Marketing Update - Finished the List!
I am a few days tardy on this latest update.
Big news is that after a lot of dedication and hours upon hours of prepping my list and my mailers I have officially finished my massive list of absentee owners!
The last mail drop that I did on 12/4/13 was 570 pieces giving a grand total of 4,905 postcards sent.
*So sad, still not letting me upload my last post card picture:*( *
Set them long enough ago that I am not hopeful that this last batch will produce any calls.
So my unofficial final tally for the first mailings is:
3 calls, 2 of which were take me off the list. The one real call wasn't really motivated and wanted about 65-70% more than her property was worth.
That one real call was pretty interesting though (See some previous posts on that...)
So where do I go form here?
Do I abandon direct mail since I didn't see any results? Is it all a big hoax perpetuated by hundreds of BP members to try to screw me? :)
Nope I am 100% convinced I did not have an effective mail piece and will use a combination of small yellow postcards and Zip letters I have already purchased for my follow up. I plan on using them as is, or with only the tiniest bit of editing of one of their proven templates.
What I learned wasn't that mail didn't work just that I will trust pros that have gotten results in the past. If I get through some follow ups with these products and am not making progress I will have to figure out what other factors are coming into play.
I'll keep you posted....
Comments (7)
How did this campaign turn out for you @Shaun Reilly
Chaz Reid, over 10 years ago
Calling me out... :)
SO I have not done a campaign since this. I have purchased a LOT of pieces that I just need to send at some point, so I am still committed to doing mailings.
In addition to the lousy piece I also do feel my list needed to be more focused and want to work on that as well.
Mostly I have gotten pulled in other directions and this just hasn't been a huge priority. Be it managing a rehab, selling a property, doing some agent stuff helping my folks sell then buy a house, managing my rentals, working on my out of state portfolio or working on other forms of marketing (Been going hard at online marketing and SEO stuff most of the last year) getting my mail going just always gets put off.
Frankly things are too busy right now for me to be able to actually properly follow up with leads if I actually had a successful couple of mailings. Right now I'm putting some effort into systematizing then delegating some more mundane time consuming stuff to free up time to focus more on the actual important things, like marketing for leads!
Shaun Reilly, over 10 years ago
What are you using to manage your mailing list to determine when to follow-up, etc?
David Rundle, over 11 years ago
Nothing fancy, just an excel spread sheet at this point. I have all the mailing in a different tab that is dated so I know when they were sent so I know when I should follow up. This is only my first campaign so I'm sure this will evolve a lot or I may feel the need to get a CRM system.
Shaun Reilly, over 11 years ago
Some of it can be luck and your target. If you mail right behind someone with the same message to the same people your results will be abysmal. Are they all to absentee owners? At 5,000 you should get way more calls from that even if you mailed an non-targeted list. I'd be curious about your message and call to action with those results. I just dropped 1,000 postcards through yellow letters. I just reworded one of their cards a little. Eager to see how it pulls. No idea what to expect. Crappy timing, but I'm still expecting 20 calls minimum, hoping for the .5% postcards should deliver. I'm trying people behind on taxes and bought the vacant houses thing from Kent Clothier to try it out. Not all that impressed with the 'system', because yellow letters is a way better mailhouse than their 'automated' system uses, but we'll see how good the list is. Worth a try at $200 for the data, anyway. I'll try to report when I get some results. They mailed today, so I should have an idea next week...
Darrell Shepherd, over 11 years ago
I doubt that bad luck of hitting them right after someone else is a big factor. I did 11 different mail drops to send those all out over the course of ~2 months so that would be pretty tough to have had that be a big factor. They are all out of state absentee owners but that was all I did for filtering (Other than removing trusts and companies, and banks of course). I can believe that the list is far form perfect but the thought was to hit more possibilities and not worry if some of them were a lower probability. Figure if I filtered equity I would have hit all the same people and would have had to prune the list down to what about 500ish for the response rate to have not totally sucked. 100% convinced the biggest issue is the post card itself. I am going to use some from yellowletters.com too for the followups.
Shaun Reilly, over 11 years ago
Oh I meant to ask about where you said you just reworded one of their postcards slightly. Can you just call them and have them slightly change one of the standard ones? I was worried I might have to redesign a "custom" one with just a small edit of their standard one. If I remember correctly I literally wanted to just remove one bullet point that had a "service" I don't really provide in my business model. If the edit is less work intensive that will help getting the pieces made and out faster!
Shaun Reilly, over 11 years ago