1. Use Reputable Data Companies

There are plenty of fly-by-night companies out there that offer direct mail lists for cheap. But you have to question the freshness of the data. How can they afford to sell fresh leads at a fraction of the cost of their industry competitors? More to the point, why would they? In most cases, cheap data is old data. The freshness factors is one of the most important considerations when buying a postcard mailing list. That’s one of several reasons I recommend using a reputable company.

Choose a company like InfoUSA, Melissa Data, or USA Data, a company that has been around for many years. These companies have a reputation to protect. If they sell direct mail lists with old data (or other problems), their reputations will suffer and they’ll lose business. The fact that these companies have been around for so long is a testament to the accuracy and freshness of their data. Note: This is not a paid plug. I receive no compensation for recommending these mailing list providers. These are just a few of the companies I trust.

You need a fresh and accurate direct mail list for your postcard campaigns. Choose a company that can provide this kind of list. Don’t go with some shady provider just to save a few pennies per lead — it’s not worth it in the end.

2. Build Your Message Around the Mailing List

In direct mail marketing, it’s important to speak to a specific audience with a specific message. For instance, if you’re using just-sold postcards to generate leads from homeowners in a particular area, you want to show them your sales performance for that particular area. Did you help someone in their neighborhood or subdivision land a buyer in only two weeks? This is the kind of information they’ll want to know, at least if they are planning to sell in the near future.

Or maybe you’re trying to generate leads from home buyers. In this case, it makes more sense to send real estate postcards to renters in a certain geographical area. Here again, you can build the message around the list. You can speak to a specific audience with a very specific message. For instance, you might use your postcards to tell them about a free seminar you are offering for first-time buyers.

3. Use Separate Direct Mail Lists for Different Campaigns

It’s better to buy three individual lists for three types of recipients, rather than one combined list. This goes hand in hand with the previous point. The success of a real estate direct-mail campaign often comes down to specificity. Your postcards need to be ultra-specific. You need to speak to a specific audience with a specific offer. This will increase your response rates, when compared to a combined list with different types of recipients. If the message isn’t relevant to the recipient, it will go straight into the trash.

Match the campaign to the list, and vice versa. In the context of real estate postcards, this might mean the difference between homeowners and renters. Or it might be the difference between homeowners in the southwest part of town versus the northeast part of town. Or it might be homeowners in a specific neighborhood, or over a certain price rage. The point is, you need to break up your mailing list to the point that all recipients have something in common.

This is what professional marketing consultants mean when they talk about demographics. Your message needs to match your demographic. And the only way to accomplish this is by purchasing a direct mail list for a specific audience. This is another reason to use a reputable company with sophisticated technology. These companies can create almost any type of list you can imagine.

Common Threads
Regardless of what option you take when building your list, you need to take the list seriously. An good postcard sent to a bad list is a bad mailing. With any list, the three most important factors are relevance, accuracy and currency.

• Relevance — Your list should include the kinds of people who can relate to your services and would be likely to respond to your offer. If you sell luxury property, don’t send your postcards to lower-income neighborhoods. If you’re offering a market report for the Belle View neighborhood, don’t send it to the folks over in Valley View.
• Accuracy — The big list providers such as InfoUSA use double or triple verification to check the names and addresses in their databases. This reduces the number of undeliverable addresses (wasted postage).
• Currency — There’s a lot of flux when it comes to mailing lists. People move, new neighborhoods arise, streets get renamed, etc. An old list is a bad list and will result in a higher number of undeliverable postcards. So make sure your list is as “fresh” as possible.

Undelivered postcards will not come back to you unless you mail them First Class (more expensive). First Class mail comes with a “return to sender” service. But when you send postcards by Standard Mail (more common), your undelivered postcards will be discarded. Even with the most current mailing list possible, there will always be a certain percentage of undeliverable addresses.

Before you can fix something, you have to know how it’s broken. So in this post, I’d like to talk about three of the most common problems agents have with their real estate farming postcards. Again, this is not conjecture or speculation. This is based on what I’ve seen working in the direct mail industry over the years.

Here are three things the “base” agents usually have in common:

1. Over-reliance on technology
2. Over-reliance on weak offers
3. Over-reliance on vendors

If you can correct (or avoid) these three problems, you’ll enjoy greater success with your real estate farming postcards. So let’s talk about each one in particular.

Problem #1 — Over-Reliance on Technology

Technology alone will not generate any leads for you. Nor will it produce a greater response to your farming postcards. It’s a tool, and nothing more. A postcard company may brag about the cutting-edge technology it uses to print and mail your postcards. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into a more successful postcard.

In order to generate a good response, a real estate postcard needs to convey value to the reader. Normally, this value comes from your ability to sell a person’s house quickly, or to help a buyer find a house with minimal hassle. After all, these are the primary benefits real estate agents provide to their clients.

Technology can help you deliver this message. But it can’t create the message for you. The same goes for other types of technologies, such as those used to create websites. If you rely too heavily on technology, to the point of neglecting your message, your marketing campaign will suffer. As I continue converting the Real Estate Postcard Book into a blog, I’ll offer a wealth of strategies for improving your direct mail message.

Problem #2 — Over-Reliance on Weak Offers

Are you using the “no-obligation consultation” as the primary offer on your farming postcards? If so, you’ll have a hard time generating a good response. In fact, you will probably spend more money on postcard mailings than you’ll earn through eventual commissions. Why? Because the consultation is not a strong offer. It’s a relic of the pre-Internet marketing era, when people had to rely on real estate agents for market information. Those days are gone.

Today, people have a wealth of information at their fingertips. As a result, their expectations have changed. Your prospects expect a free consultation, and they know they’re going to get one … if not from you, then from some other agent.

What you have to remember is that you’re not the only agent sending real estate farming postcards in your area. Most homeowners and home buyers have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of these direct mail pieces over the years. And most of these postcards follow the exact same formula. They have a certain sameness that makes them all blend together. There’s a picture of the agent. There’s an empty statement about superior customer service. And then there’s the “offer” of a no-obligation consultation.

To follow this formula is sheer folly. You have no chance of breaking out from the masses if you are the masses. If you want to generate a better-than-average response rate for your real estate farming postcard, you must create a stronger and more unique offer. You must be better than average, in every aspect of your marketing campaigns.

We will discuss this at length as the book continues to unfold onto the website.

Problem #3 — Over-Reliance on Vendors

Postcard printing companies can simplify your marketing program. I know this firsthand, because I’ve worked for two of them. You can outsource nearly every aspect of your postcard farming campaign to these companies. But you shouldn’t outsource the message, the idea, or the strategy behind your marketing program. These companies specialize in printing and mailing postcards to a list that you provide. That’s what they’re good at. But they don’t specialize in real estate marketing. Not in my experience, anyway.

This is why I also discourage you from using postcard templates with “plug-and-go” messaging. By their very nature, templates are built around the concept of sameness. If you use them, your farming postcards will look like most others. How do you get your message to stand out if it looks just like all the others? The most successful real estate postcards are those that strive for uniqueness. For one thing, they are built around a strong offer that is specific to the recipients. Secondly, they are written and designed in a way that makes them stand out from all the rest. You can’t achieve this level of success by using templates.

There’s another aspect of postcard printing companies you should know about. It has to do with the frequency of your mailings. These companies often preach the virtues of repetition. Keep sending those farming postcards, they say, and you’ll eventually start seeing positive results.

But this is a half-truth. If you keep sending an effective postcard, it will eventually start producing leads for you. But a bad mailer is a bad mailer, no matter how many times you send it out. Repetition won’t change that. These companies want you to believe that repetition can make up for a weak message. After all, it’s in their financial interest to have you believe this.

The bottom line is this: You should only repeat the postcard mailings that are working for you. If you send 1,000 real estate farming postcards but don’t get a single response, there is something wrong with the campaign. Sending another campaign would be a waste of money. You need to try another strategy, or get help from a professional marketing consultant.

Questions About Real Estate Farming Postcards?

Do you have questions about using real estate farming postcards as part of a broader marketing campaign? Feel free to send me your questions by email. If your question hasn’t been previously answered on the blog, I’ll answer it in the form of a blog post. You can also leave a comment about this particular article by using the box provided below.

For instance, if you send a mailer to 2,000 people in your town, and you get 20 of them to sign up for the real estate newsletter mentioned in the postcard, you’ve achieved a 1% response rate (20 divided by 2,000 = 0.01 or 1%).

This idea behind this graphic is that most agents achieve a relatively low response rate for their direct mail postcards, while an elite few achieve above-average response rates. I call it the Pyramid of Postcard Success.

At the bottom of the pyramid, we have ineffective postcards with below-average response rates (let’s say 0% – 0.25%). Whether they realize it or not, this is where most real estate agents fall on the scale. That’s why the base is wider than the top.

The middle section represents average response rates. These postcards generate a response somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5%.

Of course, the top of the pyramid is where you really want to be. These postcards generate above-average responses of 2% or higher. The agents who fall in the top / apex section have probably studied (and applied) the best practices of direct mail marketing.

This is not speculation. It is based on my own experiences working for two direct-mail companies, and also working as a private consultant to several real estate firms. It may be lonely at the top. But it’s definitely where you want to be. You want to generate the highest possible response rate for each of your postcard mailings. And that’s what this book blog is all about. It’s about using the best practices of direct mail marketing to boost your response.

Improving Your Postcard Response Rates

As I continue to convert the book into a blog, you’ll gain hundreds of tips for improving your response rates. Here are a few points to consider in the meantime:

You can increase your direct mail response rates simply redefining the response. You’ll have a hard time getting people to pick up the phone and call you, based on something they read on a mere postcard. But it doesn’t take much to motivate people to sign up for valuable information online. Either way, you are capturing a lead. So why not make it easier on yourself?

The “no-obligation consultation” used to be mainstay of real estate marketing. But that was before the Internet existed. Today, home buyers and homeowners can get a tremendous amount of information online, from home values to mortgage quotes.

If your offer consists of the no-obligation consultation, you have a weak offer. It won’t motivate anyone. On the other hand, if you develop a strong offer based on unique and usable information or services, you can easily d0uble or triple your response rate.

Does your website engage people in some way? Does it allow them to sign up for alerts or news? Does it allow them to participate in forums or other discussion groups? Does it give them a way — any way — to connect with you? Or is the website just a revolving door? You’ll get more out of your real estate postcards if you use them to direct people to an interactive website that allows participation.

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We will talk more about these topics (and a lot more) as the book unfolds onto the website. If you’d like to receive notices when new articles are posted onto the site, you can follow me on Twitter.

Have questions about real estate postcards, or direct mail marketing in general? Need some tips for improving your response rates? Or maybe you have a story to share on this topic? You can leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

But then I thought better of it. I realized the problem many agents have in their postcard marketing is that they don’t integrate their other marketing channels. For instance, they don’t use their postcards to direct people to a specific landing page on a website, with the ultimate goal of lead generation. These are the kinds of concepts I built into the book. I realized the postcard marketing book should go beyond the basics. It had to be a 21st-century book.

Now that I’m converting the book into a website, I plan to delve even deeper into those other marketing channels. We will talk plenty about real estate postcards and direct mail marketing. You can bet on that. But we’ll also get into nuts and bolts of websites, search engine optimization, blogs, social networks, and other aspects of modern real estate marketing. In other words, the website will be much more useful than the book was by itself.

But I digress. Let’s get back to the original purpose of the book.

The Purpose of the Postcard Book

Postcard marketing—the act of mailing postcards to attract new business—is only one part of the successful marketing mix. Real estate postcards can be used to support and enhance all other aspects of your marketing program (and your business as a whole). So they should never be considered in isolation.

So what’s my purpose with this book? Actually, I have three goals:

1. To tell you everything I know about postcard marketing.
2. To teach you how postcards interact with the other parts of your marketing program.
3. To teach you how to make your real estate marketing program more successful, by successfully integrating multiple channels (including, and beyond, direct mail postcards).

Your Responsibility

I hope you will view this book (and now the website as well) as more than just a book. I hope you’ll see it as a partnership for progress. In this partnership, we both have a certain obligation to meet. My job is to teach you everything I know about real estate direct mail, and postcards in particular, so that you can be more successful in your campaigns. Your obligation is to seek perpetual improvement in your real estate marketing efforts.

You must take the information I give you and build on it through your own experimentation and continued learning. Experimentation is the most important factor in direct mail, and we will revisit that topic throughout the book / blog. If you do this, you will get better results from your postcard campaigns over time. In fact, the whole point of a direct mail campaign is to make each one better than the last — to seek perpetual improvement. That’s what I hope to teach you over the coming weeks, as I convert the book into blog posts.

Technical Notes

By putting this book online, I hope to make it easier to use. The original version was an e-book in Acrobat PDF format. So it wasn’t the easiest thing to search through. Once the entire book is online, it will be much easier to search. For one thing, there will be a table of contents page with hyperlinks to all key sections of the book. You just click on the part you want to read, and you’re there. You’ll also find a search box at the top of this website that allows you to search for specific keywords or topics.

This will be the last administrative post for a while. From here on out, I’ll be blogging about the best practices of real estate postcard marketing. You’ll learn everything you need to know about using direct mail to support your marketing program. We will talk about messaging, design, the offer, the call to action, testing and tracking, and every other aspect of direct mail postcards. We will also discuss other forms of marketing, such as your website, and how they can play a role in all of this.

Ready to get started? Great! Just click on any of the “Recent Posts” in the upper-right sidebar area. Or click on “next page” below to continue reading the book in the order it was written.