Direct Mail
aah.. i have been there - done that. i feel your pain. i have always been able to get my 1-2%, even if the copy and mail piece are only semi-professional. in fact, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference either way. My father used to run a company with a market valuation of 350 million and he drove a ford festiva. he was deemed more trustworthy with other peoples money when he didn't spend an arm and a leg on the newest and greatest technology. the same applies to most forms of marketing. most large corporations spend millions on advertising because they have the money to spend. if they don't spend it, they lose it. simple as that. you aren't in the same position.
maybe, just maybe 1-2% is good enough. at .45-50 cents a mail piece (and if you are paying more than that, find a cheaper source). if you mail out 3000 mail pieces, you will recieve 30-60 responses. maybe you close 4 of those deals and make 2-5k on each. was your initial $1500 worth the investment? what if you only close 2 deals?
focus more on your selling ability instead of the volume of response that you get. dont make fraudulent offers. STAY AWAY from the astericks ( * is a big no no for trust). don't use cleverly worded freebies or giveaways. you are selling yourself as a professional business. not a timeshare or local pizza house. you need to gain their trust from the get go. if only 10 people call you from a letter that almost completely ensures that anybody who is responsive also finds your style comfortable, then you are set.
be yourself in the mailing. if you want to do a personalized campaign, sign every letter. you want more people to open up your mail piece? sign every single letter (or pay somebody to do it) and write out the address by hand. im serious about this. you'll get 100% open rate if you do this. maybe your response rate of 1-2% comes from a 20% open rate. with that math, your response rate would increase by at least 5 fold, right? insead of 30-60 people you'll have your hands full with 150-300 people. if you can't handle that, then send out only 600 mail pieces (hand signed and addressed) for your 30-60 responses. they'll appreciate the time that you put into pitching your services.
How in the $%^# do you guys get a list of 1-3 THOUSAND people to mail to?
-Brandon Richardson-
Good Job milliken. That is the way to go about it. Be creative and thoughtful.
Brandon; Check your local post office. They can give you a target area grouped by zip/postal code.
Oh, ok. I thought you guys were mailing solely to people who were in distress. I see now. Thanks,
-Brandon Richardson-
I tried a mass mailing through USPS and I actually got a pretty good response! surprisingly! Give it a shot
Twinky1432
Just curious, did you use their online program? I found on their website that you can design pick target area and have mailed all through the site. I don't know how their pricing is compared to others. If you used this could you tell how much it cost?
You can get those types of mailings by going through a mailing company that allows you to pull by zip codes, also skip apartments. Some investors pick one area to market in and they try to get some future deals off of potential clients that may not be ready now but will be some time down the road.
try www.melissadata.com for large group mailings. They can separate by zip code and do a few other things.
I second that, miliken. I always sign my whole mailing and I handwrite all addresses (incredibly time consuming and watch ur handwriting as the pile shrinks!). i don't do huge mailings tho, because i really target my mailings hard. only 1 letter has come back and that was today - saying the address wasn't a Philly address! yeah right, i'll hand deliver that one.
but yes, i do get a nice response to them. also, my letter is very humble, ie., i mention that i'm a "small-time" investor and how in my "spare time" i like to buy local properties and sell them which can help families on both sides of the fence, etc ... how i wrote is really how i talk and it seems very personal. friends liked it and people have called me about it - even tho they've stood me up on the face to face meetings!
I don't want to sound like an uninformed idiot here, but I am (uninformed that is, but hopefully not an idiot), but here goes. Have any of you tried tapping into the email addresses? I don't know how up to date they might be, or who would even get them, but if you could find a way to get the email of people in a certain area, it might work. I don't know how you could do it, but I know I have done "people searches" on yahoo, etc., and sometimes I get their email address along with the street address. So, I'm thinking that there might be a way to get to that database of info somehow. If you could, it wouldn't cost much to send the eletter. A slick programmer could probably set something up easily to send mass email. What do you think? zach
zach, this could work kinda, but you'd have to find a programmer that could ultimately hack into each ISP (internet service provider) and search thier database for addresses in a certain zip code (for instance). then compile those addresses into a text string that feeds them into a "mailto:" script. THEN they must know how to bypass the "junk mail" red flags to not get the mail automatically filtered to the junk mail folder. then once u do, u risk them looking at the email without thier name in it and knowing right away it's junk and calling the sender a 4 letter word or imaginative string of these words and POSSIBLY calling the ISP to have you searched out and banned for spamming.
this of course is the best case scenario. the worse case is you could do those yahoo searches and manually key each one in and send - 1 at a time and hope for a reply. i could move faster by writing envelopes, personally - and I'm that slick programmer you spoke of. Well ... not slick, but ok.
of course, i'm not knocking your idea, as you learn in programming, anything is possible! if someone figures that out, please write me! and not by bying email mailing lists - they're bogus unless u really work on quantity and not quality.