How To Be Effective With Your Direct Mail

There's over a 100,000 mailing lists available for rent. If you go to a list broker, they'll work with you and show you all the lists available to you based on the criteria of what you're looking for. Then when you decide to rent or buy that list, they get paid a commission from the person selling the list. A list brokerage is a great option for anyone out there, there's hundreds of them. You could do a search and you could find one that's in your area, or you could just find one across the country and work with them. It doesn't really matter. That's one way. A big list out there, list compiler is called Info USA. You just type into Google ‘Info USA’, they have thousands of lists available for rent. You can basically get in contact with somebody there and they will help walk through your criteria for you're looking for and then they can help you rent that list. Those are the top two ways to go and find a list probably for this niche. Maybe a question I would ask you is who is it you guys would traditionally look for, and maybe I can walk down that path with you.

One of my most successful mailings I do for real estate investors and this may or may not apply to your group and you can tell me, it's those who are going after absentee owners. They own a home, but they don't live in it. For a lot of investors, they're looking for the person that just has one home, maybe two, because they're usually inexperienced. Maybe they've owned a home, they moved out of it and bought another piece of property and they thought, “Hey, let's go into rental business and let's go ahead and rent this home out.” Then they've done that for a little bit of time and they've realized, “This is a pain and I'm not been to this, I don't want to do this anymore.”

Listen to full podcat: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws348-direct-mail-consultancy-with-craig-simpson/

If you know the age of the average person that's going to sell to you, that's super helpful. Maybe it's somebody who's 70 or 75-years-old. They've owned it for a long time, they're ready to unload it. We can narrow this down by age, we can also do a commercial property versus private. If we're looking for commercial, or if we're looking for apartment buildings or duplexes, we can do those as well. In some case it’s not a list. In some cases, they'll tell us if they're a property owner of more than one unit, or units. Do they own more than one apartment complex or not? A lot of that data we have available to us.

We could give an address and we could say give us a five-mile radius of this address. Now if you're in a smaller market, say Wichita, Kansas, you're not going to have as many opportunities as somebody in the Los Angeles area, because of the number of people available with that information is going to be much smaller. If you're in a small city, it's going to be tougher to get it. Maybe you get a list of one or two. If you're in a big market, maybe it's a list of hundreds, it all depends on the market size.

Who you're going after on the list is going to greatly determine what it is you're going to say to them. If you're going after the single-family residence and you're doing more residential, the type of mail piece you use is going to be different than the guy who's in the commercial space. For those that are doing residential, what we found that works best is the inexpensive three by four postcard and sitting in multiple times. They're really cheap to mail and you can mail a whole bunch of them for a really inexpensive. When we get to the commercial side, we have to be a little savvier. We tend to do better with a two-page sales letter. That goes in an envelope, handwritten address and we make it personal, if we're mailing into a market, say it's Portland, Oregon, we're going to reference things in that market to make a deeper connection. Maybe we're going to reference a famous coffee shop, or we're going to say “We've bought property near this Starbucks on 3rd and Elm Street”. We're telling the buyer, the seller of the property that we know their area, we know the market, we’re personable, relational and we're trying to create a different level of connection than a whole business letter would do. When we solicit them and we're trying to get information, we're trying to make it feel like they know us already. That's by mentioning key landmarks and things in that area is going to make that connection deeper. That's why we would use a two page letter, instead of just a simple cheap postcard.

Ultimately, we're not going to come out and say, “Hey, can you sell me the property at a discount”. That's not going to happen. We have to come up with creative ways to talk about what it is we want. Maybe ultimately, it is a face-to-face meeting that we're asking for and maybe it's to say something like, “I noticed that you own property, you own this 123 Elm Street. I'm purchasing similar properties to those. I'd love to get some advice and feedback from you. Maybe we can collaborate and talk about it.” You're not coming right out and saying that you want to buy it from, and you’re also not saying that you don't, you're just talking how you guys have this common interest in properties, like 123 Elm Street. I would love to buy you a cup of coffee at the Starbucks on 3rd and Elm, something like that. In fact, I wouldn't even use Starbucks, I would use a local coffee shop that's a little bit more personal and friendly. We don't want to be the big brand that they want to be more personal. That's the whole concept of this, you'd want to talk about that. Sometimes, I have clients who will put their photo in there or picture of their family and this is the things we like to do. Just mentioning things in passing and connecting it to why they want to talk. Well, we're immersed in the Elm Street area, my family's lived here for 20 years, my kids go to school down the street, I'm interested. I love to know more about your property there., could we sit down and talk, because I'm interested in those and maybe some others like it.

Listen to full podcat: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws348-direct-mail-consultancy-with-craig-simpson/