Way back in the mid-nineties, most e-mail was just plain text. It was boring, gray, hard to read, and thus it was easy to miss something important. However, when HTML (graphic e-mail) became available, it changed all that. Hundreds of combinations showed up for highlighting text and images in e-mail messages. If only agents would use learn to use them.

Color is one tactic. You can change the color of headings in your e-mails, or subheads, to make it easier for the reader to see what’s important in your e-mail message, or to follow your logic in a longer e-mail.

How? Well, first, be sure that you have earlier changed your e-mail setting that gives you the choice of sending HTML or plain text e-mail. To do that, go to your e-mail in-box screen in Outlook or Outlook Express and click on Tools>Options>Send. Then, where it says, “Mail Sending Format,” choose HTML.

Doing so tells your blank e-mail box to let you become creative within the outgoing e-mail window. You can now send colorful e-mails by changing the color of letters, words, paragraphs, or just parts of them.

But wait, color is just the beginning. You can also make certain elements of an e-mail, such as words, sentences and more, become clickable links---sometimes called “hotlinks.” By clicking on them, your recipient is taken to another page or image on the Web.

You can also change the size or style of fonts that you use in an e-mail; you don’t have to use the same old default 10- or 12-point font all the time. You can embolden text, italicize it, shrink or enlarge it, and insert images. Let’s cover these useful options that will pep up your dreary e-mails that you’ve been sending to clients.

Change colors

Do this along with me now. Open up your e-mail window. (Instructions here are for Outlook Express. Outlook is similar. I do not discuss AOL here, or “free” e-mails like Hotmail or Yahoo because they are not professional enough to use in business, and you should abandon them if you are using them now.)

• First, click somewhere inside the blank e-mail box to wake it up.
• Note that, immediately, the editing tools atop the empty e-mail box suddenly come alive and darken.
• Type a dozen words.
• Highlight any word with your cursor.
• Move your cursor up to the A in the editing bar.
• Hover the cursor there and note that the mouseover/Alt tag word that appears, says “Font Color.”
• Click on the A.
• From the palette of colors that drops down, click on a color.
• Now go back and note that the word you’d highlighted is now that color.
• Try it with all the words you typed.
• Change the color by choosing a different one from the same drop down menu.

Amazing, huh? Now you can do it anytime you want, to make part of an email message more noticeable than some other part.

Change font size

Notice at the top of your typing space, on the left side of your empty e-mail box, that there is a long box with a down-menu arrow beside it, and a narrower box to the right of that, with a down-menu arrow beside it. These are the tools you use for choosing a different font (long box) and making fonts larger (narrower box):

• Move your cursor to highlight one or two words you’ve typed for our color exercise.
• Now, go to the long box and click the down-menu arrow.
• You will see a long list of fonts. Find and click on: “Arial Black,” near the top.
• Notice how doing so made your highlighted text become a different font.
• Now, go to the small box. Click on the down-menu arrow. Choose “36”
• Note how the text became huge. Go back and choose “18.” See it grow smaller.

Make text bolder

Now, highlight a word. Go click on the B on the toolbar above where you’re typing. Notice how the font became instantly bolder. The B stands for BOLD. It makes text stand out more…makes it more noticeable. If you bolded something and want to Un-bold it, just click on the B again. Try it.

Italicize

Highlight some text. Click on the slanted I in the tool bar. See how the text becomes italicized? Click on the I again to remove the italicization.

Insert a straight line

This is an incredibly easy way to separate segments of your e-mail with a single horizontal line. Look at the toolbar just above where you type your e-mail and find the button with the little ----- solid horizontal bar. Click it and see the horizontal line get inserted, running from the left to the right margin. This is a perfect way to separate one section of your pasted in pictures, or paragraphs, or discussion points, one from another.

Pasting pictures into e-mails

It’s so much fun to send pictures to your friends and family, and clients love it when you can send them several digital photos of a property they’re interested in. Just be sure that you have reduced the size of any photo that you send to not much bigger than a 3” x 4” size, (unless you know how to reduce a photo’s dpi/kilobytes another way.) Reducing picture size reduces the time they take to up and down-load.

• To begin, click on the little square landscape icon on the toolbar above the e-mail box.
• You next see a small window and a button saying “Browse.” Click on it.
• What you see next is the contents of your computer. If you store your photos in “My Pictures,” first click on “My Documents,” then drill down to “My Pictures.”
• Click on “My Pictures.”
• Isolate, by clicking on, a single picture and then click on “Open.”
• (Or, go to a floppy disk or CD and click on a picture you select from there)

Doing so takes you back to the window with Browse on it. But now, the formerly empty field is filled in with the location of the picture that you chose to paste in.

Click on OK, and viola, there is a picture pasted into your e-mail box.

• Go ahead and address this e-mail to yourself (Yes, you can do that).
• Go to your main e-mail window and click the big Send/Receive button at the top.
• When the e-mail you just sent comes in, click on it and, Yipee! See the photo you inserted.

  Inserting links

  • Type the word “Google.” Now, highlight that word. On the toolbar directly above, click on the little icon showing an Earth with the link of a chain in front of it.
  • A little window opens that has a box that says URL with http:// already filled in the field.
  • Right immediately after “http://” type in www.google.com so the whole line reads: http://www.google.com.
  • Click OK
  • Now, address that e-mail to yourself.
  • Download it.
  • Notice when you get that e-mail and click on the word Google that you highlighted, you are taken by a hyperlink directly to the home page of Google.

  Few know that you can also highlight an inserted picture and make it hyperlink to a page or to an image on the Web in just the same way.

  Also, since few agents even know how to do this, e-mails from you in this vein will make a most favorable impression on your prospects and clients, branding you as perhaps even more of a Web aficionado than you really are.

  Baby Steps. Give it a try. Keep this window on your screen, or print it out, for reference as you try enhancing your emails with these great HTML approaches.

  These tools are just sitting on your computer unused, wasted, until you take the time to put them to work. But once you do, you will swiftly distinguish yourself head and shoulders above those other agents in your office and city.

Published: May 26, 2004

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .