Starting the Campaign

This week I started my first direct mail campaign. The first batch of letters go out next week and I’ll be updating the results here. I plan to send monthly to the same list for a year. I may refresh the list at some point but have not decided when.

I am mailing to 1,109 leads and the total cost to get started was is $1,901.36.  I expect the recurring monthly mailing cost to be about $500 and I will be below my $10,o00 budget by years end.  Hopefully I can find some more targeted leads, like inheritance or foreclosures but I can't find a good source.

The Leads

The lead list is from listsource cost $1,156.30.  I am farming an area with about 76,000 properties. It’s one county and 2 zip code in the next county.

I am mailing to 1,109 people but I bought 1,787 leads. For one reason, I wanted to restrict to 3+ bedrooms and noticed some records did not list bedrooms and would not be pulled used that in the filtering.  As a result, I pulled regardless of bedrooms and then removed the ones that reported less than 2.

Here is the breakdown of the lists.

• Absentee Owner with 49% or more equity. 514 leads.
• Custom Equity – 118 leads.  The reported equity from list source is based on the original mortgage amount. I pulled 730 leads that did not have the required equity and applied my own equity formula based on the origination date which narrowed me down to 118 leads.
• Equity reporting problem out-of-state owners. 374 leads.  Some records had no value for equity. Most of these had no mortgage but for some reason there was no equity value. There were a lot of these so I only pulled out of state absentee owners. I spot checked a few and I can’t find any mortgage info at the deed office. I am not sure if these are good leads.
• Equity reporting problem in-state owners. 101 leads.  This is the same equity issue as above but I pulled in-state in only two neighborhoods.
• I also added two Driving for Dollars leads.

What I'm Mailing

Deciding what to mail was a problem. There are so many theories and little actual data. Eventually I gave up and decided the most important thing is to just mail something and get it in front of the people. Truly motivated sellers probably do not care what the mailing looks like.

I decided to go with a simple white postcard from with the handwriting font (from yellowLetters). It’s cheap and I don’t have to get them to open it. It’s just a simple message saying I want to buy their house fast as-is, and I give the property address and my phone number. I did get a new number just for this campaign.  

I sent two batches a couple days apart and it cost a total of $745.06. If I had mailed all 1,109 at the same time it would have been a lot less - under $500. I had a partial list I knew was ready and felt like I was procrastinating to get the perfect list, so I sent what I had and then sent the rest when it was ready. Also, I didn’t know the volume discount was that step – lesson learned.

On the second batch I included my website.  I was on the fence about this.  I think it looks a little more legitimate but might conflict with the hand-written approach.  Also, I want them to call me but don't want to miss people who prefer to do it online.

What I expect.

Nothing.  At least at first I don't expect a deal.  I will probably get some calls about taking people of the list.  I will remove anyone that requests it and keep a list of who I removed.  I will try to filter them out when I refresh the list.

By the end of the year I should have sent over 13,000 pieces of mail and reached over 1,000 people.  I hope to get at least 50 responses that are not angry people.  Of that, I think I could close about 3.  If I just get one deal it should be a profit.

I don't really know what to expect.  I would like to hear from experienced people and see what others predict.

Use the comments to critique my approach and tell me what you think.