BiggerPockets

Your monthly budget is based on what you can afford! if you feel you can afford to send out 1000 postcards and get a good number of calls from them. You have to ask your self are you going to be able to handle all the calls.
Theres no set amount! If you want more leads, send more cards and if your want less leads, then send less cards.

good luck

It really depends on what your yield measures. The right copy to the right lists can increase your response rate to 15% or so. The trouble is that if a good piece of copy is mailed to a poor list you will spend almost all of your time screening unhappy callers. People somehow feel the need to call and tell you that they aren't selling and/or you are the devil for mailing them a letter.

As with all marketing the idea is to screen adequately to make sure that you are spending the bulk of your time with quality warm leads. This is no easy task and that is why many real estate investors outsource their marketing to professionals that specialize in the area. Others do their own campaigns so that they can mix things up as needed. Both philosophies have merit IMO.

The most important part of the whole marketing campaign is the target list. You can mail perfect mailers to a cruddy list and get virtually no value for your spend. You can mail mediocre copy to a great list and do pretty well.

For the OP...everyone has a different quantity of deal flow required and value for their time. Calibrate your budget accordingly. I would suggest that you err on the side of underspending to start so that you learn what works and what doesn't. You can quickly chew through many deals' worth of profit sending out mailers with the wrong message.

You really have to get a game plan of who your trying to reach, I use click2mail and on average i spend between .38 to .39 cents per post card, that is with them printing and mailing for me. you will need to learn their system, I send a minimum of 5 mailers per property, as you can see it gets expensive quickly if your not keeping up with whom is receiving your mailers and who is not, it also depends what I am sending for, letter and postcard have price differences, postcards are much cheaper than letters, If you have a small budget I would use bandit signs, they run about .98 cents per sign to $1.25 (depends on size), make sure you check your sign ordinance before ordering them, it can get expensive quickly if they fine you.

Yes you heard me correctly.Targeted mailing with the correct copy will get you outstanding results.

Targeted marketing will always out pull blanket marketing.

Many small companies make the mistake of getting into the branding type of marketing that huge companies with unlimited pockets employ.

Small companies need to be using Gorilla type marketing to get results with small budgets.

The letter costs 1 cent to print,envelope is about 4 cents,postage 43 cents.Mail up to 80 letters a month.

I will be expanding it soon.

Ok you just got me re-focused in a major way. Just hung a bunch of signs last night in the cold feeling like an fugitive hiding behind trees, lol

By u mentioning commission though I assume u work as an agent and don't mean earnings from wholesaling, correct?

At any rate I like the guerilla target marketing concept, I sell vehicles as well and it seems this concept would be useful in many areas, not just rei.

Amen to that! Seems like most people i notice , myself included tend to get into real estate, then stocks, then internet marketing, etc, etc, and leave at the first failure.

I also live in Gwinnett County, Ga and while i don't really aspire to be a full time agent or broker at this point as my primary focus now is cars, i did want to set my sites on completing about 4 wholesale deals a year. (if i somehow manage to do more, great). This is good information, though, i will keep it in mind to track my mailings/signs etc as i go along, and fine tune it to hopefully have it down to where i can streamline it to a proven system. By the way, do you have a set fee for rei marketing consultation? Would be nice to sidestep some landmines, unlike my previous ventures.

Morris,

In regards to Joel, keep in mind that he works the commercial side of real estate in his business as a broker - the numbers are bigger so his annual income does not require as many transactions as if he were doing residential.