Probate Monday: Lead Manager Update and Mailers

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Probate Investing MondayWelcome back from the holiday weekend everyone!  Hopefully you all had a chance to relax and hang out with your family and friends at a bbq or something similar.  The weather in NJ was awesome the entire weekend, mid 70’s and no humidity at all to speak of.  That is my kind of weather!

Because it was a holiday weekend I held off on sending out my probate letters until today, in fact I dropped them off in the mailbox at 9:30pm.  There were 106 of them and I am continuing to use the shorter letter.  So far it has been getting about a 5 to 6 percent response rate which is a bit lower then the letter from Ron Meads course, but I like the leads that I’m getting better and the letter seems to be going over better with the owners.

Lead Manager

I’ve been using my Lead Manager software now for 3 months and I have discovered one feature that needs to be reworked.  The way I handle keeping track of mailers is lacking.  Currently I setup mailers by List, and then create the schedule (recurring mailings) based on the list.  Here is the problem with doing it that way…

  • I can’t easily send out different mail types depending on a particular recurrence.  For example if I want to send out a postcard with the 2nd and 3rd mailings.
  • I can’t easily adjust the mail piece if a person has responded once.  Say I want to send that person a different letter then the rest of the people in that list?  Can’t do that unless I move the person to another list and then I lose the ability to keep stats on a list basis.
  • Keeping a history of the mailings.   Right now i have to look back at the schedule in order to view a “history” which is not convenient or quick

My solution is to start tracking mailings by individual lead.  This has multiple advantages and I can really fine tune how everything works together.  I’m also creating a new interface to create mailings that will allow you to schedule a mailing based on..

  • a lead
  • multiple leads
  • a list
  • multiple lists

Since the program will also save to history all the mail pieces you’ve sent out, you’ll be able to quickly view a leads mailing history.  I’d also like to add the ability to print out a report that tells you

  • the response rates per letter type
  • the response rate of each of the recurring mailings. (i.e. 7% for mailing 1, 3% for mailing 2, 1% for mailing 3, 10% for mailing 4, etc…)
  • if postcards work better then letters on the first mailing

New Updates

For those that have downloaded the program already, I’m about two weeks away from releasing an update that will fix most of the bugs that have been reported to me and also have some enhancements to some of the screens.  Some of these enhancements include

  • Filtering on the List module (similar to what is on the leads module)
  • being able to select specific leads to print out
  • Filtering of leads and then printing letters based on that filtered data
  • Lead Editing module no longer pops up but is shown with in the main window like the List and Leads modules
  • and more…

Long term goals

  • Be able to print directly through Click2Mail.com (they just released an API that will allow me to do just that)

What’s up for the rest of this week?

Tomorrow I will post about my first assignment that I got from Jon Zorrer’s coaching program.  It was quite in-depth and took me 3 days to finish.  I am going to completely throw myself into this coaching and do what ever it takes and calls for.

I’ve also finished the book All Marketers are Liars Tell Stories by Seth Godin.  As I did with the last book I read, after I write my review I will be giving this book away as well so keep an eye out for that in the coming days.

Scott Costello
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