip, county, and full address
• The property details — Bedrooms, Bathrooms, Square Feet, Year Built, Lot Size, Property Type, ARV, and Repair Estimate
• Asking Price
• Closing Date and Due Diligence End Date
• The deal owner's and disposition agent's name and email
• The buyer's own name and email, the sender's name and email, your team name, and today's date
• Any of your team's own custom fields (under Custom fields) — you decide which ones. A buyer email sends them exactly as they're written on the deal, so Insert merge field reminds you: "Custom fields are sent exactly as written. Check they're safe to share with buyers." A field like Access Notes might hold a lockbox code, and a buyer email goes to the whole list.

Everything else is never sent to a buyer list: seller and buyer contact details, the purchase price, earnest money, escrow details, the assignment fee, the sale price, the title company, and vendors. In Insert merge field on a buyer or general template, and in an automator's Email step set to a buyer list, those fields are marked Not sent to buyer lists.

Nothing goes out with a gap in it. If a template uses a field that can't go to a buyer list, or one that's empty on the deal (no asking price yet, no bedrooms recorded, or a Square Feet or Year Built of 0, for example):

• Send this deal to buyers keeps Send turned off and lists the fields to fix — fill them in on the deal or pick another template.
• An automator's buyer list step doesn't send, and the run stops with "Buyer email not sent — fix the template or the deal, then retry." and a reason that names the fields. Fix the template or the deal, then select Retry send. The builder also won't let you publish while the step's template uses a field that can't go to buyers.
• If a buyer has no name on file and the template greets them by name, that one buyer is skipped and the rest of the campaign carries on.

Opting out vs. unsubscribing

A buyer can be kept off deal marketing sends in two ways, and they look different on their profile:

• Opted out (by your team) — anyone with edit access to Contacts can turn on Opt out from deal marketing on the buyer's profile at any time. This only affects deal-marketing campaigns; one-to-one email and automator deal emails to that buyer still go through.
• Unsubscribed (by the buyer) — every deal marketing email includes an unsubscribe link in its footer. The link opens a page that names your team and has one Unsubscribe me button; the buyer is only unsubscribed once they press it. Opening the link on its own changes nothing, so a mail security scanner that opens every link in a message can't unsubscribe a buyer by accident. The Unsubscribe button that Gmail, Outlook and other mail apps show at the top of the email still works in one click. Either way, the buyer's profile then shows "Unsubscribed by the recipient on ⟨date⟩" instead of the usual helper text, and only a team admin can turn it back on (with a confirmation, since it means the buyer starts receiving deal marketing emails again even though they asked to stop). A buyer who opens the link after they're already opted out — by themselves or by your team — sees "You're already unsubscribed."

Either way, that buyer's email address is never sent a deal marketing email again — even through a company. If a company has no email of its own and its point of contact has opted out, the company is skipped too, because its email would land in that same inbox. The company itself stays opted in: give it its own email address and it receives sends again. It works the other way too: if a company's sends go to its point of contact's inbox and that person unsubscribes, the company is opted out — and that inbox is skipped when you send to the contact directly, too.

A buyer marked Do not email on their profile (in the Person card) is left out of every deal marketing send too, and counted with the opted-out buyers. That's the stronger switch: it also stops one-to-one and automator emails, where Opt out from deal marketing only affects campaigns. A company whose sends would go to a do-not-email person's address is skipped the same way. Turning Do not email on while a campaign is still sending works too: any email to that person that hasn't gone out yet is skipped and added to the campaign's opted-out count.

A campaign card shows how many buyers were left out for opting out — for example, "2 skipped — opted out of deal emails" — and so does the campaign line under an automator's buyer list step on the run's timeline. After Send this deal to buyers, the confirmation says how many buyers the send actually went to, and how many it skipped for opting out — for example, "Sending to 10 buyers · 2 skipped — opted out of deal emails."

Seeing who opened and clicked

Once a campaign has sent its first email, its card on the deal's Disposition tab shows how many buyers opened it and how many clicked a link in it — for example, "Opened 12 · Clicked 5". Each buyer counts once, however many times they open the email. Per buyer, the Opened and Clicked columns in Buyers on this deal (below) show when they first did, and how many times when it's more than once (for example, "Oct 12 · 3 opens"). The counts update on their own while you watch.

Treat opens as an estimate. Opens are counted when the email's images load, so a buyer whose mail app blocks images won't show as opened, and Apple Mail's privacy feature (which loads every image as the email arrives, whether or not anyone reads it) isn't counted at all. Link scanners that check every link before the buyer sees the email aren't counted either. A click always counts as an open too, so Clicked is the more reliable signal of a buyer who's interested.

The links in your email still go exactly where you pointed them — a click passes through TED for a moment to be counted, then opens the page. The unsubscribe link is never tracked.

Buyers on this deal

Under the campaign cards, Buyers on this deal has one row per buyer, however many times the deal went to them — a deal sent twice to the same 40 buyers is 40 rows. The columns are Buyer (with their email and tier), Sent (the latest send, plus "· 2 sends" when they got it more than once), Opened, Clicked, Replied, Response, and Offer (their latest offer's amount and status). Hover a date to see the exact time. When a send to a buyer failed, Sent reads Failed with the reason underneath — for example a bad address or your mailbox's daily send limit — so you know whether to fix the email or just try again later. A buyer who made an offer or replied without ever being sent the deal gets a row too.

The chips above the table filter by how far each buyer has got: All, then Not sent, Sent, Opened, Clicked, Replied, Responded, and Offered — each with how many buyers are at that stage, and only the stages someone is at. Select Clicked, for example, to see who clicked but hasn't answered yet.

Before anything has gone out, the section says "No buyers have been sent this deal yet" with a Send to buyers button.

Logging what a buyer said

Each row's ⋯ menu has:

• Interested — logs that the buyer is interested ("Dana Reyes is interested — logged").
• Pass… — opens Log Dana Reyes's response on Passed. Pick Why they passed from your team's pass reasons (required), add a Note (optional), and select Save Response. Without a reason it says "Pick why they passed". Your admin manages the reasons in Settings > Deals > Pass Reasons (see Customizing your team's field options). Once a buyer has passed, the item reads Edit pass….
• Mark replied — for a reply by email or phone call that TED can't see.
• Send again — sends the deal to just this buyer through the send dialog. For a buyer the deal never went to (say, one who made an offer first), it reads Send deal.
• Log offer — jumps to Offers and opens Add Offer with this buyer already picked (people only — an offer always names a person).

Logging again replaces the buyer's last answer — each buyer has one answer per deal. The Response column shows Interested, or Passed with the reason (for example "Passed — Price") and the note.

When a buyer you sent the deal to texts back about it, Replied fills in on its own ("Oct 12 · by text"). That only counts texts linked to the deal, and only from someone the deal already went to as a buyer — the seller texting about their own deal doesn't. Email replies aren't picked up yet, so use Mark replied for those.

A buyer's answers also show on their Buyer tab, in the Responses card, and as an Interested or Passed tag in Find buyers and Deals that fit (see Finding buyers and lenders). Buyers you own who clicked a deal email in the last 14 days and haven't been heard from show up on My Book (see Working your book from My Book).

On a deal you can only view, the table shows without the ⋯ menu.

Why sends are paced

A campaign doesn't send all at once — it sends one email at a time, on a delay, from the sending mailbox. By default that's about one email every 30 seconds, up to 300 emails from one mailbox per day (your team's admin can adjust both, see Ranking buyers and setting up deal marketing). The very first day a mailbox is ever used for a deal marketing send, it's held to 100 emails regardless of the daily cap — a "warm-up" period that protects a mailbox that's never sent bulk email before. This pacing is what keeps your emails landing in inboxes instead of getting flagged as bulk mail.

When a campaign pauses

A campaign card on a deal's Disposition tab shows its status — Queued, Sending, Paused, Completed, or Canceled — and, when paused, why. You'll also get a notification when a campaign you sent pauses or finishes. What each pause reason means, and what to do about it:

• Mailbox throttled by your email provider — your email provider temporarily slowed or blocked sending from your mailbox. Wait a while before selecting Resume; if it keeps happening, your daily volume may be too high for your provider — ask your admin to lower the daily cap.
• Repeated send failures — several emails in a row failed to send, usually because your mailbox connection needs attention. Check that your email is still connected (see Connecting your email and calendar), then select Resume.
• A merge field in the email can't be filled in on this deal — a field the template uses was cleared on the deal after the campaign started (the asking price, say), or it's a field that can never go to a buyer list. Nobody else is emailed until it's fixed: fill the field back in on the deal (or swap it out of the template), then select Resume.
• Monthly email quota reached — your team has hit its monthly email sending limit. The campaign resumes on its own once the quota resets, or your admin can review your plan's limits.
• No reason shown — you or a teammate selected Pause directly. Select Resume whenever you're ready to continue, or Cancel to stop it for good (everyone who hasn't been sent to yet is skipped; emails already sent aren't recalled).

The person who started the campaign, the mailbox it's sending from, or a team admin can pause, resume, or cancel a campaign at any time from its card.