So I want to take on doing yellow letters because I really believe I could get good response. So I am looking for some info. Should I start there or should I do postcards to start? How much does it normally cost per month because I want to be sending at least 100 a week? As far a a phone goes I want a seperate business phone, not my cell. How do you get a 1800 number?...any advice will be amazing and well apperciated.
Windie
Who cares about response rate. I would rather get 8 calls a month, 4 of which turn out to be deals, I have enough going on the last thing I want is sorting through tons of unqualified leads. I dislike Yellow Letters personally because they typically incentive people to call for the wrong reason. The potential client is curious because they have what appears to be a genuinely authentic hand written letter. Furthermore, many yellow letters use a template such that you appear to be a person searching to buy a home as a personal residence and implies you physically drove or walked past their property. Again, this will produce many leads, but for the wrong reason, often unqualified.
People need to be more willing to put their message out there and be accepting of it, don't try to hide it! You buy houses at a DISCOUNT for CASH and can offer a QUICK CLOSING in most cases (unless a title issue springs up or the seller requests a closing farther out). There are NO Realtor commissions appraisals or any of that mess. Get that message to the right people and it has appeal I promise you.
Your marketing piece should do some upfront filtering for you. Some people on here talk about how you need to field 30-50 calls to get one deal. Thats ridiculous and its likely because they are using yellow letters. 1/3 of my calls turn out to be deals and I use post cards. I truly feel sorry for anyone that has to field that many calls to get a deal.
With that rant out of the way, real estate is local, and YL may very well be worth using in your market. Perform a split test, see what produces for you. Some zip codes may be more sensitive post card vs yellow letter even. The leads you are trying to generate will also hinge on which marketing piece you should use. If you are trying to do sub2 or lease option, YL may very well be the letter of choice. However, for high equity motivated sellers I always use post cards. YOU CANT CREATE MOTIVATION so quit trying to manipulate it, you are working on the sellers time frame not yours. Thats why you continue to mail them through the year as you will read more about below.
In addition, post cards allow you to cast a wider net because they are much less expensive and easy to produce and outsource.
Also you don't need to do X amount per week, your making it too complicated. The amount you send out is completely dependent on your marketing budget and how much YOU are willing to spend for at least 6 months without getting a deal.
Here is how I would do it. Figure out how much you can COMFORTABLY spend every month. Lets say that is $1,000. Next choose your marketing piece. We will use post cards in this example. For printing and postage fulfillment its .30 per post card.
Your monthly budget / cost per marketing piece
$1,000 / .30 = roughly 3,300 post cards you can send each month as per your BUDGET. If your budget is $200, who cares, spend that consistently and persistently and you will find deals. And guess what, when you do you can put that money directly into your marketing budget and scale your business accordingly.
Form 3 groups for mailing: Group A, B and C. Use list source or whatever you want to generate this. I query the information from my appraisal district myself.
Group A = 3,300 unique leads
Group B = 3,300 unique leads
Group C = 3,300 unique leads
So that means you will need about 9,900 unique leads (Group A + B + C) from your list generation service total. The 9,900 total leads gets divided into 3, however you want to cut it, for our 3 groups.
Now mail each group on rotation at the beginning of the month, for example
January - Group A
February - Group B
March - Group C
April - Group A
May - Group B
Etc.
If you follow the above plan each group will be "touched" by your marketing peice 4 times through the year. This is critical. You are building a brand rapport and estbalishing an identiy and the seller may not be ready to sell the 1st, 2nd or even 3rd time you contact them. However, as you "touch" them more often you will begin to see a higher yield in the deals produced. Remember circumstances change through time thats why your mailing them multiple times.
Hope that helps.
Sure. For my criteria I use the following:
Hope that helps.
I have found that I am not good enough with consistency or follow up for direct mail to work for me. :-)
My results with post cards, my only method, has been poor in both in response and deals acquired. I do plan to get back into direct mail but with outsourcing as much as I can.
December might be a terrific time to send hand addressed letters that look like Christmas cards - They will get opened. The message could be get money for Christmas bills by selling your house. - Ned
December might be a terrific time to send hand addressed letters that look like Christmas cards - They will get opened. The message could be get money for Christmas bills by selling your house. - Ned
That sounds like a really good idea.
Probably get a better open rate and if you tailor the message like that it is a different angle than anything else they have seen
Regarding a source for 1-800 numbers - I've used TollFreeNumbers.com to get several toll-free numbers over the years. Excellent service and low cost.
On our postcards, of course we have the WeBuyHouses.com branding and the 877-WeBuyHouses phone number (which we spell out for them numerically) AND we include the NAME of the investor and a LOCAL # that goes thru our phone system. We give them all those ways to contact us and guess what we see:
People call the LOCAL number 90+% of the time.
We think that the option of a toll free number (and URL) is great - especially if it something that can remember later easily. But ultimately, people like to connect with other people and they will call your LOCAL number thinking they will get right to you. They might avoid the toll free option thinking they will go into a phone tree. But we believe - at least in our scenario - that the toll free number is a critical element in the overall brand experience.
Outside of a brand like We Buy Houses - I might not see as much value in the toll-free number, unless it is an easy to recall vanity number...
@Ned Careyand @Shaun Reilly -
I think you might be right about the envelope that looks like an envelope for a Christmas card.
Ned - you need to get a list, outsource it to one of the companies and then just shoot them an email each month and tell them to send your mail out. It's really easy to manage that way.
Sharon
December might be a terrific time to send hand addressed letters that look like Christmas cards - They will get opened. The message could be get money for Christmas bills by selling your house. - Ned
I sent out that message last year in December only on a post card. I got a slightly higher than usual response rate ;-).
Great idea @Alison.
Sharon
I sent out that message last year in December only on a post card. I got a slightly higher than usual response rate ;-).
Oh cool so it sounds like that very well might be a good strategy to try around the holdiays.
Chris, do you mind sharing your direct message you use in your postcards?