$2,500: A Post Mortem

Perhaps I have been putting this off, dreading the undeniable failure that was this marketing campaign, but that being said I think it’s more important to reflect on what really happened so to know what I am going to do differently in the future. Let’s take a look at the raw numbers:

Total Campaign Cost: $2504.75

Total Number of Mailers Sent: 2819 (postcards and yellow letters, 1x monthly)

Total Numbers of Calls: 8* (verifiable calls were a message was laft)

Response Rate: 00.3%*

Cost per Call: $325.75

Appointments: 2

Offers: 4

Deals: 0

It’s really that simple isn’t it? The truth is usually in the numbers. The marketing drastically underperformed my expectations of 2% response rate with a depressing .3%. What went wrong? I not quite sure but here’s a list of things I would do differently if given another chance:

Don’t use Google Voice: Google voice is a cool tool that’s available for $0. The problem is that it works like it’s worth $0, too. You may notice the (*) annotated to a few my numbers above. The reason why is because I had issue with the voicemail recorder during the first month of the campaign and it wouldn’t record an incoming message. So I got no usable/verifiable responses on the mailers for the first month!

Hire Someone to Answer the Phones: It’s really hard to be available to answer the phones when you’re working full time. My job demands my time and attention while I’m on the clock, so it’s impossible for me to be ready to answer the phone 24/7.

Use Better List: Another problem with my campaign was brought to my attention by someone I met at a REIA event that has far more experience than I do. When I made the list on ListSource, I sorted it by very equity (>90%) in the zip code I wanted and made sure the last sale date wasn’t since 1995. The problem with that is I potentially eliminated countless people with motivation (far more important than equity) from the list. Bad move. As beat up as absentee owners are, they’re still your best bet if you’re getting your list from a place like ListSource.com.

All in all, I’m pretty disappointed with how the marketing campaign went. Not necessarily because it produced no deals, but because it produced virtually no calls. I’ve been in sales long enough to realize that as long as you have leads you have chance. It’s a “numbers game” as everyone says. But this gave me nothing to work with.

In short, it’s obviously left me with real questions as to whether or not direct mail is a viable marketing solution around here. If I do decide to take it up again; I will DEFINITELY HEED the few lessons learned.

I’ve hope you’ve been able to learn a few things, too, from this fledgling experience of mine, and hopefully it will give a taste of the real world behind the gleam of a guru’s sales pitch. I wonder why REI folks obsess so much over what the uber-successful are doing in this business, when failure is the primary educator in life.

Well, I just had mine. What do you guys think? What did I do well? What did I do wrong? What am I missing? Leave all critiques in the comments section.