Meeting Minutes: Direct Mail Campaigns

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This post is part 3 of 6 detailing what my partner and I went over during our annual meeting this year.  The point of this meeting was to come up with a plan that will create a more consistent and profitable business for 2013.

The items we covered in our meeting are listed below.  To view prior posts related to this series click on the link for that topic.

  1. Budget
  2. Sweet Spot Areas
  3. Sweat Equity
  4. Mail Campaigns
  5. Education
  6. SI Lead Manager

Mail Campaigns

Over the past 2 years, our direct mailing campaigns centered around out-of-state owners (or Absentee Owners).  The results have been a mix bag because we have been getting a great response rate to our letters, but the number of motivated sellers hasn’t been to our liking.  This could be for a few reason, but with a limited budget I don’t have the time or funds to keep testing this market when there might be a better market to go after.

I’ve had lengthy talks with my partner and my coach about the best direction to go and we all agreed, Probate.  We aren’t going to totally eliminate out-of-state owners from our direct mail, but it’s priority will be moved down a bit.  Probate won’t have as many total leads as we got with out-of-state owners so it’ll help me regain control of my budget.

Here are the campaigns that we are going to be running in 2013….

Probate.  My partner will be pulling these leads from the court houses of 4 counties each month.  The good thing about probate is that we won’t ever run out of new leads like we were about to do with absentee owners.  From talking to a few other investors in my circle, they have confirmed that probate is returning a much higher rate of deals per lead compared to other lead types.

For probate, my planned letter campaign looks like this…

  • 1st mailing – a letter 6 weeks after probate case was filed
  • 2nd mailing – a letter 10 weeks after probate case was filed (or 1 month after 1st letter)
  • 3rd mailing – a letter 14 weeks after probate case was filed (or 1 month after 2nd letter)
  • 4th mailing – a postcard 6 months after case was filed
  • 5th mailing – a postcard 12 months after case was filed

 

Evictions.  My partner will also pull these leads when he goes to the courthouse.  Evictions must be mailed out quickly because you want to hit the owner while he is going through the eviction process and or while the property is vacant.  Once another tenant is placed, his motivation will drastically decline.  There aren’t many of these so it won’t take up much of my budget, plus it is a one and done postcard.

Campaigns

  • 1st mailing – postcard same day we pull the eviction notice
Out-of-State Owners.  With the left over budget from probate and evictions we will mail out to OOSO.  I’m going to guess and say we will have about $2000 (or $166 /mo) to throw at this lead type.  That is less the half of our past budget and that is okay because we have narrowed down our targeted areas.
Campaigns
  • 1st mailing – a letter whenever we pull the list from the tax records
  • 2nd mailing – a letter 3 months later
  • 3rd mailing – a letter 6 months after 1st mailing
  • 4th mailing – a postcard 9 months after 1st mailing
Lease Options.  Once everything is done for the month, the remaining focus will be learning and going after lease options for me.  I’m not really sure how this will work or how much money it will take.  My coach said that it is very cheap and could put some extra money in our pockets.  Hopefully that is the case.   Does anyone have any good lease option courses they would lend me?

 

 

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