yellow letters feedback 1.6% ~ response rate

[Account Closed]

Hi everyone, 

I know there are plenty of threads out there discussing yellow letters. I recently sent about 1,800 letters and received about 30 calls. I'm pretty aware every market is different and the market has become very competitive during the last few years. If someone could share some feedback on my criteria and share their experiences it would be pretty helpful. 

This is the criteria I used:

-Owner occupied properties

-At least 40 % equity

-Last sale date: 2010

-At least 2 bedrooms

-Exclude corporations

-SQ FT 1000+

-SFH

-AGE: 35+

3 weeks prior sending these letters, I hand handwritten over 300 letters and the response rate was much higher. I'm finding out a lot of people are using yellow letters and perhaps that's the reason I'm not getting the response rate I was expecting. I'm targeting a mix of B AND C neighborhoods, and only a small portion of A neighborhoods as well. 

[David Dachtera]

@Account Closed,

Yes, hand written gets a better open rate than machine printed. I know of one service which has robots "hand-writing" letters and envelopes. They use hand-writing fonts with actual ball point pens, make intentional mistakes to make it look human-written, there's a noticeable pen impression on the paper, ...

I have some background in mass marketing and 1.6% for an untargeted campaign is about the usual expected response. Yes, you're choosing certain criteria, but you're not further qualifying by potential seller motivation. So, technically, your campaign is "untargeted".