Real Estate Investor Direct Mail

Occasionally we will write about Yellow Letters, the big direct mail product that 10's of thousands of real-estate investors and home flippers use to attract sellers. There are debates all around the web on when and how to use them, why do they work and are they worth the investment and how can you guarantee it to work for you?

For a Direct Mail Marketing company such as us, we nestle ourselves between the internet world and the direct mail world, it's a unique area for us, because real estate investors, our biggest client base, must use deep property based demographics to identify potential home sellers, where-as Google Ad-Words doesn't have those metrics. But the true question is why do Yellow Letters work for some home flippers and not for others? We might have some answers...

First, not every square mile in the United States is the same. So you can imagine there would be a lot of variables depending on your region. For instance, home investors find certain cities or regions nearly impossible to get any calls from their direct mail campaigns, where-as other regions are ripe for the picking. Smart home investors will deeply research neighborhoods as their primary filter, we recommend neighborhoodscout.com (we have no affiliation), this way you can start plucking out entire zip codes that you don't want to target, or better yet, pluck out zip 4's for even smarter targeting.

Second, the only thing that matters in your mail-piece is the envelope, once they open the envelope, the message takes 3 seconds to receive, they either are interested... or they are not. This is why we print our envelopes using 2400 DPI text, we also recommend real-stamps and other factors to beef up open rates. Also, we highly recommend inserting a business card to make it as easy as possible for someone to call you, after they throw out the letter inside.

Third, focus on your mailing list. Spend 40 hours of analysis on a mailing list with 5,000 names, hand scrub the mailing list yourself. Maybe even have us append your mailing list with life data (income demographics, magazine subscriptions) and other factors that might tell you, "this person will not sell or they will sell".

I am personally making some videos on this subject coming up and will post those here and on YouTube. Give Nataliya or Casey a call for more info on these subjects if you want to know more sooner.

- Maddison