Marketing
As you may know by now, Marketing is the single most important part of your business. If you don’t have any leads coming in, you have no business! In order to get leads coming in, you need marketing that works. There are many types of marketing that have worked for many investors for many years. Some of the different marketing available including; signs, direct mail, flyers, radio, bill boards, bird dogs, internet and the list goes on. Although these all produce leads, the most effective way to get the most qualified leads calling in with the least amount of your money or personal time spent is through Direct Mail. This includes mailing some kind of mail piece, usually a letter or a postcard to a specific mailing list. There are many different types of lists out there that are likely to have motivated sellers of real estate some of the different mailing lists that have worked well for us and many others are:
- Pre-NOD- This means pre- notice of default. If the owner of a property misses from one to three mortgage payments (30-90 days late on payments) their name will show up on the Pre-NOD list in your area. This can be a great list since you will not have as much competition as the foreclosure list that everybody and their brother mails to. Another benefit of buying homes off this list is that it will take less money to bring their loan current when you purchase “subject-to.” Buying homes in foreclosure is great, but you’ll generally need the money to pay up (reinstate) 4-8 months worth of back-payments or all cash to pay off existing loans.
- Foreclosure List- Although many investors are soliciting these owners, this list will still produce many good leads. When mailing to this list, your marketing has to be exceptional since you’ll have a lot of competition. This means you’ll need some powerful letters and postcards. We use a sequential marketing campaign when mailing to this lists. That means that we have 7 different letters that are mailed to the owner of the property. Each letter addresses the situation they may be in at that moment, as the situation of these owners’ changes every day. Like Ron says “time and circumstance change all sellers minds.” Its also more effective to use “lumpy mail” which is when you insert something other than a letter into the envelope, so that the receiver of the letter is curious enough to open up the letter instead of immediately trashing it before reading.
- Free and Clear or High equity owners- Another target market for real estate entrepreneurs is owners of free and clear or high equity properties. This means the sellers have plenty of room to negotiate on price and they have the flexibility to offer you owner financing terms. This allows you structure deals that work in any kind of real estate market.
- Bankruptcy- This is another great list of motivated sellers that has less competition than some of the others since many investors avoid bankruptcy properties because they simply don’t know what to do with a property in bankruptcy.
There are many other types of lists and you can refer to the marketing cards of your Game based training system to see all types of marketing available, along with general prices and response rates we’ve tested.
Its important to understand that finding quality lists, writing copy for all letters and postcards, printing letters and postcards, handwriting addresses (for better response rates), mailing letters and then tracking all your results manually can be a chore! Its difficult for many investors to effectively manage this process and keep the marketing going every month.
That’s why we are so lucky to have the Done For You Marketing services at our finger tips! There are companies out there now that do all of the following for you:
- Pull all lists you request and test for accuracy
- Write all your copy for letters, postcards and anything else you ask for. Everything is written by professional copywriters who know what they’re doing. They also test the results of every mail piece they send out so if something isn’t working they know and they fix it.
- Printing, Envelope stuffing, Addressing (even handwritten)
- Once all this is done, they’ll mail out letters on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule as you request.
- The last part is that they work with your Phone answering service to add a unique number to your marketing so you can track the results of everything THEY do. They even show you how to pull up all the reports on specially designed lead management software. Then they show you how to manage and market to all your buyers that called in and didn’t sell (follow-up list). This little element will have a massive impact on your business because tests show that anywhere from 50%-80% of your seller leads must be contacted by you 5-7 times before they will sell to you!
Maybe its easy to pick up on my excitement for these services! Its probably because I was doing every one of these steps myself, manually. It was the most frustrating responsibility I had to manage. Now with these services I’ve freed up two full days of every work week that me or an employee (that I had to manage) used to spend on marketing. This is the single most valuable business tool on the market.
