Handling negative responses to marketing

 I have noticed a few threads on BP from newer investors panicking over adverse responses to yellow letters and other marketing tactics.

I have had a significant database for a number of years and have found this over the top aggressive reaction is common in any area of marketing.

IN fact I have had people threaten to report me to all sorts of online authorities regarding me supposedly spamming them and when I check their history they have been subscribers for many years but obviously forgot.

The bottom line is people have bad days and sometimes a real estate marketer is a convenient place to vent.

However it is also worth noting that:

Many people seem to have nothing better to do than find things to complain about.  For example all my emails have an unsubscribe link prominently displayed yet some people will write a novel in an email to me abusing me for emailing them. The fact that they use so much bad language meaning that many of them don't even get delivered seems to evade them as does the disproportionate energy involved in writing a thousand words instead of clicking unsubscribe.

I think generally as a marketer the adage:

"What others think of me is none of my business" is mostly true.

One of my online mentors said if I am not getting any complaints I am not emailing enough.

I have a large database so some of the problems get magnified by sheer numbers but as a percentage they are very small. So if you send out a hundred yellow letters and get one septic response just learn to expect it.

Having said all that though let me relay a personal experience that made me one of the people abusing a marketer.

In 2004 my dad died of cancer rather unexpectedly. He wasn't that old and we were obviously devastated.

About 5 days after his death, possibly the day before or after the funeral I can;t remember now, there was a knock at the door and when my mother answered it was a real estate agent who greeted her with:

"Mrs Letfus I am terribly sorry for your loss, I wondered if you were considering selling your home".

He avoided a smack in the mouth by virtue of the fact that I wasn't there to hit him but his office certainly heard from me in due course :-).

Now my point is this:

When you buy lists you cannot know the source of those records or the circumstances of the people on that list. I am sure you all know the list of "D's" to look for when buying and nearly all of them involve pain on the part of the owner. (Death, Divorce and Debt).

So be sensible in your marketing knowing that many of the people you are trying to communicate with will be in distress.  Don't be smarmy or aggressive. Be super polite and give people a reason to respond not attack you. I don't know the US market well enough to advise on specific ideas that work here as I don't need to do any cold marketing but in NZ my primary success in deceased estate marketing was to talk about the fact that we wanted to remove the headaches for the family by offering whatever terms they needed including offering to dispose of all unwanted items in the home. We would say for the family just to take what they wanted to keep and leave all the cr*p for us to remove. No need to clean, cut the grass etc.  Just get on with your grieving and let us sort out the house that was a problem with a lot of emotional baggage.

I bought a LOT of houses that way!