Using direct mail to attract motivated sellers is my favorite marketing technique. There are several reasons for this. The first is that generally speaking, there is no competition for these properties whatsoever. Much of your competition don’t use direct mail and the sellers themselves generally don’t know they are going to sell their house until they receive contact from you. They know they have a problem to solve, they just don’t know how until you are there to help them.
Secondly, once you build a machine whereby you have direct mail campaigns going out on a regular basis, you create an ongoing source of leads. Not only do you have deals coming at you today, you are constantly planting seeds for future deals. As these sellers’ situations change, they will contact you first because you took the time to create credibility with them through your mailings.
Another really great thing about direct mail is that since it is very targeted to specific lists, you are getting the very best use of the marketing dollars available to you. The more you do direct mail campaigns the higher the response rate gets. So the more you do it, the less it costs. Direct mail is the only marketing technique out there that allows you to do this. In addition, you are using your available marketing dollars to target specific types of sellers as opposed to other types of marketing like signage or an ad where you are hitting a much broader market area. You should always have between three and five marketing techniques working at any given time and one of them should absolutely be direct mail campaigns.
There are several great ways to get the lists you need to mail to. For the most part they are very easy to get. You can get lists to mail to from your local newspaper, from the property assessors office, from mailing list companies, from the courthouse or from a company called First American Real Estate Solutions. For more information on direct mail campaigns and how to acquire lists, please visit my web site at Marketingmagiclady.com.