0.40% Response Rate on Yellow Letter - Looking for Suggestions

[Paul Felix]

I mailed 500 yellow letters to out of state property owners.  The mailer should have arrived in mailboxes around 3-4 days ago.  So far I have received 2 call from the mailer.  I used a standard yellow letter.  No modifications were made.  You can view the letter here.  https://www.yellowletters.com/product/investor-yellow-letter-1.

My list came from the central appraisal district.  I randomly selected 1000 out of state owners to mail to.  500 mailers went out a week ago and 500 will go out again today.  I sent one to myself and it arrived on Friday.

Based on other threads here on BP and elsewhere I expected to get at least 2 or 3% response rate and was hoping for something closer to 5%.  I may yet get a call or two, but it doesn't look like my response rate will come close to what others get on yellow letters.

Any ideas as to what caused the low response rate?  Here's my novice analysis of the situation.

- The letter itself has numerous people saying that it works well to generate incoming calls.  I have to believe that the letter is not the problem.  However, I do see that some suggest writing the address on the envelope by hand.  Others say this makes a marginal difference.

- Maybe more calls will come in over the next few days?  I don't know how long it should take to start receiving calls, but I was expecting that the majority of calls would come in shortly after the mail landed in mailboxes.

- My list is straight from the local county CAD.  I scrubbed the data thoroughly & ran it through google geocode api to get clean addresses.  I have not started to receive returned mail (likely will today), but if I assume that 20% of the mail is going to be returned that increases the response rate slightly but nowhere close to what others have reported.

- Maybe my target has seen too many yellow letters?  I plan to continue to mail to the same list indefinitely every month.  Perhaps the response rate will increase as the number of touches increases.  Others have reported that the response rate goes down and quality (conversion) goes up.  Not sure what to expect really.

My goal is to find opportunities to fix & flip.  The good news is that the couple calls I did get may generates some marketing fee revenue. 

What do you think I should do next?  Stay the course or make adjustments?  Thank you in advance for your feedback.