Direct Mail Getting Started

[Matthew Berry]

I just finished listening to the Michael Quarles interview on the Bigger Pockets podcast. Wow... What excellent content. I especially appreciated the position that Michael takes on not working on weekends. Not being a slave to your job is something that is difficult to accomplish for me. Our pipeline is empty, which makes it easy for me to overwork. Most of our lead generation so far has been through Craigslist or paid services like zBuyer or Landvoice. The quality of leads has been very low. Most of the people that we talk to are looking to sell for retail price. Based on what I'm hearing about direct mail, I'd like to take a step into that area of marketing. My budget is no more than $1000 per month initially. If I can get a dealer to closed in the next few months, I would plan on dumping most of the profits into further marketing. But at this point, I am limited to a defined budget. I went to ListSource.com and generated a list for my area of homes with 40% or more equity, 3+ bedrooms, 2+ bathrooms, no junior liens, property value $75,000-$200,000, single-family home, and an age of 65 or older (not set on old folks but looking for filters). Those filters brought the number of leads down to 600. The cost for the list would be about $500. If I remove the age filter, the number of leads jumps up to over 3000. I would love to be able to market to a list that large, but my monthly spend budget doesn't allow for $3000 in direct-mail per month. Given the budget limit that I have and what I have shared, does anyone have recommendations for me? I know that direct-mail requires a fair amount of money upfront, but I'm not sure if my budget is too small. I would like to think that a 1% response rate off of 600 leads would result in 2-6 deals. I'm open to any suggestions and critiques.