Direct Mail Marketing for Real Estate Investment
Direct Mail Marketing Best Practices for Your Real Estate Investment Business
Direct mailing for your real estate investment business is equally as important as digital and social media marketing, but many have forgotten how to do it.
As digital marketing has become more and more prevalent in the last few years, many businesses have forgotten about the benefits of direct mail marketing.
According to the Direct Mail Association (DMA) 65% of all consumers make purchases as a result of direct mail. In fact, with fewer pieces of “snail mail” coming in as a result of online billing and payment options as well as an increased sentiment by marketers that traditional marketing is dead, your direct mail pieces actually may have a better chance at being seen today then they did even five years ago.
The reality is, direct mail marketing affords the lowest cost per lead and yields the highest conversion rates.
In case you need a refresher or direct mailing 101 because you’re too young to remember how it used to be done, here are a few best practices to keep in mind:
Develop Copy That Crushes It
Dan Kennedy, sometimes referred to as “the millionaire maker”, has helped thousands of entrepreneurs build their businesses through direct marketing and is one of the leading copywriters of all time. Kennedy once said, “writing copy is only a small part of developing copy that sells”.
Copy development that converts is a finite recipe and really, just one missing ingredient can take you from copy that converts, to copy that converts into trash.
Ingredients for copy that converts:
- Audience: Define whom you are writing to; your “buyer persona” or “avatar” and then write directly to them.
- Emotion: Emotional triggers compel people to act.
- Credentials: Without credibility, you are not going to be very convincing. Don’t yet have a proven track record? Borrow some credentials through the process of affiliation.
- Easy Response Gateways: When you give clear ways to respond via return mail on a printed response device, a toll free telephone number or a website domain and email address, you enable your target to respond to your message.
- The Offer: You’ve got to make an offer; otherwise, what’s the point? This is the meat of your copy.
- Deadline: Time sensitive materials encourage people to act now; given too much time to mull things over, your offer will likely be forgotten.
- Guarantee: Make it easier for them to say yes by alleviating the fear of making a bad decision.
- Proof: Relevant testimonials go a long way toward overcoming objections and evoking an emotional response from your targeted buyers.
- A Good Headline. Note that this ingredient came near to the end. Develop your copy first, then go back and develop your headline. You should write a minimum of 50 headlines and then pull one from there, possibly by combining a few headlines that don’t work.
- “Double Readership Path” This is something that Dan Kennedy and his team do at Glazier Kennedy. If someone is skimming the copy, certain words and phrases are going to pop out at them. We know that people tend to skim down to the bottom, and then go back and read the copy.
- Post Script- Don’t forget the PS!! The PS is there because, as stated above, people tend to read the headline first, skim down to the bottom and read the PS second, then go back and read slowly. Your P.S.’s reiterate the juicy stuff or the benefits, give a secondary call to action and provide placement for more testimonials
Target Your Market Tightly
When you target your audience, you will market with more efficiency and save yourself a ton of cash. This is the area where your digital marketing efforts can really tie in to your traditional marketing efforts as the use of big data and cloud computing today has increased our ability to develop media lists that are culled from social media, blogs and our entire PR process.
Get Creative
Studies show that creative or dimensional mailing devices have a 250% higher response rate than standard letters or brochures. There is an increase in cost per lead, but the DMA says it’s only by 50%; at a 250% increased conversion rate, I’d say that’s not a bad deal.
Combine Tactics
Laura Beasely author and marketing expert says, “I’ve seen a combination of email, direct mail and telemarketing consistently yield a 13% to 15% response, and once you have them engaged on the phone you can qualify them for lead quality and pass the “A” leads immediately onto the sales department”.
To learn about our own ready-to-go direct mail letter templates and multi-touch campaigns, click any of the system links below: