Why can’t DMM minimum be 500 pcs for 1 year?

Question

I keep hearing about the minimum you need to send for a direct mail campaign is 1000 pieces a month for 6 months. Why these specific numbers? Would 500 pieces a month for 12 months not work? If so, why not?

David Lee Hall, III · Answer

Response on DMM is generally lower than 1%. You are going to get 5 calls tops out of 500 mailings over 6 months. You can’t have that little of a volume for any real business.

Bill B. · Answer

@Jerryll Noorden

sorry Jerryll. You are over confident. Your math mistake means the actual number is 0.2 out of those 10,000. You said 30% read instead of 3%…       .         “OK from those 7000 mailers that do get delivered, lets say 3% get seen or opened. that is 2100 people will see your letter.”   that should be 210 (3% of 7,000).   .  ps. Can someone PLEASE fix the posting window?  On an iPad every time I try to hit return twice to space out my ideas the return jumps to the top of the post. So I have to put 5 spaces and then hit return and repeat, that works for some reason.

Jerryll Noorden · Answer

Let me visualize this for you, and hereby you will also understand why DMM is the dumbest stupidist thing you can ever do.

To understand this, consider this.

The average open rate of DMM is less than 3%. What that means is that every 100 mailers you will send, about 3 people reads/opens that mailer.

What you need to understand is that this is not an appointment, nor is this anyone interested in selling. This is someone actually reading it. This 3% includes people that are angry, call you up and start talking to you about things they demand you to do with/to your mom!   (not in a good way).

So...

that 3% includes everyone good or bad, that engaged. The question then becomes,  out of that small number of people that actually opened your letter/card, what percentage of that 3% is actually interested in selling? A terribly low percentage.

Great. You are with me so far.

NOW..

Out of these ridiculously few people interested in selling, how many of them actually want to sell at a discounted price, i.e. NOT through an agent.. EVEN less!!

So lets recap.

less than 1% will open your letter.

A small percentage of that 3% will be interested in selling (through an agent or otherwise).

Then..

A smaller percentage, OF THAT small percentage that want to sell, of that less than 3% will actually be interested in  a cash offer (discounted offer).

Complicated yes? Let me give you an example:

You have 10000 people on your list right? So you send 10000 letters.

30% will be undeliverable and you need to pay for skip tracing.

So you have 7000 mailers that actually arrive (30% of 10000 never get delivered, that is 3000, thus 10000-3000=7000).

OK from those 7000 mailers that do get delivered, lets say 3% get seen or opened. that is 2100 people will see your letter.

Although 2100 people see it, only a few will be interested and a lot will get pissed off. Let's say about 10% of these will be interested.

So 10% of 2100 = 210 ... thus 210 people will be interested in selling their house( or at least interested to just see how much you would offer for their house in cash.. not interested in selling mind you, just wondering how much their house is word as a cash offer).

OK so from those 210 people, probably 10 % are actually interested in a cash offer and the rest want full market value for their house (listing it with an agent). That is 2.1 people are interested. that is 2 whole people and 1 toe.

So of you sent out 10000 mailers you will hopefully get 2 deals.

Now can you imagine if you just send out 500 mailers? You would get maybe only 0.05 people interested. I believe that is just a toe will be interested.

Do you now see why DMM is so friggin stupid?

And mind you I didn't even get into the cost and effort of skip tracing!

There you have it!

Caleb Brown · Answer

It's a numbers game in direct mail. It's about how many you send and being consistent. It is expensive and I would do direct mail later. I would initially do cold calling and more direct reaches than direct mail. There is a lot of people doing direct mail so the conversion rate is pretty low from my experience