All Forum Posts by: Blair Halver

Hi Arthur! Don't go spend a few thousand on marketing materials yet!!

I hope I'm not too late. I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned this yet, but here's the scoop: marketing is synonymous with TESTING. Test test test before you invest!

I once spent several thousand dollars on a whole bunch of nice, full-color postcards, only to find out that they didn't produce a lick of leads for me! Same thing happened with a giant box full of high-gloss, full-color, fold-over business cards. I still have several thousand in a box somewhere because they didn't work and were such a waste of money for me.

I'm trying to save you from the same plight.

If I had to do it over again, and I wanted to try those same full-color postcards I had printed, I would have bought a very small lot at first, tested them out, and if they had a good response, I'd order more. This is very basic - any professional marketer will tell you this.

One thing to note as well, is that if you have a direct mail campaign that bombs, you should not expect greater response rates from mailing the same card again to the same people just because you've mailed them again. Essentially, if they didn't respond to your offer the first time, then why would they respond the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time?

Now, this previous paragraph refers to direct-response marketing. If you're just trying to get your name or company name, and your face out there (aka "image advertising") then keep mailing those non-responsive cards. I hear they eventually pay off, but I hope you're in it for the long haul with a good chunk of money set aside to make it pay off.

If, however, you're wanting your direct mail campaign to immediately produce leads, you need to be sticking to direct-response marketing, not image advertising.

Just speaking from my experience, hoping to save others from the same mistakes I made.

One other thought that comes to mind when reading your posts about what company name to choose: in the end it's probably not going to matter as much as you might think it does right now. I work with a professional home buyer in NC who has a "nice company name" but does the company name really generate any leads for him? From observing his business, it seems he gets more business from personal referrals and direct-response marketing than any advertising he does with his company name.

Now, having said that, I do think it's important to pick a good name. There is value in a good company name. The object of the game being: how much marketing value can I create in as few letters or syllables as possible. In fact, there's a company out there called NameLab and all they do is help companies come up with really good company names. And as an example, their own name, NameLab, is a good example of a good name: it gives the reader a very quick and simple understanding of what they do, why they are UNIQUE (very important), and they do it in only 2 Syllables! :-)

Anyway, just my two cents. I hope this is helpful.

Hi Nichole,
Thanks for the kind words of encouragement!

Yes, we use the little yellow postcards over the yellow letters. We've just found we get a better quality lead with the postcards.

And actually, Listsource is a good provider of mailing data. I'd use them if I were you.

I don't want to break any forum policies by promoting my company (I'm still not sure how that all works and where the line is that I'm not supposed to cross), but if you want, you can click the link in my signature to see how it all works - in reference to your question about if we provide leads.

Thanks again!
Blair

I guess I'll have to disagree here. And first of all, this is pertaining to mailing to Absentee Owners, not Probates as the OP asked about, but hopefully this helps.

Whether or not having the website on the card helps/hurts response rate, I don't have the records to support. But I can say that when I did put the website on the card, nobody responded via the website, and maybe just a couple people actually went to the website to check it out.

The ones who did go to the website, did not end up contacting me. My theory is that this is because they got enough info they wanted from the website, and didn't need to call me. So I didn't get to talk to them!

The direct mail piece's job is just to get them to call you. If you give them too much info up front, I believe it will decrease your actual response rate.

On top of that, I've found I get a better response rate when the mail piece looks like it comes from a PERSON, instead of a COMPANY. So if you put the website on there, you look like a company. If you leave it off and just put a phone number on there (a local phone number, not a toll-free, no extension), I've found an increase in response rate.

Hope this helps!

Hey Scott, my pleasure. Thanks for posting the update.

Blair

I just use a spreadsheet I created. I keep track of all the different variables with each mailing, compute the percentages, find averages, etc. Pretty easy to do if you have Excel.

I recently met with a local here in Atlanta, originally from China, who has been buying houses cash with a bankroll of $1.5MM cash from friends and family back in China.

Because he has the money, and/or because he doesn't know any better, he's been buying houses off the MLS whenever his realtor calls him. He feels he's getting a good deal. Minimum 10% ROI. He buys and holds for rentals. Mostly section 8 he said. All professionally managed. He's pretty hands-off, but I'm sure he's making some good money on his money. It's just an investment to him of course.

Point being, he's going to the MLS, but I don't think he's getting true wholesale deals, as Jerry has mentioned.

Hey Brandon Foken, Thanks for checking out the site. Sorry if I miscommunicated previously in this thread. We actually don't do yellow letters. We do yellow postcards. They pull about as well, and the respondents are better informed about who our clients are, what they do and how they buy - before they respond. Makes handling the responses a little easier.

Maybe I should look into providing yellow letters as well. They seem to be ever-popular. If we did do them, then yes, we'd be paying people to hand-write them, no printed fonts.

I posted this in another thread - how I used to have them done a certain way, here is the pertinent part reiterated, it may give you some idea(s) on how to improve the yellow letter printing process:

Jon I could not agree with you more. The mailer's job is simply to get them to respond. It cannot create motivation, as others have mentioned here as well.

Thus, can ANY direct mail (YL included) increase quality as the title of this thread asks? I submit that it cannot.

I had some more thoughts on this I recently posted on my BP blog:
http://www.biggerpockets.com/blogs/3572/blog_posts/25567-deal-to-leads-ratio-or-how-many-leads-does-it-take-to

Hi Brandon,
I tried the handwritten fonts when I first started doing direct mail, and never had good luck with them. I finally realized that if I can tell (even in the slightest) that it's fake, then someone else can too. Peoples' B.S. meter is pretty sensitive when going through the mail.

But maybe that's just my experience - and the fonts and printers have probably improved a bit from 3 years ago when I did it. I saw in another thread that Jerry Puckett says the fonts can work.

I use yellow postcards - they're cheaper than yellow letters and they pull about as well, and you have the opportunity to inform the prospect moreso with postcards than with the traditional yellow letter.

Traditional Yellow Letter template:
"Hi {owner-name},
My name is Michael, my wife is Jane.
We'd like to buy your house at 123 Main St.
Please call at 555-555-1234.
Sincerely,
Michael"

You can see that this may pull well, but it doesn't give the reader much info at all. So when they call in, you spend a lot of time explaining the same thing over and over again: you're an investor, you buy at a discount or with flexible terms, etc etc.

On the other hand, if you include more info about who you are and what you do in the letter, and then route them to a recorded message that tells them even more, you don't end up wasting all that time explaining everything yourself.

Doing close to 2,000 yellow letters a month - I believe you will find that to be quite tedious. I was doing a couple hundred a month on my own when I started out, and even that was a big pain the neck. But that's my temperament I guess.

Glad to hear you'll be tracking everything. I'm sure you will. Marketing is synonymous with Testing. Test test test and measure measure measure.

I mail only to Absentee Owners.

Regarding your thoughts on casting the net wide and catching every fish possible, here's a link I just found that explains my sentiments on that:
http://www.awebguy.com/2011/09/everybody-is-not-your-target-market/ I don't know that guy or that website. Just did a google search to find an article explaining what I was going to say.

Regarding your thoughts on "it's a waiting game". I think you'll find that there's a bit more to it than waiting. Well, you do your initial marketing, and WAIT for the leads to come in if you've done it correctly. But once the leads come in, you're not just sitting around, you're calling these leads back, finally getting them on the phone, researching their property value, making offers, getting contracts, etc. That's just on the seller side. Then you have the buyer side - doing the marketing to find the buyers, getting them to go look at the property you have under contract, negotiating with them, sending the contract, etc etc. It's a lot more work than most wholesale gurus would have you believe. But it beats digging ditches I suppose! Just don't kid yourself - it's definitely work!

Oh, also, I almost forgot - handwritten fonts, in my experience, don't work. The envelope needs to be actually handwritten. At least the TO address. For the return address you can use a "kitchen drawer return address sticker" printed with your return address. And first class stamp of course.

Then, inside, the letter doesn't HAVE to be in red sharpie (as some say), it can be in regular ink pen. After I stopped doing my own yellow letters, I found a printing company (now out of business) that would do them for me. What they would do is have one of their employees write the template for the letter like so:
"Dear ,
My name is Blair, my wife is Sidra.
We'd like to buy your house at .
Please call me at 555-555-1234.
Thanks,
Blair"

Notice the blank spaces. So they'd write this template by hand, then photocopy with high-quality printers onto actual lined yellow legal pad paper ripped off a legal pad, and then the SAME guy who wrote the template would go and write in the owner's name and the address on each one by hand. Then of course they'd handwrite the outside of the envelope too. We used a regular #10 envelope.

We had good response rates doing it just like that. But no deals came of it. Probably because at the time I was mailing to Owner-Occ's with equity. The owner-occ's aren't necessarily a fun bunch to deal with - too much pride in their homes! But absentee-owners, they have more emotional detachment.

Anyway, after you do a deal and you've got some money in the business account, I wouldn't necessarily say to hire someone to do your mailings, although that may be the cheapest, but rather outsource to a company who already does it. Wish I could plug my company here, but we don't do yellow letters, as I mentioned. :-) I think Michael Quarles on here probably has a good business going doing just that, but I've never used his company's services so I can't say for sure.