I found and purchased my first deal off-market via a direct mail campaign of handwritten yellow letters. It wasn't terribly expensive or time consuming because I was searching in one town of 150 suitable properties, but I am now looking to mail to 3500 properties across New Hampshire. How do I do this in a cost-effective and time-effective manner? Pay a high schooler to handwrite my letters? Use a professional service to print typed or fake handwritten letters? Any advice and, if applicable, recommended direct mail services would be much appreciated.

@Nicholas Gray i have heard of people paying college kids to write, stamp, and send the letters for them that could work out really good. I have a system that automatically does it for my team and each letter looks hand written all we need to do is stamp and send those bad boys out lol.

I know a fairly popular 3rd party service is yellowletters.com, they have a variety of mailers. The postcards are quite a bit cheaper than the letters. 

@Vick Galu I would love to hear how you automate your system for your team. How do you make it look hand written every time?

@Wes Short lol thats a 15 min conversation if you have the time PM me man

There are a number of ways you can go. Sounds like the biggest factor is going to be cost. 

Do you have a budget set aside for your marketing?

Direct mail tends to work best when you send a campaign of 5-7 different pieces, 4 weeks apart from each other. Follow ups are key as the average person takes 3-5 touches before picking up the phone to respond. That being said, it is tremendously important to have a budget and plan set up before starting a mailing campaign. However, if you have those things in place, go for it!

Hiring someone to hand-write is USUALLY costly and time consuming. I have handwritten letters before and, especially when the letters are wordy, it takes a good 5-10 mins per letter to write, fold, address, and stamp. And that's when I'm on a roll! That's part of why I think with the amount of leads you're wanting to mail to it would be both cost and time efficient to go computer printed or with a third party mailer. 

In a mass mailing I haven't seen TOO much of a difference in response rates between human handwritten and handwritten font, therefore, I tend to recommend the cheaper and faster route of handwritten font. However, if you wanted to run some tests in your market (which I highly recommend) maybe try some of both. You could even try some handwritten font letters and human handwritten addressing on the envelopes. 

You can still make the letters or postcards personalized with using mail merging. Most of the time lists are in Excel formatting anyways, so mail merging is an easy addition. 

Happy investing!