Have you ever calculated your response rate?
At this point, I have a hard time believing that someone desperate to sell their house will say…
“Fuck this! This letter isn’t handwritten!!! Like I’m gonna sell my house to someone who doesn’t use glitter!!!”
Gold River suggested using bulk mail and I would take his word as gold seeing as he’s a billionaire and all.
I really just need to get the word out there, start getting a return on my investment, then maybe my dad will invest in my marketing and I could go national. He would like nothing more than for me to be successful following my prison stint from age 22 - 26.
Anything is better than nothing. That being said, there’s a reason people use hand written vs typed. It doesnt matter what your message is if it doesn’t get looked at. A 3% difference in response rates can literally save thousands…
Once again, the glitter comment was merely a thought on how to get a higher percentage of letters opened.
But there’s also the cost of buying yellow paper vs. white copy paper. Staples didn’t even sell yellow lined paper in sufficient quantity. Let alone 5,000 sheets for $50 like with the white.
At this point, it’s SOMETHING versus NOTHING for me.
I’m not looking forward to taping 30,000 letters in the future. I will outsource that.
REdstar,
You are beginnng to sound like a friend of mine. He spent over $70,000 on books, tapes, seminars, classes,…AND…NEVER did buy or deal with ONE SINGA: PROPERTY…but he wa WELL EDUCATED.
Wow, you got me beat, I know a guy that spent $30,000 on private mentoring and one on one training.
He turned a room into his home into a gorgeous office, With expensive hard wood flooring, He had an extra business line, big Oak desk, latest computer, fancy business cards and even an LLC. Any thing about Real Estate investing he was an expert on and didn’t hesitate to let you know. I was doing deals from a $20 book,
I offered to help him by walking him thru some deals for 50% His response was, So you want me to do all the work and give you 50%? Luckily for him his wife had a good job.
A few years later I talked to him and he still hadn’t done any deals but was working on a few.
This guy had a sucky attitude. I shud look him up to get an update on his progress or lack of.
I think I’ll mention him in my book under the chapter, Attitude.
I don’t know if it’s fear of success, and the resultant responsibility that success entails, or a fear of failure, and the relative comfort that doing nothing offers, but I do know that being busy doing things is not the same as accomplishing things.
Ears just made a blind offer to what looked like a motivated seller. He’s already learned more in two hours of screwing with this deal, than most who’ve read 20 books on the subject.
You know who thinks that gimmicks are necessary to get your mail opened and read? Mailing gurus.
You know what skeptical, unmotivated, seasoned pros, who’ve done and seen everything will notice and open? White, #10, business envelopes, with a first class stamp attached and a typed address.
We’ll open every one of them, and so will every residential recipient.
You also know what every skeptical, seasoned pro, whose done and seen everything will notice and read? Yellow or Green, 67#-ish, 3x5 postcards, no matter how they are addressed, or stamped.
Letters are three-step marketing tools. Receive, open, and read.
Postcards are two-step marketing tools. Receive and read.
The secret to either of these tools starts with the quality of the mailing list. If that’s wrong, everything else gets crippled.
Spend more money sifting a mailing list, and resonating with the target market with your ad copy, and less on gimmicks.
Am I saying that ‘yellow letters’ are useless gimmicks? I am saying that, if the recipient doesn’t open the letter, it makes no difference what gimmick you’re using to further interest the recipient.
BTW, inserting Tic-Tacs into mail is a certain way to have your mail returned, or sent to the Pentagon for evaluation as a terror threat. Either way, nobody’s gonna see those letters, and you’ve just flushed postage down the toilet. Don’t screw with the candy deal. Shiny, new pennies? Thick, multi-page letters? Perhaps.
Meantime, there’s no such thing as deliverable “lumpy mail” anymore. Just saying.
I’m waiting on my paper folding machine to come in from Staples so I can get this mailing list out.
Okay just got the machine. Now I need to learn how to do mail merge so I can print 1,500 addresses and hope there isn’t a mistake in printing or the whole thing will be wasted.
Actually, Bill H, I think I bought one $20 book that I thought was useless.