All Forum Posts by: Brandon Foken

@Erik Hitzelberger thank you! No offense taken at all. That was my first attempt at any sort of lengthy sales letter and I'm not too surprised it wasn't very good. I used to do IT sales and for whatever reason, crafting those emails were a lot easier than this sales letter (maybe I'm just out of practice).

Question: I've seen multiple people recommend putting your URL in the letter so that they have a different way to reach you as some people are too shy (or whatever reason) to pick up the phone and call you. Do you use your URL in your mail or only your phone number? Thanks again for the input!

Alright, now that everyone has the right mindset, let's get this thread back on track. I'm working on getting a good, quality Listsource list put together. Right now I have about 4,500 absentee owners that have 10+ years of ownership and 50%+ equity. There are more criteria than that, but those are the major ones.

Our plan is to mail to about 2,000 of those this month and that is where my question comes in. We are going to be using the zip letters from yellowletters.com. Due to some pre-existing vacation plans, I'm questioning when the mailers should hit our prospects. Do you think that having letters hit during the week of Nov. 18th is too close to Thanksgiving for maximum effectiveness? Or should the letters be received at the very beginning of December? I'm probably overthinking this, but I'm wanting to make sure my first, large batch of mail hits during an optimum time, not one where people are going to be too focused on the holidays to act.

This is great stuff, @Jerry Puckett thanks for sharing. When you say each letter builds on the one before, can you give me an example? Are you more referencing, "Hey, I sent you a letter a few weeks ago..." or something a little more sophisticated than that?

I'm a little confused on the 2nd paragraph. What do you mean by extending the cycle out to 6 weeks? Does this mean you mail every 6 weeks, or mail every week for 6 weeks or something completely different? Just trying to make sure I understand your experienced advice. Finally, thanks for the inspiration, those are exactly the words I needed to hear.

I think we are only an @Aaron Mazzrillo away from a real direct mail party.

Thanks for chiming in Michael. I just placed an order for your direct mail samples last night. The zip letters look pretty awesome.

Based upon the advice from everyone, we will be augmenting our driving for dollars mailing list with a Listsource list with tight criteria. Hoping to get 2,000 pieces out in the month of November. Can't thank the community enough!

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

@Dev Horn after reading your input, I came to the realization that both campaigns involved lengthier marketing copy. (I guess I had been reading too much from Dan Kennedy). My business partner and I are meeting tomorrow to buy some leads from Listsource and get a campaign going off of those. I have been looking at yellowletters.com and their zip letters; what service do you use for your postcards?

@Joel Owens thanks for the input. I had taken the idea of using longer marketing copy some from reading Dan Kennedy's book and also from the @Sharon Vornholt blog. I got a few sample letters from signing up for her mailing list and assumed that the longer letters were working for her and that would be best for my market. Anyways, thanks for the great advice. I'm going to write-up some new marketing copy today or tomorrow and post it back here to help others and get some critiques.

@Dev Horn thanks for chiming in, I was hoping you would. I had previously bought an absentee owner list from Listsource at the beginning of the year and sent 5 different mailers to that list (896 was the original count), but stopped that campaign after my response rates continued to drop and drop after each subsequent mailing. I sent 2 yellow letters, 2 regular letters and 1 postcard dripped out over 7 months. Do you have any recommendations as to either the criteria you would use to build the list or the type/message of postcard?

Also, as far as my current list, I know it's small, but I have another 250 or so addresses being researched by my VA. The hope is to grab 250/week until I've driven my entire farm area. I know some of the sentiment around here is to just get your marketing pieces in the mail, but I'd like to do some level of testing to see what works before significantly ramping up my direct mail campaigns.

Finally, the main reason we are doing this is our thought process was that Listsource is available to any Tom, Dick or Harry out there whereas our list would be complied ourselves and target obviously distressed properties. Not sure if that is right or wrong, but that was our thought process. Appreciate the insight!

Oh man, can't believe I omitted that. We are driving for dollars. We drive around and find dilapidated or very outdated properties and have a VA reserach the owner information for us.

Hey There BPers,

Myself and my business partner have been spending a significant amount of time on our direct mail campaign and so far, our results have been subpar to say the least. We have sent out a total of 395 letters and received a whopping 5 responses. 1 was a prank call. 2 were of the "please remove me from your list" variety. Our one success was getting an appointment with a seller, so in reality we have had 1 good response out of 395 total letters. I'm hoping to get some insights and ideas/critiques for increasing our response rate. The details of our campaigns are below.

We have slowly been gathering addresses so our list is split up, one campaign is 149 people and the other is 246 people. We have sent the different groups different pieces to try and test what will get the best response.

The first group received a standard yellow letter stuffed inside of a handwritten (in blue sharpie) 6x9" manilla envelope (link). I also used some muscle car stamps instead of the regular American flag ones to hopefully make it seem more "friendly". Our response rate was 4 of 149. Here is a picture of the finished letter:

The second group of 246 received a different mailer altogether. We used an A6 invitation-style envelope that was handwritten in black ink. Instead of a yellow letter, we sent our message on standard white copy paper. This letter was placed in the mail on 10/19 and we've only received one phone call and one FB like from our efforts. Here is the copy:

"

@Landon H. I just passed my licensing test yesterday. So hopefully I will have a license here shortly (CA likes to take their time). As for the leads, I believe I spent $.13 a lead from Listsource - that could be wrong, I'm just going off of memory.

Hey guys, I'm still here - alive and well. Sorry for leaving everyone hanging. There are a couple of reasons the Shift site has been left alone for a bit. The main reasons:

• Another investor found me here on BP and we have quickly struck up a friendship. In addition, we are working on a joint marketing project to share some of the costs and time required. We are a couple of weeks in. Our main focus is going to be mailing based off of driving for dollars and our online presence.
• A couple of weeks ago I went to work for a real estate investing company. They are located in the surrounding areas of the Bay Area. My job is to expand their operations into what the locals call the Peninsula outside of San Francisco. I've learned a crazy amount of information in the last two weeks alone.

My life is starting to return back to normal after the job transfer and some other personal things going on. I am going to try to write pretty regularly on my blog site. Thanks for following along!