2,200 mailers, 5 calls. What to do next?

[Account Closed]

So I started my direct mail campaign almost a month ago. The first batch of postcards went out on Feb. 1st.

I got 3 calls on the first 1100 post cards that went to out of state absentee owners in areas surrounding Denver. My criteria were SFR, 1 to 4 bedroom, 25-100% equity, last sale date more then 4 years, max assessed value of $330,000. I got no leads out of that, and thinking back on it, it probably wasnt the best list considering these are more expensive homes and tons of other people are marketing here.

The second mailing went out on Monday and Tuesday of this week to two smaller counties in Illinois where I used to live. It was Dupage and Mchenry County, same criteria, just max assessed value at $200,000. I got a whopping 2 calls from this mailing so far, and that was another 1,100 mailers, one potential lead but Its not very promising, he wants pretty much full retail. Ill be following up 15, 30, and 60.

Any suggestions on what I should do to generate a better response rate? I'm not discouraged at all, just thinking of more effective ways to generate leads, I bought the listsource plan of 15,000 names so I still have about 13,000 I can pull. I also just started doing adwords, which I like a lot, I'm also driving for dollars, and just had 5,000 door hangers come in. (so if you know of anyone in the denver area that puts out hangers please let me know!)

Anyways any suggestions for what I should do to make my direct mail more effective?? Any opinions are greatly appreciated. 

Thank you!

[Jonathan Wheeler]

Something to keep in mind is that just because you've only had a few responses to your mailers in the first month, doesn't mean you won't get more responses from the same mailing campaign down the road.  I've done some marketing where the sellers didn't contact me until 5-6 months after receiving our mailer and have heard of instances of others getting deals like a year or more after sending direct mail.

I would also add that it's not really about the sheer number of responses that you're getting but more about the quality of the responses that matters.  I'd take 2 responses out of 1,000 that both turned into deals any day vs. 40 out of 1,000 where the sellers weren't really motivated and nothing came of the leads.