Returned letters from Direct Mail Campaign

[Solomon Oh]

Dear Fellow Bp'ers-

What a start to 2017! Decided to pony up the money to start marketing consistently for the next 6 months and hit my area hard with mailers. I've sent out 600 letters for the month of January and received the dreaded "returned mail" at rate of 2%. 

Here is where I need your input: In previous mailing campaigns is there a way to monetize these "returned" letters? I've thought about skip tracing to find the owners, but I am not sure how successful that it is. I have also been using white pages to try and find the actual address, but it really has been hit or miss. Any thoughts on door knocking these houses?

Thanks again,

SD

[Cornelius Garland]

Hello @Solomon Oh! Great decision on marketing consistently. Once my company committed to our monthly mail campaigns, we began getting contracts frequently. We had this issue regarding returned mail and it can be overwhelming. You can door knock, but I don't think it's the highest and best use of your time as a business owner. My business partner and I door knocked in one of our farm areas but we found that most of the neighbors had no idea where the people in my subject property went and I had to find other means to locate them. I did do this on one property and got a deal; however, this was after I skip traced the owner and located an address for her son. I showed up to his house and he put me in touch with his mom and we got a contract. I would suggest trying any or a combination of the strategies below. 

Initially, I skip traced every returned letter and repacked the letters in new hand-written envelopes. This was very tedious because I was sending out thousands of pieces every month and getting a couple of hundred returned mail pieces. Due to this, I began prioritizing my returned letters to determine if it was worth the time to resend them. If I saw that a property clearly looked abandoned from Google Maps or bought over 20 years ago, then I would find the owner's correct address and resend the letter. I still do this for some of my lists. However, I prefer to get my virtual assistant to use my skip tracing tools to locate the correct addresses of all my returned letters then just update my excel spreadsheet and wait until the next month to resend those letters out. This way I'm avoiding hand writing all of the letters.

Currently, we don't get a lot of returned letters because we always skip trace out lists before we send our mail out to reduce the return rate. We do this because the information from the court houses is often out-of-date, and it's not necessarily the list provider's fault. Additionally, we found it's really beneficial to call in conjunction with sending mail. Our tools give us access to the numbers of sellers in addition to their correct address so we like hitting them on both angles. It also helps us get to the 5th touch a lot quicker. After your prospect hears from you 5 times, you're more likely to close the deal because your competitors are only touching them a few times.

Some resources you can use to locate correct addresses and phone numbers are findtheseller.com, TLO, Microbilt, or Spokeo. If you plan on prioritizing your list and going after the low hanging fruit, then I would use findtheseller.com. This can get very pricy because they charge like $6 per search; however, it's a quick fix and they have a quick turnaround time. Spokeo is as about good as White Pages, but I would use them for phone numbers rather than correct addresses because they'll likely be wrong. Microbilt was the first tool I used, and it was spotty with numbers but typically gave me correct addresses. It costs about $50 per month and is good if you are doing around 20 searches per month. You'll need to contact them and go through the process of getting an account, which takes roughly 2 weeks. Lastly, if you plan on doing this consistently then I would seriously consider TLO. I've had great experience with it, and it costs roughly $250 monthly for 3600 searches annually. I've found that I get 1 out of 25 numbers are incorrect, which is roughly 90% accuracy rate on a 1000-lead list. You need to go through the process of getting an account, like Microbilt. TLO will take you about a month to get but well worth it if you do plan on making skip tracing returned letters part of your business model. I would just weigh your options and see what fits your needs. I've skip traced tens of thousands of leads so I can answer any specific questions you have. Just ask away!