After purchasing my first absentee owners list of 1500 from listsource.com, I noticed a few things.
Most of the names seemed good, they were either individuals or what I would imagine to be small corporations.
However, there were a few “Wells Fargo,” “Bank of America”'s in there, too.
I don’t have money to waste on bad leads.
From now on, I will be getting my leads straight from the property appraiser, or the lis pendens list for when I’m ready to do sub2’s.
In my county you can pull a list of properties and property data by zip code. It comes as an excel file. You can then run a formula that removes owner occupants. I have a bird dog do it. But in all seriousness leads are only what, 20-35 cents a lead. If you get ten bad ones that’s only a few bucks. Hardly worth worrying about.
True, but I also just bought about 400,000 listings from the property appraiser for $50.
That’s $0.000125/lead.
Combine that with bulk mail and I can seriously reduce marketing costs.
Now where am I going to find that much glitter?
My wife is an an artist and she gets here glitter at Michael’s Arts and Crafts Store in the mall here
Nice.
I was kind of joking, though.
Glitter, stickers, I’ve even thought of spraying the envelope with cologne. I’ve heard of people putting a couple tic tacs in the envelope to increase open rates.
I’m just sending out pieces of paper folded in 3. You can get bulk mail rates if you mail more than 500.
I’ll pay someone to put. the stamps on them because getting these first 1500 I just bought has been hell.
I didn’t get in this to spend all day putting paper in envelopes.
Redstar, most of us who are succesful have found that there is no excuse fro NOT working HARD and LONG. I used to send out 2,250 newsletter EVERY month. Did it pay off, well I redkon you could say so my first deal netted me $68,000. You seem to be looking for the easy way out…there is no such thing.
No, I’m looking to streamline. I don’t need to spend my days folding paper and putting 30,000 stamps on 30,000 pieces of paper.
Then THINK outside the DA## BOX. Let your printer do this. That is what they get paid for.
I just bought a letter folder that folds 4,000 pages/hour.
I am looking forward to what the bulk mailing section of the post office has to say about me NOT having to peel and stick 30,009 stamps.
Bill, can you take over answering all the questions and rants of Redstar?
I will be able to regain my sanity and come out of my Idaho cave.
Rando
If I get zero calls from my 1500 letters, I’m going to blame you.
I was going to offer valuable advice on how to word your letters and post cards and the correct postage and even the best time of the week to mail them out, The color of paper, color of ink, many direct mail marketers have developed exacts methods that are proven and effective for maximizing results in this long before I did.
Because, I do have a little bit of experience in direct mail, I’ve done a shipload of deals using letters and postcards.
In fact, I just got 2 deals, one just paid out $5,000 and another one is closing next week for $18,000 But I knew you wouldn’t listen and would have to do things your way, and that’s not a bad thing, just costly & wasting time.
If I have to crawl out of my cave and come down there to Florida to show you how it’s done I’m not going to be happy. Wait, is it warm there? I’m worried I’m going to get frostbite on my diliwad up here in this frozen Northern State.
I tamed a wild Moose and I’ll be riding him bareback, I named him Nanuk. It will take me about a month to get there.
I haven’t gotten any good advice for you in months. You can hopefully see that I’m committed to this.
Why else would I have spent over $1,000 on supplies?
Do I really need glitter on my letters? My letter is as plain as could be. White paper, black ink.
Never said you needed glitter. I said I’ve thought of stuff like that so my letter stands out. Using a plain white letter with typed print looks like every other piece of junk mail.
Rando, I’d love to hear and implement any tips you have for direct mail. Please share if you will. Or you can text me… I’ll actually use the advice and not think of ten million follow up questions.
I’ll be there in a month, where can I park my moose? Do you have any lawn clippings and veggies to feed him? Do you need any manure?
Come on Randy don’t kill this thread because of a couple trolls. I’d love to hear about direct mail.
My mail will be a piece of copy paper folded in three.
Maybe I can put “We Buy Houses” in the top left so they get the point before opening it.
I purchased a course on direct mail about 2 years ago, It cost $99, it provided a couple of custom fonts that look so much like handwriting it would fool your grandma. The Guru suggested buying reams of heavy white card stock and then having the Office store cut them into post cards. This program pulls the names and addresses off the paid Excel sheets of your absentee owners using mail merge and cranks them out fast on your printer in Blue or Black Ink.
The bird dogs email their addresses and I just hand write those on the white post cards.
I have heard to never use bulk mail because most people treat it as throw away mail without even looking at it. I like post cards cuz they do get read. I often get a low response rate but I always have made 2-3 times my costs, and this latest campaign it’s more like 10 times or more, I havnt calculated it. $1,500 spent with a return of $23,000
I use to pay girls 10 cents each to hand write them, I wud get a much better response rate, but dealing with these girls was torture, so unreliable. One girl that was reliable informed me that she needed 25 Cents per card. Maybe I shud have kept her. If she’s fast and can do 20 an hour that’s only 5 dollars per hour.