800$ Monthly Budget For Direct Mail Need Guidance

[Kirk Zacharda]

I have an 800$ Monthly budget that I plan to use until my Rehab business is well on its way to doing 2 to 3 deals a month. I have a list of 1500 AO in Socal. What would be the best direct mail strategy given the budget and the list. I plan to mail to this list until its been exhausted. Should I cut the list in half and use yellow letters or do a post card campaign.

[Aaron Mazzrillo]

Just use click2mail.com and create your own post card. It is easy and cheap. These guys selling their services are great, but at your budget, all the other nonsense isn't going to make much of a... any difference. Everyone always talks open rates, conversion rations, blah, blah, blah. The only thing that really matters, at the end of the day, is how profitable you are. I sent out 500 two pages letters. I don't know what the cost was and I DON'T CARE. I got 1 phone call. Sounds crappy doesn't it? I closed that seller, wholesaled the house and pocketed a $14,000 wholesale fee. Was my campaign successful? Bet your ***. I have almost zero overhead so that is $14,000 - $625 ($1.25(rough guess) per letter x 500) = $13,375 profit.

Now, here is the big argument (said in some whiny psuedo-marketer voice): If I got more people to call, I could have gotten more deals. Is that a fact? Sounds more like an opinion to me. I've done campaigns and had 50 calls with no closed deals. I did a post card campaign and sent out over 2,000 post cards. I got less than 5 calls. I thought it was a total failure and decided to try a new marketing piece because I had been sending out this piece for almost a year and thought it had gone stale.. Several months later a call came in from that campaign. I closed on that house and sold it for a $60K profit. Do I care about open rates, conversion rates, calls, blah, blah, blah - No. That info is important if you are sending out hundreds of thousands of mailers, but not a few hundred a week to a list of 20,000 or less. Also, these psuedo-marketers are confusing what they do with what the original mailing guys, like Robert Collier did. He mailed to millions of households selling books, suits, overcoats, etc. When your list is 5M names, you need to do small tests, split tests, etc. to see what gets the best response. We are mailing to get people to sell us a house. I don't care what Dan Kennedy says, this business IS DIFFERENT. Is a person buying a $50 coat and selling a $100K house that possibly produces income the same? No. Not even close.

There is no magic envelope, special font, perfect color, right stamp, blah, blah, blah. And, if they are doing mail on behalf of others, I guarantee you there are HUGE margins of errors in any statistics they report.

There is a guy here in Socal who prints up generic post cards in full color. They say the typical "We buy houses, pay cash, no costs to you" copy. He prints out individual mailing address labels and sticks them on the cards. He's been in business since 1981. I think he'd agree with me. Just mail. That is the most important. If you want to analyze every detail of your tiny campaign to pretend you have convinced yourself you know the magic formula to get the highest possible return, good luck. I think your time is better spent practicing your putting.

I've sent hundreds of thousands of letters, post cards, bank money bags, bulky mail, etc. in every color and size. We had specialty in-house software that tracked every .001 of a cent and printed out these fancy reports with all the statistics a person could dream of. After a few years of that nonsense, I went back to good ol' send it and forget it marketing and I'm still consistently doing the same number of deals with the same profit spreads.