One of my biggest annoyances when sending out mailers is making sure I have all the needed supplies. I always run out of stamps, envelopes or even the paper that I’m using. When I run out of these things it means a 40 minute round trip to the nearest office supply store to pick these things up. This doesn’t work out to well when you only have a certain amount of time to put the mailers together. At the end of the day, the less I have to remember to do the happier I’ll be.
So I got to thinking, is there a service that I can have any of these items mailed to me on a monthly basis? Sure I could buy them all in bulk, but having a large one time expenditure is not possible in my current situation. What I ended up finding out is I can have USPS send me a roll of 100 stamps on a monthly basis for each month over a 6 or 12 month period. I don’t know why I never thought about this before but I signed up immediately. If anyone is also interested in this you can go to the link below. The cost is $44 + $1 for shipping.
Next I’m going to hunt down an envelope source. Some other things I’m throwing around to try and either save money or keep me from having to run around picking up supplies.
Kinkos
Is it cheaper to go to kinkos and print out my letters? The cost of ink from my printer is going to add up big time. Also will kinkos allow you to supply your own paper? Sounds like a stupid question but they probably don’t have the type of paper I want to use.
Writing Yellow Letters by Hand
I want to shorten my probate letter a little bit and write them out by hand to check out the response rate. There are only 80 leads per month so I might be able to pull it off if I do 5 a day.
Other Updated Items
I printed, stuffed, addressed and stamped 84 new letters to be going out tomorrow. This time I’m running a split test by hand writing the mailing address on 42 of them and printing the other 42 using the printer. On my excel spreadsheet I noted which once went out with hand written envelopes so I could keep track of who called back.
Tomorrow I’ll be sending out a followup postcard to my December list.
Yesterday I met Jon Zorrer for dinner and we talked about setting up an online lead generation process for probates. He gave me some good ideas and pointed out some of the things I may have been doing wrong. The main point that I was getting wrong was not targeting Morris County probates only. I was casting my net for the entire state of New Jersey which, as we all know is about 20 counties more then what I want to do at this moment.
Well that’s about it for today, I just wanted to let everyone know how my week is going. Making some progress.
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Comments 14
Scott,
With the calls you have been getting that are priced to high, are you forwarding those to a realtor? Might help you get a lead fee to help pay for your marketing.
Scott, you might want to consider creating your own font of your own handwriting for use with your yellow letters. $10 bucks gets you there. Better to spend a few bucks on red ink for the printer than burn hour after hour handwriting your YL's. Ugh…
http://www.yourfonts.com/
Or, use someone else's for free if your handwriting is like mine. Shitty….
http://www.free-fonts.com/handwriting_fonts.html
FYI, my historical call response rate after working probates for 2.5 yrs in 2 different states, 5 different counties is 12%. Close rate is 8% of responders. Now that I'm licensed I'm expecting higher close rates, but we'll see.
Stop handwriting. Use technology.
Best,
Taylor
Scotty, I'm with Taylor. Don't forget about that great “DIY: Yellow Letter Marketing” post that Justin did for you….you're handy with the computer..just use a mail merge, print those suckers out on yellow lined paper and call it a day 🙂
I couldn't agree more. Time is one resource that cannot be regained after it is spent.
Scott, I agree with Taylor and Shae. And Justin did do a pretty detailed how to on the DIY yellow letter. With your computer savvyness you will have it up and running in no time!
I love the stamp subscription idea. I generally get the roll of stamps when I go to the post office but never knew they had a subscription for them. Awesome idea Scott!
I am SO glad everyone on here is telling you to not hand write those letters Scott!! Seriously!!! We did a little photo copy magic trick with our hand written letters leaving a space for the name and address and ta da!!! You couldn't tell the whole letter was not hand written. And even with 90% of the work done we still hired somebody to write the envelope, address the letter with the name and stick the stamp on!! Total cost including supplies and stamps was less than $1.50 per letter.
On another note … I am so happy to hear you're testing and tracking!! My vote is that your hand written envelopes will perform better but I look forward to hearing your results but to be a really good test you should probably send out 100 of each!! Hard to get conclusive results from such a small sample size.
Great post!!! And great comments from everyone!!!
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I've actually asked these leads if they would be interested me referring them a realtor. Each time they've said they have one already they are using or know of. Would you send the referral to my “realtor friend” anyway?
For the envelopes I've used someone else's hand written font before. But for my next mailing I'm going to see about creating my own yellow letter with my own font like you mentioned. See how it turns out.
Many thanks Taylor! you always give good advice
I actually did forget about that article and will go back and refer to it. Thanks Shae!
It's amazing how out of 24 hours in a day, I only have 4 hours, 4 to 5 days a week to work on real estate. That is less then 20% of my day. Seems like I should be able to have more time then that, but I don't and I shouldn't waste it, your right.
It's amazing how out of 24 hours in a day, I only have 4 hours, 4 to 5 days a week to work on real estate. That is less then 20% of my day. Seems like I should be able to have more time then that, but I don't and I shouldn't waste it, your right.
I'll come up with something and post a video on how I did it. Could be an interesting alternative to the way Justin created his letters.
Those calls should start coming in shortly, I'm looking to see what the difference is myself. I'm a man of automation for sure, but sometimes I like to break things down to the most basic level and rebuild in order to get a better understanding on how things work.
If I can get a baseline for how well hand written letters work I then can compare how alternate methods stack up against it and then go with the automated solution that comes closest to the handwritten method.
That's basically what I was driving at