Real Estate Marketing Letters — Prospecting With Letters

Direct mail letters have been a mainstay of real estate marketing for decades. There are many reasons for this longevity. Real estate letters are simple to create and don't cost much to deliver. They are also a proven strategy for marketing success that, when used properly, can help you take your business to the next level.

But when some agents consider real estate marketing letters as a farming strategy, they quickly become overwhelmed with choices. What should I put in my letter? How do I print and mail them in large quantities? But it doesn't have to be this complicated. Using letters for marketing purposes can be as simple or as hard as you make it. So in this article, we will examine the key components of real estate letter marketing and how you can use it to grow your business.

Using Letters for Real Estate Farming

Real estate agents have been using letters to drum up business for decades. Aside from word of mouth, letters are truly the oldest form of real estate marketing. They are often referred to as prospecting or farming letters, because you can use them to prospect or "farm" a neighborhood for new leads and clients.

Cost and simplicity are the two main advantages of this marketing medium. Depending on how many letters you mail out — and whether or not you outsource the printing to a print shop — the cost could only include the paper, envelopes and stamps you use.

And while it does help to have direct mail writing experience, you can produce a decent farming letter with only basic writing skills. In a sales letter, what you say is more important than how you say it. So the skills needed for the job can be easily learned by most real estate agents (see writing tips below).

How to Write a Marketing Letter

If you plan to include farming letters as part of your overall real estate marketing program, you should spend some time learning the fundamentals of direct mail copywriting. (By the way, the term "copywriting" refers to the act of writing copy for letters and other marketing pieces.)

I don't mean you have to become an expert copywriter. But you should at least buy a book on writing copy for marketing purposes. You can find plenty of them on Amazon.com.

Here's a short lesson on copywriting that you can apply to your real estate marketing letters and other promotional content:

Do the proper research — When you begin the writing process with the proper planning and research, you've tackled the toughest part right from the start. Before you jot down the first word of your prospecting letter you need to do the proper research. The other items on this list show the topics you need to research.
Determine the logistics — Will you write a one-page letter or a multipart "letter kit"? Are you printing anything in color, or just black and white? Are you using any supporting information, or just the marketing letter by itself? By addressing the logistics early on, you will make the writing process much easier for yourself.
Understand your audience — Who is your intended audience, the people who will receive your farming letter? What do you know about them? What do they care about the most, from a real estate perspective? What kind of fears and concerns do they have? How can your services help them get what they want, while avoiding the things the fear? Get into the mind of your audience before writing your letter.
Identify your objective — If you have followed the steps up to this point, you will know exactly who you're trying to reach with your letters. The next question is, what do you want those recipients to do? You need a specific goal here. Do you want them to contact you based solely on the material in the letter? Or do you want to steer them toward a specific page of your website? You need to clearly understand the objective for your marketing letters before you create them, and those objectives must be realistic.
Shape your content — With the research and planning you've done up to this point, you are ready to think about the content of your direct mail piece. What do you need to include in your real estate farming letter in order to achieve the desired response? Statistics on recent sales? Testimonials and success stories from clients in the same neighborhood?

Note that the points presented above follow a logical order. If you start with the proper research and build from there, you'll have a much easier time creating the kind of real estate marketing letter that gets results. Things will fall neatly into place if you go about it the right way.

If you need help with the writing process, you consider using a tool like WriteExpress: 3,001 Business & Sales Letters software from WriteExpress

Mailing Options - Cost vs. Convenience

A lot of real estate agents ask, "What is the best way to mail letters to a target area?" To me, this is a question of cost versus convenience. And you must consider the size of the audience and the frequency of mailings to make such a decision.

The cheapest way to mail real estate marketing letters is to handle the process yourself. Of course, when you factor in the time it takes to do this (and how valuable your time is), it doesn't seem quite as cheap. This is also the most time-consuming way to conduct a direct mailing.

Having a direct mail company handle the process for you will cost extra, but it comes with added convenience and time savings. You can shop around online to get pricing from different companies, and then you can decide if it's within your budget. If you have a large list, I highly recommend you outsource the printing and mailing to a company who specializes in the process. It will save you a tremendous amount of time and energy.

Just keep in mind that some direct mail companies specialize postcards and other "self mailers" (items that do not include envelopes). Other companies specialize in letters only, and some offer a variety of formats. So make sure a printer can mail your real estate marketing letters before you get into their pricing information.

Conclusion and Going Forward

Am I suggesting that real estate prospecting letters are the perfect tool for your marketing program? No. That's something you will have to decide for yourself, ideally through actual experimentation.

But what I am saying is that direct mail letters can deliver good results if you take it seriously and put in the necessary effort. If you take a half-hearted approach and send out a weak product as a result, you can't expect much in return. But if you take the lessons I've given above, and build on them with additional research and experimentation, there is no limit to what you can accomplish by using real estate marketing letters. The real question is, what have you got to lose ... and what do you stand to gain?