How To Do Mail-outs and Postcards That Convert
Ultimate Postcard Marketing Machine is so critical to your success…because it is all about not only generating a flood of motivated sellers… AND educating your leads while simultaneously selling you as the only possible option to get their deal closed quickly and profitably.
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The Ultimate Postcard Marketing Machine
How to do mail outs and postcards that convert. First of all, I’m a big believer in marketing and mail outs is a good marketing tool to have in your briefcase; however, being a refugee to America, mail outs and postcards cost a lot of money and in my presentation I will explain the cost of these so you can get it. But does this mean that I am against mail outs? No, it doesn’t. I am for mail outs and I will be showing you three different ways that most people do mail outs.
#1 way: those who don’t know what they’re doing will just do a shotgun defect. They’ll just get an area, for example the area where they live or the area they want to market like a zip code; they will just get everywhere. And there’s nothing wrong with that if you have only a specific zip code that you want to buy, but the majority of investors have multiple locations, cities, and areas they’re working at. Another problem with the shotgun effect is that it’s very expensive and when I do the numbers you will see what I’m talking about. Then we have the level two investors, these are smarter, they have read online forums, they’ve gone to Real Estate Investment clubs REI’s, but they have probably read a couple of books and they know that they should do something that’s called the sniper rifle approach where you zoom in on your audience. What you do it here is make a targeted list. In the shotgun effect you don’t have a targeted list, which is another con for this method, because you’re hitting a lot of people that are probably don’t need your services. They’re not looking to move or to sell their home, so it costs a lot of money to go through that trash to find the potentials to get to the gold. As I said before, these investors are smarter and what they do is target a list. There are all types of lists, but I’ll explain two.
The first list is the foreclosures list; these are people where the bank has given them notices and they’re going to foreclose on their home in 30 days or less depending on what state you’re in. So there’s a lot of motivation there. You could also target out of state home owners and these are people that used to live in Dallas, but now live in Las Vegas because of a job transfer and maybe they don’t want to deal with being a landlord or they’ve already done it for a year or two and find it too hard so they want to get out. So, they’re motivated. And there are so many other lists out there I can go on, but I’m not going to get into it. I know the difference between them because I have traveled the path. When I first started, I did that shotgun effect then I got smarter- I started reading- and that’s when I went with the targeted list method. And I realized that it costs a lot of money to do this (targeted list).
In This Marketing Strategy for Real Estate Investors, Let’s say if you get a mailing list, foreclosures, and there’s 3000 people on it, well that’s a lot of money to spend on postcards or letters. It becomes big sums of money and if you’re sending out only 100 then you’re probably not going to get a good return. Because of this, I came up with the Dojo way; I’m a refugee to America, so I don’t like to spend a lot of money. If you have an unlimited amount of money for advertisement like $10,000 a month for mail outs or $50,000 or whatever it is, and you don’t care then this may not be the thing for you. But if you’re smart then you could take those 50,000 or 10,000 and do it the Dojo way and get more deals.
The Dojo way and this Marketing Strategy says that I’m going to market this list (target), the motivated sellers list; however, I’m not going to mail out to every single one of them. Let’s say I have the foreclosure list and I’m in Dallas or Las Vegas and there are a lot of foreclosures, before they changed their laws recently. So, say we have 3,000 people on the list and at the very minimum it costs me a dollar to send it out, I’ll show you the exact numbers in a second, but this is very low end, so I’d be spending three grand in marketing. Although it’s way better than spending three grand with the first method (shot gun), where you just pick or blanket an area because the majority of these people are not motivated. And if you spend like three grand your return investment will be very little. Whereas if you spend that money with the second method (target list), your return investment will be much greater. You decide if you want little return or greater return.
Now, with the Dojo way, I get a huge return and spend the least amount of money. That’s the master key which I call, filtering. If you look at it, this business is kind of like digging for gold. In the gold rush days not everything you dug was gold. A lot of it was just rocks, dirt, insects, and what have you; that’s not what you’re looking for. And to move this dirt to a place where it’ll have the potential of having some gold after being processed takes a significant amount of energy, tools, man power, and money. So, to move the dirt, simplify the mailing list, it takes money. And the way to do that is by sending letters and postcards. That’s how you move the dirt to get potentials, people that want to sell their home, and using my seller phone script to even grind it more to find the really motivated ones.
The Dojo way is consists of not just sending out the mail to everyone, but it uses a filtering system to identify the motivated people in that list. So, if this is a foreclosure list and it has 3,000 people, I may only send out a letter to 30. And of these 30 with a potential of closing I’d say is about 75%. With this in mind, do you want to spend, assuming it’s $1 each, 30 bucks and make a deal with these people with a higher potential of closing, or spend do you want to blanket the area with your hard earned money, saying it’s $3,000 you have to spend on letters and making the same amount of money. But as you can see, you have to spend more money. So the course is about how you come to filter this information out, but I just wanted to explain to you the three ways that people do it so that you know the difference. I’m using what other people are talking about, but also adding my creativity and ingenious in order to be able to discriminate or raise the hands of the people in this list (targeted one) that says I am motivated to do it cash or I’m motivated to do owner financing; because some of these people, the majority or 50%, on this list they’re not going to want to sell to you, they might rather go to foreclosure, they’ll find a different solution, or they’ll borrow money from their friends and family. SO I don’t want to spend money and energy targeting these people, because it will cost me money and a lot of it. That’s why I don’t want to send out a list to 2 or 3000 people and pay full price to top dollar. I still have to use some kind of equipment, labor, or technology to filter this out (targeted list), but the way I do it costs me a little bit of money versus those $3000, and that’s the whole goal.
Let’s talk about what the requirements for direct mail campaigning are. I’ll say letters, but it’s the same thing with postcards. The very first thing you need are stamps and the last time I checked these were roughly around 50¢. You’ll also need the flyer, which can be the letter, postcard, one or two sided, can have UV gloss, full color or two color, and all of these things will determine the cost of the flyer. You can go anywhere from black and white all the way to more expensive. You can chop that piece of paper into two so you can have more flyers, so it all depends on your imagination and creativity; so I won’t put a number on here.
You’re also going to need the envelope that and I won’t put a number here either because everyone can do different things. There’s also the labor, if you do it yourself, it’s labor and if you get somebody else to do it, it’s still labor. Labor is to get the mailing list, to search and find the mailing list, merge the information, print out the labels, stuff the envelopes, fold the flyers, and put the business card into the flyer that you’re placing in the envelope. Along with that you’ll have delivery because you have to take it to the post office; if you’re doing 3000, there will be a lot of boxes. Some of you guys may use the cheaper way where you get a meter or a commercial stamp which will cost a little less, but then the delivery cost will go a little bit higher because you can’t take it to your normal postal service it has to be taken to the hub. Every major city may only have one or two hubs and you may have to drive really far to take it to there because that is the only way to do the direct mails that’ll save you money. I won’t get into that because there are so many variables. When you add it all up (stamps, envelopes, flyers, labor, delivery), you’re going to get a minimum of a $1 per piece or per letter assuming that is the cheapest way. It may go a lot more, but realistically you’ll be around $1.50 or $1 +, it’ll depend on the letters you use etc. Let’s do the math now that we understand what’s in here; and you might be saying that $1 isn’t that much.
And this is the reason why I think the Dojo way is better because it saves you so much money. It costs so much money to do direct mail. So let’s say we buy a foreclosure list with 1000 people on it, and we’re going to mail to all of them. We’ll keep it simple and say the mailing just costs $1, I know it’ll cost more, but I’d rather be all negative and go on the lower side. That’ll bring us to $1,000. The leads we’re going to get on this on an average, if you look on the internet, direct mail opening from somebody who is really good, they’re getting like 1-3% or 2-3%, but let’s go on the lower side and everything on that end. So 1%, which means that out of $1000 you’re getting 10 leads; using the law of probability, because this is not all gold, not all of these are going to be deals, you get 1 deal. Depending on the deal, if it was $3,000, was this a bad transaction? No, it wasn’t. You put 1000 bucks and you made 3000. If you’d made 5,000 it still wouldn’t be a bad transaction. But what if you could send out only 30 letters, and it’ll only cost you 30 bucks and you still got the same 3 grand. DO you see the difference? You spend little money and your profit will be more if not equally the same.
The key is not to spend those $1000, but instead of spending that amount and hitting a thousand people there’s a better way to find the motivated people without using the most expensive marketing. The direct mail is like your right punch, and you don’t want to use it every time. You also need jabs and once the person is ready then you come with your right punch and that’s what the whole Dojo way is. I realized, even though I’m a refugee, when I had my 7 figure business I wanted to do mail outs for my moving company, for my broker’s firm, for my Mr. Investor, they got expensive; and I was turning so much stuff, I realized I can’t do this because I’m not going to grow and I’ll be like the average person; I need exponential leverage. So I thought, how can I identify out of the 1000 people who’s the most motivated and narrow them down to X, in my example X was 30 people, and only mail out to that number and still get the same exact harvest if not more seeing as how these people were actually motivated –they responded, they raised their hand, called me, I used my VA or you could be yourself, I used my seller phone script. I qualified them etc. before I started sending them letters. Let’s do something more realistic because of 1000 postcards is very low, if you’re going to get some good deals then you’re going to have to do 10,000 postcards at $1 apiece which is going to be a lot more, you’re looking at $10,000. How many leads will that give you? 100 leads. And if you’re closing the law of probability, you don’t know anything and you’re just starting out let’s just say 10% like the last one, then you’re getting 10 deals.
And if every deal was $3000, just to be fair again going on the low end side, it’s a shitty deal then you just made 3 grand as in a signing fee because you’re a wholesaler. We’re not going to talk about it as if you buy it for yourself and made a lot of money because you’re a buy and hold guy because it gets even more complicated, let’s just keep it simple. You got 10 leads and the law of probability says that if you don’t know the answer out of ten questions you’ll get 1 right. So we have 100, 10 of them will convert and at $3000 each that’s 30K. You spend 10K and make 30K, is that bad? NO. I don’t know any bank of America that allows you to do that. But that’s the old school way, which is why many people are like “Oh my God, I’m getting rich” and they’re loving that.
But I added my refugee twist to it, how about if out of the same situation instead of me doing 30, I only mail out to 100 people and still make the same exact price, that’s the key. The mail out to me is my right punch. I won’t throw it just to dig, instead I will use it for the knockout punch. What’s the knockout punch? I’d take the list, whatever it is foreclosures, divorces, probate, and scrub it – filter it, like they did in the West, and only start processing what looks like potential gold and then you throw your right punch in, which will save you thousands of dollars.
The next point is very important and I want to make sure you understand this there are four simple factors for success in direct mail. And the first one, I’m going to call it zero, because if you do zero it doesn’t matter if you’re ignorant, illiterate, a refugee, you don’t have any money, you don’t have any support, you don’t know left from right, or you don’t even speak any English, if you do this number zero which is called a will persistence, you will win. You don’t even need this course. That’s the way I did it, just through Will of persistence and that’s what many people are missing, they want all the information. This is the number one factor, and to me the most important one, for success. And what it means is that, if you have shitty ass flyers, horrible copywriting, miss spellings, you don’t know how to mail out to the list or get it, it doesn’t matter as long as you continue doing it and doing it and doing it, continue sending letters to these people they will give you a deal. If you do that, will of persistence, then you don’t need any education in any course. That’s it.
But I know the majority of people don’t, so I’m going to explain the other three factors that are important for the success of doing direct mail. After the main one, we have what I call multiple touches or follow up. It is very crucial that if you’re going to have a direct mail campaign, and if your budget is to only do $1000 that you don’t send out, assuming it’s a dollar per mail out, 1000 letters, because you’ve only touched them once and your probability of closing or getting a deal is very slim since the majority of people are not going to respond. It is very crucial that you are able to touch them multiple times, so if you have $1000 budget then you may only want to send out 100 letters or 150 letters five times and that way you reach out to the same exact people five times at five different intervals. So the first factor for success besides what we talked about, is multi touching. And this is so crucial, it’s the most important part. If you don’t learn anything today, please learn that you have to do multi touching in direct marketing or any kind. Follow up is king if not queen.
The second most important factor for success in direct mail is what I call pattern disruption. You have to be able to shock the seller or the receiver for them to take the minute to read your information. If your information looks like every other information, if the color of your paper or the envelope was like everyone else, then you’re not going to shock that seller or the receiver of your marketing for them to open it up and even take time for them to read your copywriting; very important. Now back in the days when I was doing moving, and we use to send out letters to our target audience we would stuff them with candy, chocolate bars, so it had a little lump into it; people would open them, I don’t know if they ate them or not, but it made it feel different. We always handwrote them. One of the best pattern disruptions is handwriting them. Actually handwriting them, and not using their meter stamps or commercial stamps or the ones you get from your mom or grandma if you have any of these. It is so crucial, because if you have to send out to 1000 people it would take forever, but if you had already filtered those people, shake them out and that thousand was only 30, you could handwrite them. You could get somebody and pay them 10-20 bucks to do 30, but 1000 will take a long time. Pattern disruption is very important for you to get their attention. All three factors mentioned so far are very important and will determine your success.
Our next one is very important, but before you get to this one you have to make sure that you have done pattern disruption, you’ve done something that makes that person, before they throw your piece of paper in the trash like all the other spam they get, think that it’s not spam or that it’s not from a bank, or credit lender, or collection office, that it’s not some insurance nonsense; have them think that this is one human being with love and care. It has to be something like that; that will make them go “What is this? Let me open this up”. This pattern disruption is crucial for our next step because it allows you maybe 19 seconds for that person to open the envelope up and pull your flyer and take a look at it. And the very next thing is what I call your Sales copy letter which is extremely important because if you didn’t do pattern disruption, then you won’t even get to this step (sales copy letter). Now if you did do the previous step correctly, then you have 19 seconds for them to decide if you’re a spam or do you have vital or helpful information for them. I know many people that say they’ve got an A in English class, I’m a great writer, or I’ve met people that have written great books but when it comes to sales, they can’t sell. However, when it comes to doing a sales copy guess what? They can’t do it.
Because normal writing or book writing is totally different from sales copy writing, it’s a whole different animal. The majority of us, to be honest with you, are not good at it at all. We may spell great, know where the commas go, but it just doesn’t convert. Your copy writing is very crucial. There should be a couple of things in here that most people don’t realize. In sales copy you cannot use the shotgun effect. You can’t just throw something out there, like “we buy houses” and expected it to stick with everybody; it may only stick to 10% of the people, that’s it. So when you do your sales copy, like me, I’m a refugee and I can’t read or write but I understand this stuff because I’ve been doing it since high school. If I’m going to do long copies then I hire people to do it, but not just anybody because 99% of the people cannot do sales copy. I don’t even want to pay for someone else to do it wrong because they think they’re a good writer. Being a good writer has nothing to do with this. These are the two things that you need to do basically: you need to see your audience. If you go out there in a crowd where there’s so many people, are you seeing your audience? You’re seeing a lot of people, but you’re not really seeing anybody specifically. Only when you zoom in to that like anybody that has red clothes, then you could see here’s Johnny, Bobby, Sally or anybody that’s wearing black then you zoom in, all white people or all kids, and that’s when you can start seeing patterns.
It’s very important that you see your audience. If I am doing a letter to divorces I wouldn’t just say on there “hey, I buy houses”; seller might think you’re spamming me, I’m going through a divorce and I don’t want to hear this. What do they want? You want to be able to see your customer which is hey, this is a divorce, am I targeting the woman or the male, if you can do that then that’s great, but if not it doesn’t matter. But at least I know what they are. What kind of emotions are they going through? Which brings us to the second part – you have to be them. What kind of hardships? How are they’re going to be feeling? When is going to be the best time to reach out to them? And you have to consider all of that. If you’re doing the sales letters where it says, “I’ve been in business for seven years. I pay cash. I close fast. I have all of these cash buyers. I do this. I’m so good at this. My company does this.” Nobody cares. Do you think that somebody who is going through a divorce cares about how you’re going to buy their house or how much money you make? And how you have cash, and you’re going to make money off of them, and buy their home at 60¢ on a dollar. Do you think they care about that? Does this person really care about that? They don’t. One thing I forgot to put into the four factors is you have to build authority. We are all trying to make money, I’m trying to make money, you’re trying to make money, Mike’s trying to make money. But we have to go the extra miles and put the money aside so we can get the massive money or we’re just going to be stuck with the crumbs. Whenever I talk to a seller, I always try to help them build authority to let them know I’m an expert in this. I help them out. I tell them, you can do bankruptcy and if you want a couple of turns I’ll give you the phone numbers, you can do a short sale, you can do this, I try to educate them even if I don’t make any money. By me doing all of this stuff when nobody else does, the seller feels like this guy is an authority. And the great thing with this is there’s trust now.
Am I trying to make money? Absolutely. Am I willing to not make money and help this guy out? Hell yes. I’m willing to help this guy out and not get any money, because I’m the authority and I want to build trust. And I know that if I help this guy out, a) the creator will take care of me and b) this guy will be so happy he’s going to send me his friends and family. So I’ll win anyway. It’s very important that in your sales letters you’re not doing the type of marketing that’s called “Me, ME, ME” – I buy houses cash, I close quickly, we can do this, we give you this. It’s not about that, it’s about you educating and helping them. Now to get a good sales copy person, if you go to Freelancer or Upwork there’s hundreds and thousands of people there that will bid on it. Some bid cheap, middle, and some bid high. It doesn’t mean they’re good. To get somebody that’s really good you’re going to spend thousands of dollars.
But they understand the sales process, and that’s the whole thing because there’s a way to do sales especially on a piece of paper when you’re not even there. On a piece of paper, where you’re not seeing that person’s face- are they frowning, smiling, getting their guard up, are they listening, are they leaning forward?- so you have to present in a way that you’re absent. The sales copy is important and it should not be about Me, me, me. If you educate the seller, they’re going to come and find out about you, they will take the time and get on google and see who the heck Mr. Investor is or who Is Mike Park they’ll go up there and see who this guy is. And how do you build authority through the mails? Well you have to touch them multiple times, and every letter you send them should be something with vital information to them.
I have my ultimate marketing machine that has a library vault of 67 different type of audience segments like divorces, foreclosures, probate, and I could go on. 67 that I’ve used in my business, which I target specifically. 67 kind of pools of different places where you can fish and there’s not many people on there. It’s not like the MLS, nor like the auction with so many people bidding there. These are isolated pools of the fishes that are mapped out away from everybody. In the 67 segments I see the customer, I become them, and then I target them with information just for them. Am not doing general information that works for this guy and this guy, no.
I am doing a specific information, hired the very best person to do the copy writing because I can do short, but I can’t do long. Why would I even do that? I want to hire the very best because it cost so much money. We’ve talked about if you want to do 1,000 letters it’s going to cost you $1,000 bucks, although it will cost you more than that, but I’m just going very low. And the conversion later is not the greatest. So, If you guys are interested in getting the copy letter, let me remind you have a 67 different types of audiences, motivated seller audiences with different letters that go in deep – follow up- because remember we talked about doing multiple touches; not just a one-time letter. These copy-letters and postcards what they’re going to do is build authority from you to the seller, and it’s a copy and paste job. All you have to do is just copy and paste, then add your company phone number, and website address, and email if you want.
Just take that text and give it to a designer who can make a beautiful design or you could just do a normal black and white print and just send it out. What counts is that I see the audience, I become the audience; and I hired the very best person with years of experience in sales, and together we came up with a marketing machine that understands the customer, becomes the customer, we add authority, and we help them create a win-win situation. Now they’re calling you instead of you chasing them. If you’re interested in that, right now we’re having a special. This course (contains 67 different letters and postcards) retails for $500, but right now I’m letting you have it for $97. Why am I letting you have it at this price when I paid thousands and thousands of dollars for it? It’s because I want you to have success, I want you to use this; market, get your first check, take a picture of it and send it to me.
I just want you to make your first check and help you get to the next level, and I’m very confident this will help you do that if you take action. If you buy this and don’t take any action, does it work? Absolutely not. This package is only the letters and the postcards for the different types of audiences that are motivated and we do the authority building through multiple letters that you’re going to send to them. It does not have my filtering system, it only includes the marketing assets. If you’re interested in my filtering system, we’ll talk about that in a little bit. But right now, let’s move forward to the next topic which is very important.
The whole idea is that you’re trying to get a conversion from these letters, and to do that you need to understand what I call the 6 6 for Success. It is very crucial for you to understand this; if you don’t understand anything, it is crucial for you to do so with this. What the first six represents is that you have to follow up with any seller, in this case doing the mail-outs, you have to at least follow with them 6 times at the very minimum. This way you get the maximum conversion, the maximum juice; like when you have a wet towel and you squeeze all the oil, all of the money out of it because you worked so hard for it, it cost money and you need to get everything of it, so you have to follow up six times.
The other six talks about that you have to do six different Medias and this is where most people don’t get it right. What does this mean? If you’re just sending out the follow ups, six postcards back to back, you’re going to get a lot of conversions, way more than somebody that doesn’t do anything or more than somebody who only sends out one or two. But if you add the six other medians, you’re going to get the exponential conversion. What does that mean? It’s or , depends how big your list is. So, you send them the postcard, but you still have to touch them on six different types of median besides postcards. You may want to touch them on their Facebook instant messenger, you may want to run an ad on Facebook retargeting to retarget them, you may want to text message them, cold-call them, go to their door and place a door hanger on it, and when you use my filtering system you don’t have to go to 1,000 people’s homes and leave a door hanger because we narrowed them down to 30, so you only have to go to 30 people. And these people are the motivated people, the ones that raised their hand so you’re not going to just any random person.
You’re going to someone you spoke over the phone with, they showed motivation, and you’re hitting those people because you don’t have to spend a lot of time, if it’s 30 people you could probably get that done in one or two days. You’ll drive a lot if you do it yourself, but your conversion is going to be a lot. So basically you have to hit up people, follow-up, six times, and you have to use six types of media. Let’s say cold-calling, which is different than text messaging; also different than mailing or Facebook messenger, or Facebook ad, different than door hangers. You have to hit them up six times with six different media that way they’ll be like, “Darn this guy is everywhere. I just got a letter from him, I saw him on Facebook newsfeed, I got a text message from him, a cold-call from him, and somebody put a flyer. This guy is everywhere.” And this will make them think that it’s because you’re an authority. You’re using my ultimate marketing postcard machine that I’m letting you have for $97 bucks when I paid a lot more for it – and there’s people that paid the full price- you could just download it for 97 bucks. You’re building authority to that, they see you everywhere, and you know what you’re doing. You’re watching this stuff to know what you’re doing to build that authority. So, the second six is very important.
One of the reasons I don’t like to work the foreclosure list myself. When I first started, I went to all of the seminars and that’s what they sell you. I was thinking, this is a hot list. Here’s what I don’t like. I like to buy owner-financing and if I meet a seller that’s behind on their payment and they’re in a foreclosure I have to go in with a big sum of money and I don’t want to do that. I’d rather take the house when they’re not behind at all. I like to take the payments where the seller makes the payments. I don’t want to go in 5 to 10 grand to take over a house if it doesn’t have a lot of equity. The second reason why I don’t like foreclosures is because you don’t have a lot of time to work them; however, when I did work the foreclosure list I fired off those letters back to back, so I didn’t have to wait a whole week. That brings me to my VA filtering system. Since there’s such a short period of time, you can’t just wait for the letters. So let’s say you have that foreclosure list with a thousand people in it, and you spent $1, that equals $1,000, and the 10% rule, you got 10 leads. That’s a lot of money, if you divide $1000 into 10, you’re basically paying $100 per lead and that’s a lot. Yet it’s still not bad if you’re going to make 3000. You just spend $1,000 and you make $3000, that’s not bad.
I just have better ways of doing it, where I can spend 1,000 and make 20, or 1,000 and make 10, or not even spend 1,000, spend $100 and make ten. That’s my thing. There’s nothing wrong with the equation (1,000 to get 3,000), but it’s just too much.