Are You Wasting Money on Direct Mail Postcards?

Written by Brandon Cornett | © 2010

Many real estate agents are wasting money on direct mail postcards, and they don’t even know it. These agents will pay hundreds of dollars to send out a huge batch of postcards, only to get a handful of leads. If those leads fail to become actual clients, then all of that money has gone down the drain.

This kind of scenario is more common than you might think. The question is — are you wasting money on your campaigns? Unless you’re tracking the results, you have no way of knowing. You could be pouring money down the drain each month, with nothing to show for it.

What’s my point? My point is that you must track the responses to each campaign, and measure the conversion rate from “lead” to “client.” Then you need to compare the commissions you derive from these relationships with the amount you spent on your postcard campaign. In other words, you need to measure your return on investment (ROI) for every mailing you send out.

When somebody contacts you for the first time (whether it’s through your website or over the phone), ask them how they heard about you. Keep a spreadsheet or notebook to record this kind of thing. If they say it was your postcard, then you’ve just recorded a lead resulting from your direct mail campaign. If you continue to do this, you’ll be able to tie certain commissions back to your real estate postcard campaign.

If you fail to measure your success, you could be wasting a lot of money on your real estate postcard marketing. And you wouldn’t even know it.

Change Your Strategy to Avoid Wasting Money

Albert Einstein once said the definition of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So by this definition, people who repeatedly waste money on failed postcard campaign are insane. I would agree with that. Either that, or they just hate money, and they want to get rid of it by any means necessary.

Here’s the point. If you send out a batch of real estate postcards, and you don’t get a single response from it, you have a marketing failure. Hey, it happens. The important thing is that you do something to change it. Don’t just repeat it! That’s the Einstein definition of insane, remember?

Of course, the printing companies will tell you that repetition is the key to success. But this is just a lie, designed to make you spend more money on postcards. Success is the key to postcard success, not blind repetition. And testing is the first step to getting there. You have to test your postcard design, message and strategy until you find something that works. And then (and only then) you can repeat the campaign. Repetition alone is not enough. You can repeat a failed mailing a hundred times, but it will still be a failed mailing — not to mention a huge waste of money. Or you can get smart and track your success.