Why don’t sample marketing letters work well? It has to do with repetition and commonality:

Sample = Common

Let’s say you do a Google search for real estate marketing, and you eventually stumble across a website that offers a sample marketing letter for agents. Ask yourself this: How many other agents have found that same letter, and used it verbatim in their marketing campaigns? How many times do you think your target audience has seen that particular letter, or a slight variation of it? What kind of impression does this give people, when you use a cut-and-paste / fill-in-the-blanks approach to your professional correspondence? How effective do you think this is, overall?

Marketing Letters Need Good Ideas

Sample marketing letters have their place, but mainly as idea generators. The more closely you copy them, the less original you will be. If you send a carbon copy of the marketing or introduction letters being sent by your competitors, you will render yourself indistinguishable from the pack. One final question for you: How many prospective clients will notice you, if you look and sound just like every other agent in your city? It’s something to think about, the next time you use a sample marketing letter to “connect” with your audience.

The best marketing strategies have always been built around original ideas. This is true in the real estate industry, as with any other vertical. Commonality and repetition make people blind. Think about those used-car salesmen that use the exact same formula (i.e., shouting) on their commercials. Do you even hear what they’re saying anymore? They’re all the same. The same goes for the real estate business. Sample marketing letters are the lazy agent’s approach to marketing. And if you use this kind of approach, you shouldn’t expect much in the way of results.

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Letters for expired listings

Many of the real estate direct mail pieces I’ve seen have the same call-to-action. It says something to the effect of: “Call me for your real estate needs.” This is a missed opportunity for lead generation. With this advertising “strategy,” you are only giving the recipient two choices — call me, or don’t call me. Most of the will simply toss your letter or postcard into the trash. That’s just one of the immutable laws of direct mail advertising, and marketing in general. Most people simply won’t be interested.

But there’s a way to get more out of your postcards. Even if people don’t want (or, more accurately, need) to call you at that given moment, they might be inclined to stay in touch. And this is where your direct mail advertising campaign integrates with your other marketing channels.

Direct Mail to Websites – A Lead Generation Strategy

For example, if you combine your postcard / letter campaign with an online lead-generation technique, you’d be giving people yet another option. They can still call you (or not), but now they can get some valuable information from your website as well. If you publish a real estate blog, you can encourage their participate that way. That’s one way to form a more long-term connection.

You could also set up a real estate Q&A service on your website. If you do a good job with this, and make it really slick, you’ll get some participation. I know, because I’ve seen it  work many times in the past. There are many other ways to integrate your direct mail advertising with your other marketing channels. The more you can connect the dots, the better. Give people more than two options. If you force them into a call or don’t call decision, 99% will choose the latter. Give them other items of value they can go after.

If you found this direct mail advertising tip helpful, be sure to bookmark the blog or subscribe to the RSS feed. I publish new tips on a weekly basis. Good luck with your marketing campaign.

It depends. Why did the listing expire? You can’t always get this kind of information, but if you can it will make the letter easier to write. If you think the listing expired because it was overpriced, then you could send a letter about your pricing strategies for clients — and how they get results.

Expired Listings Create a Certain Mindset

There’s one very important thing to keep in mind, when creating a marketing letter for expired listings in your area. The recipient might not think highly of real estate agents. At least, not at the time your letter reaches them. If their agent failed to sell the home, the homeowner might be a bit jaded toward the profession. It doesn’t matter whose fault it was that the house didn’t sell. The owner (your intended reader) will blame the agent.

If your marketing letter talks about all the things homeowners do wrong when selling a home, it might evoke an angry response. Again, you need to consider the mindset of your reader. On the other hand, if you talk about the primary reasons why agents fail to sell houses, you might get a different response entirely — the kind of response you want. You can almost hear the homeowner saying: “Exactly! That’s what I kept telling my agent. Man, it sounds like I could see eye to eye with this person.”

I don’t mean to general expired listing scenarios, or the people involved. I’m just giving you something to think about.

Tips for a Smart Marketing Letter

This is the kind of approach you might want to take:

“Some agents just don’t know how to sell a house. This is one of the most common reasons why real estate listings expire in the first place. It usually comes down to failures with pricing and marketing. In the end, the homeowner is left high and dry. Sound familiar?”

Whatever strategy you take, you need to test and track your marketing letters for effectiveness. If you send a batch of letters to expired listings and get no response whatsoever, then you might be barking up the wrong tree — or “barking” in the wrong way. Adjust your approach. Step back and rethink your strategy. Just don’t repeat the same mailing. If it didn’t work once, it’s not worth doing twice.

As you sit down to write your marketing letter for expired listings, think about the seller’s problem. What lies at the heart of the problem? What solutions can you offer to help them overcome this?

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The problem with sample marketing letters

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.