All Forum Posts by: Blair Halver

Cool, I know click2mail does full color, but I'm not sure of the pricing. Never looked into that there.

Hi Nicole Goss,
I'd recommend click2mail all the way if you're going to do it yourself. There's no minimum quantity order, you just upload your list, design your postcard, and basically click send. They print and mail for you by the next day. It's pretty slick.

I will agree with Jerry Puckett, though, their design interface is a bit buggy. But once you get used to it and you've got your templates in there, it's easy enough to just go click to send one again.

For black & white, small postcards, I don't think you'll beat their price with no minimum quantity order.

Also, I've never done any full-color postcards with click2mail, so I don't know how well that does. Are you sending b&w or full color?

Blair

Christopher Willett - I have to disagree with Dev. If you do the direct mail properly, you can get sellers calling you in a week. Will they all be deals? No. It's a numbers game. But I have seen people do one mailing and find a deal the first week. They got lucky, but it does happen.

I do not think it takes 6 months to start getting responses. Now, to really get your marketing engine humming, as I think Dev is really saying, then yes, it may take 6 months.

And for disclosure, I run a direct mail company - so I'm a little biased!

I would say look around for some good info products on doing the direct mail yourself - my service is beyond the scope of your monthly budget (thus this is not a solicitation, mods :-) ).

I second that! All my buyers ever wanted was address and asking price. If I tried giving them numbers, they'd be incredulous.

Dev Horn - do you use your website as a response method on direct mail? If so, how well does that work for you? Do you also offer phone method of response?

I ask because I never had much luck getting direct mail recipients to respond via website. They always responded by phone. And the response rate seemed to increase when I removed the website from the mailer all together.

Thanks,
Blair

Yeah Dev Horn - I'm not too up to date on the recipient's psychology of it all. There may be something there, but I am not well versed in it. My previously mentioned stance on the subject was based purely on benefits perceived from my side (the sender's side).

There may be a great deal of psychological theory behind what day of the week a recipient is most ready to receive mail.

I might submit that the best day for him to receive the mailer is the day after he loses his job (or some other life-changing event) which of course is impossible to predict from where we sit. :-)

We always mail on Fridays, via First Class Mail, so that "most" if not all the mailers hit mailboxes the following Monday.

When the mailers hit on Monday, the recipients respond to the mailer by phoning in, usually beginning mid-day on Monday, then continuing Tues and Wednesday, then tapering off by the end of the week.

The upside to this is that if someone calls you back and leaves a message for you on Mon-Wed, you have until Friday to call them back before the weekend. You don't want to let too much time lapse between when they call and when you call them back, so it's best not to have a weekend timeframe stuck in there.

Plus, you can take care of all the week's leads in the same week, then schedule site visits for that following weekend (if you want).

The other upside to this is that it helps you measure your response rate more accurately. You send a mailing each week, it usually lands in mailboxes on Monday, then you can count how many responses you get during that week and attribute them all to the mailing that hit on Monday.

It's not an exact science, of course. You will always have those respondents who call you that week, but they received a mailer from you several weeks ago. I've had people call back as much as 6 months later.

Anyway, to answer your question - mail on Fridays, so it hits mailboxes on Monday.

(And don't mail more often than every 5-6 weeks to the same person.)

Hey Dev Horn, I agree and disagree with you. I started out handwriting my own letters. I did a couple hundred one week, and then I was done. It was the worst. So I agree with you that handwriting your own letters is a bad idea.

However, I disagree that actually handwriting the letter only gives a marginal advantage. My experience has shown that it does indeed increase response rate, which is the goal for anyone trying to maximize their few marketing dollars.

If a new investor has more time than money to invest, he wants to maximize his return by turning the "quantity" of responses way up even if the "quality" of the responses goes down. When he gets to a point where he has more money than time to invest, he does the opposite and makes his mailers more stringent in their qualifying characteristics.

P.S. again, my company does not provide yellow letter service (as of the date of this writing... :-))

I agree, I hadn't heard "Fat in the box" before but I like that.

Why not "actual handwritten" by an outsourced company (not necessarily your buds)?

P.S. My company does not provide this service. But I've seen companies in the past who do.