The Direct Mail List: A Key Part of Your Postcard Campaign

By Brandon Cornett | 4/23/12
© 2012, All rights reserved

Welcome to the Real Estate Postcard Book blog. I am in the process of turning my direct mail e-book into a website, one blog post at a time. Here is today's entry.

The direct mail list is one of the three most important components of a postcard campaign. The offer and the presentation round out the top three. Fortunately, modern technology makes it easy to obtain a targeted mailing list for postcard marketing. But it doesn’t come free. If you want fresh and accurate data, you’ll have to pay for it. Here are three things to keep in mind as you buy a list for your real estate postcards.

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.

The Direct Mail List: A Key Part of Your Postcard Campaign

1. Use Reputable Data Companies

2. Build Your Message Around the Mailing List

3. Use Separate Direct Mail Lists for Different Campaigns

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