If my market responds after the first mailing (80% of responses), and rarely after the second mailing (20% of mailing), does it make sense to mail to them more than 3 times? It’s currently setup for 4 mailers. (Remember, it’s one of the markets that I target, other markets may respond differently.)
Your thoughts please ?..
Hello and very interesting question.
IMHO direct mail must be reinforced with other direct mail to be effective. The key is to touch touch and touch again. With that said those touches can be created by your competition, the key is for you to be the last one touching.
So how do you do that? Mail multiple times. And with multiple messages.
My current program I am sending 4 types of mail 5 different times
Day 1) Professional Letter
Day 5) Check Letter
Day 8) Mary Letter
Day 13) Postcard
Day 30) Postcard
It would take too long to go into the reasoning behind the different pieces aand their effectiveness and individual messages so I will juat state that it works…
I use to, in a sellers market, mail out 15 different pieces of mail to the five prospect groups over the first 30 business days… I dont need that much of a campaign in a Buyers market…
Good Luck
Michael
Advertising is the key to successful Investing
It takes 7 contacts with someone before you can expect a response.
So, my answer is YES, you should follow up. - 7 times.
I would have to agree that multiple mailings are important. I couldn’t remember how many times you had to mail someone to acquire a response (on average), but it looks like tattooedguru pointed that out.
tattooedguru knows her stuff… I know her and she is very successful… if that was my question, I would go with her answer.
If you’re mailing to a good list or prospect you may want to keep mailing to them forever (meaning until they move, die, or sell it to someone else). Like MichaelQuarles eluded, you want to be the one with the marketing piece in their hands when they finally are ready to sell. Repetitive, direct response oriented marketing will help you build that “presence.”
However, if you’re mailing to preforeclosures typically you have a much shorter window to get your message out, so you may want to mail them every 3-7 days or so for however long your municipality gives the seller before redemption/auction. Some of these people will end up coming up with the money and catch up their payments. Those that do will still be good leads for you even after they stop the foreclosure, so keep mailing them. They have demonstrated poor financial management and will likely be in a similar circumstance at some point in the future. You want to be there when that happens.