Real estate businesses thrive when they have a steady stream of leads to grow their business. One of the most important tools you can add to your real estate business marketing plan is a direct mail campaign.
Although direct mailing might receive negative comments, such as 'How important is junk mail?' the CMO Council reports direct marketing was responsible for $2.05 trillion in sales. Direct mail produces a 13-to-1 ROI providing you with a cost-effective way of obtaining new business.
So how do you build a direct mailing list for your real estate business?
Our real estate investors postcard templates will generate leads and return on investment in your marketing strategy — specifically when mailed consistently! Our designs include We Buy Houses Cash Postcards, Yellow Letter Postcards, and many other postcards for real estate investors. ProspectsPLUS, INC. Is a direct response marketing and management company based in Bradenton, Florida. Founded in 1998 by company president Jim Morton, it offers personal marketing and business development solutions for real estate professionals nationwide. SureFactor specializes in printing and real estate marketing solutions with a primary focus on simplifying marketing for real estate agents. We not only provide our customers with thousands of elegant templates for marketing and brand building but also have an extensive suite of products for direct mail marketing for real estate agents.
Before You Start
Before you can start building a direct marketing list, there are a couple questions you will want to consider.
What's My Offer?
The first step in building a list is to identify which products or services you offer. You don't market a small single family home to the same demographic interested in a commercial building. If you have a variety of properties on the market, or services that apply to multiple demographics, you should segment each distinct offering. When you segment your services, you increase your chances at a response, due to the relevancy to your target audience.
Who's My Audience
Once you define your services and products as clearly as possible, you should define the target demographic. For real estate audiences, you typically work within defined geographic areas. If you want to reach home buyers, you should establish the average income necessary to afford your properties, whether the audience already owns a home or rents, and other data points that focus the audience as much as possible.
If you're reaching out to purchase properties, remember to focus on data points such as pre-foreclosure and foreclosed homes, the average value of the properties, specific types of properties, homeowners in bankruptcy and landlord-owned properties. These data areas will provide ways to narrow your audience.
Free List-Building Resources
With your audience and offers in-hand, it's time to build a direct mail list for your real estate business. Both free and paid options are available for list building. A properly built list can help your business to grow and thrive. Here are a few methods to build a list using free options:
- Eviction: Public records provide you with a wealth of valuable list-building information; eviction judgments get you in touch with frustrated landlords who may want to sell their homes.
- Tax records: Tax records allow you to figure out which properties are landlord owned; you can either target absentee landlords or reach out to renters who may be interested in purchasing a home.
- Probate: Inherited property is not always welcome property to the new owner, who may want to get it off his or her hands.
- 'Driving for Dollars': This term is used when you drive around and look for properties that are for sale, abandoned or otherwise distressed.
Paid List-Building: List Brokers
Paid list services deliver you with real estate leads based on pre-defined criteria, such as addresses within a specific zip code, families within an age or income range, home values, and other data points useful for filtering to an interested audience. You don't need to spend the time digging through public records, driving around town looking for properties, or other time consuming activities, but you do need to pay for this type of service.
In general list brokers are going to be able to provide you with a higher quality list of leads for your real estate direct mail marketing campaign. That said, keep a couple of key things in mind when working with a list broker.
Pricing
Pricing for list broker services will be based on the complexity of your list filtering criteria. Most brokers have a base rate per 1,000 addresses, and then increase that rate if you want to filter on things like household income, purchasing history, or credit scores.
In general expect to pay anywhere from $10 - $30 for every 1,000 addresses received from a list broker.
Deliverability
The industry averages only about 90% of mail successfully arriving. There is no way to avoid this and here are a few reasons why:
- There's no such thing as a 100% accurate mailing list: Time is really the biggest culprit in the inaccuracy of mailing lists. Situations change between the time the compiler collects information and the time that information reaches you, the client.
- There's no such thing as a 100% deliverable mailing list: Statistically, a little over 17% of the country moves on an annual basis so time is again complicit in the reduction of accuracy. By the time the data is scrubbed through the National Change of Address (NCOA) database, the Do-Not-Mail registries, and the prison and pander files, some people on the list will likely have moved.
Keep this information in mind when working with a list broker. If they do not address the issue of deliverability, you will most likely want to look at another shop.
Brokers
We've worked with a couple list brokers in the past and can personally vouch for the quality of service that is provided by these two:
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- Mailers Haven : These guys have been around for forever and use multiple data providers to compile their lists. Expect to work directly with a broker that will walk you through the list building process.
- Datamyx : Datamyx is another list broker that can create a direct marketing list based off of many advanced filters options.
Contact us for names of the individual brokers we've worked with from each of these companies.
Next Steps... Automation
Here at Lob, our goal is to always be providing resources to help you automate and grow your business.
- If you are not already using a platform to manage your leads, consider Podio! Here is an awesome video by Dan Schwartz on how to use Podio to automate your real estate workflows.
- If you are already using Podio, here is a video that shows you how to integrate Lob + Podio to automatically send your leads mail.
Real estate is a tricky field, with high highs and low lows. Making the decision to become a real estate broker isn’t easy, and from certain perspectives may seem like more trouble than it’s worth.
Forbes Council member Heidi Burkhart speaking on her own experience as a broker says, “Real estate is strictly commission based, so be prepared to go months without getting paid. When I started in real estate as a new broker, I didn’t receive a real, livable commission check for almost three years.” According to her, the dropout rate for new real estate agents in their first five years can go as high as 60-80%.
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Real Estate Direct Mail
Taking that view, a career as a real estate agent might seem pretty daunting. However, if you’ve got the passion and talent for the job, it just takes a little bit of legwork to establish a long career. That’s where marketing comes in.
Marketing for Real Estate
Sustaining a career as a real estate broker takes time and effort, and that may not always pay off. One of the best ways to make sure you’re pulling in the clients and contracts that you need is, of course, through a good marketing strategy.
In our previous article ‘How Much Do REALTORS Spend on Marketing Tools in 2018?, we took a look at what the marketing landscape is like for real estate brokers and agents. A study commissioned by Real Estate Webmasters found that, out of a pool of 300 active agents, team leaders, and brokers, digital marketing tools were among the most popular choices.
70% of the survey participants had their own website, and 38% were actively promoting their services on social media. The next most popular option was local newspaper advertising, followed by 23% who used search engine marketing. The remaining 10% used a variety of techniques such as magazines, online display ads, and door-to-door flyers.
Real Estate Agents Direct Marketing
Direct Mail Marketing for Real Estate
If you’ve tried all of the above options or are simply looking for another technique to boost your response rates, direct mail marketing is a solid choice.
The U.S. Small Business Administration encourages businesses to use direct mail for a number of different reasons. Direct mail can often be more effective than digital campaigns, generating purchases of up to five times larger than email marketing. It’s more shareable, with up to 88% of key decisions in retail, financial, and automotive categories discussed at home thanks to direct mail. It also has a longer lifespan, with mail materials staying on customers’ minds far longer than email or digital ads.
In big decision industries like real estate, direct mail marketing can be an indispensable tool. Direct mail materials hold attention longer, generating bigger emotional impact than digital materials and thus exerting more influence on consumer decisions. Real estate professionals can use direct mail to send out catalogs, pamphlets, freebies, or other materials that add value to clients’ lives.
Real Estate Direct Mail Marketing
It can also be used in conjunction with other marketing techniques. Marketing company Triadex Service’s CEO Greg Mesaros says of direct mail retargeting that, “Prospects who have recently visited and stayed on your website have already shown an interest in your services. Using cutting-edge retargeting data, Triadex is able to help you turn these valuable leads into long-term customers.”
Direct Mail Marketing Real Estate
With greater impact, lower costs per lead, and some of the highest ROI around, direct mail marketing can positively impact any real estate professional’s marketing strategy. In a field where consumer decision-making can span weeks up to months, you need marketing tools that can boost credibility, name recall, and response rates, among others. Direct mail can do all that for you and more.