Marketing is Expensive!

[Joshua Durrin]

Holy crap! Marketing is expensive! I went to listsource.com to build my list and had 10,000 people or so on it. I filtered the duplicates and only had names where the mailing and property addresses were whole. Further I filtered out corporations and only had absentee owners with more than 50% equity. 10,000 names is a huge expense. Then I went to yellowletters.com and saw the mailing costs were about 4x the list cost. It's clear I need to have a better targeted list to keep my costs low as I'm just starting out. What would you suggest? Should I narrow my search area (removing zip codes) or should I narrow the amount I take from each (say a percentage of names from each)? Other demographic filters you can think of? Thanks for the help.

[Victoria Winters]

@Joshua Durrin  Wonderful real life post!  Yes, it is possible to spend any amount of money on marketing. When budget is a concern, it is a good idea to take a deep breath and think about the scale and scope of your campaigns.  It is ok to start with less than 10,000 or even less than 50 names on a list. Quality over quantity usually wins. 

Sorting through a list that you purchased is a good idea. The reason to do this is to improve the quality of the list. Have you considered building your own list?  What and where is your target market?  If 1,000 real deals resulted from your proposed massive marketing effort, would you be able to handle them all at once?  This may sound silly, but it is worth taking time to define exactly what you want and expect to get from your efforts. 

It is important to buy all you want, but equally important to use all you buy.  Real estate is a solid industry that will continue as long as people have need of houses and other buildings.  There is no need to rush implementing a marketing system that will work for you within your budget.

Yellow letter marketing is one of the best ways to connect with potential sellers. The rate of response is very high when measured against other direct mail vehicles. One of the reasons Yellow Letter marketing works so well is because it is designed to be used in the form of a personal letter, hand written to a homeowner, delivered via "snail"mail.  It is almost unusual for people to receive hand written letters in the mail and that is the main reason they get opened, read and responded to so often. 

I started my investment business with yellow letter marketing and got a deal from the first 20 letters I sent out. The list I used was one I created from driving the neighborhood and writing down addresses of property that looked less than well maintained.  In a nutshell, that is one way of creating a great list on a small budget.  There are a lot more details underlying this process, but that is best saved for another post. 

I am happy to share what I know. Feel free to get in touch.  The spirit of helping fellow investors is what BP is all about and I am all in!  Hope this helps.