Episode #233 – Making Money From Follow-Up, with Paul Do Campo, Part 1

You're listening to the REI marketing nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.

(0:38) All right, what's up everybody? This is Daniel Barron from AdWords nerds. And I am here with Paul D'Acampo from REI Omni drip.com. Paul, how are you my friend? Thanks for coming on the show.

(0:50) I'm doing great, man. And thanks for having me. Yeah, so we are going to get into not the weeds of marketing because that sounds negative. We're gonna get into some of the details of I think what makes marketing for real estate investors effective. This is going to be a highly sort of immediately applicable tangible SERP frag Matic sort of episode. I'm super excited to dig in. Before we do that, let's talk about you a little bit just kind of introduce you to the audience. So let's talk about who you are like what got you into real estate before he got into the drip and we'll talk about that in a second. What was your introduction into investing and how'd you get started?

(1:31) Yeah, it's started back in 2015. I think everybody's story is kind of similar where they they got Trump they have financial troubles or they want more and they read Robert Kiyosaki book Rich Dad Poor Dad that's right that's not everybody's gonna read it at least

(1:49) I wish I had a fantastic epic story on how I got into it No it's just the boring you know Rich Dad Poor Dad introduction but yeah you know the whole the whole nine yards you know the going down the rabbit hole of bigger pockets you know diving into that trying out mail doing all kinds of stuff but make make a long story short I got a I started land flipping that was kind of my bread and butter mobile home flipping as well mobile home into into notes with for that for the cash for the for the passive income there so there's that for a while at the same time I was doing this you know, I think everybody as an entrepreneur is going goes through a stage of like wading through tall grass not knowing exactly where they're gonna end up not even knowing no map to really to get to and so at the same time I'm in two paths.

I am doing I'm I'm land flipping mobile home flipping and at the same time I'm also learning about copywriting and I kind of just by accident fell into it I got a became investor karates copywriter by accident completely by accident they shot an email out to their to do list which I was a member saying hey we need a copywriter I said hey, why the hell not I can make a few extra bucks and did it ended up liking it ended up getting better better and better at it start taking up some more clients started implementing what I've been learning into my own my own businesses created a info publishing business where I was selling a real estate seminar online and then I am I'm here today we're copywriting is my main bread my main trade my main income every day for brands like Ryan Dawsey we call Porter which you've been on our podcast before and ballpoint marketing and then AMI drip which is my my own offer my own brand to help real estate investors really really fine tune their their follow up because I think it will every every client that almost comes to me for for to build a follow up everything is kind of is really all over the place.

It's chaotic. It's and they're they everybody falls in line into the leaky bucket problem right I think everybody's everyone's heard of the leaky bucket syndrome. And I wrote my dad actually, you know, before we get we got on this call we talked we talked about how Portuguese how my my family comes from from Portugal. My dad used to tell me a story.

This is like third world country back then. It's not today but they had no running water they had no electricity when my dad was a kid. And so he he would they actually had a well and he'd go in there manually with a you know, throw rope at the bucket and then pull out some water as that bucket had cracks had had cracks you can see you've pulled the water up and that water would be down to like a Fifth Third and you your your assumption would be oh we're running out of water here in this well without thinking I got cracks in this in his bucket. And that's a lot of investors I've I speak with a their problem their their complaint is there's no more. There's the deals are running out. There's no more deals in our market.

There's too is too is too crowded, it's too competitive. But the problem is that their bucket is they think that their bucket, there's no water in there well but the problem is their bucket is just keep spilling out water and so their back end funnel their back end drip the back And finally back back in marketing is weak, it sucks. It doesn't take an account for long term marketing that you can easily implement on automation, a mixture of automation and manual follow up to really rake in those those deals that come six months, eight months, a year after. So that's, you know, that's what I helped do I help investors fix your leaky bucket syndrome by better copy within their text messages, but also a 10,000 foot view of their organizing everything, getting everything in a place, making sure that that everybody has a that every sellers in the in the appropriate bucket. So they're they're being followed up with. So

(5:35) yeah, I think that is super powerful. And I just want to underline this because I think, you know, people who have listened this podcast, a lot will have heard me talk about this before, when I want to stress it again, in case you've never heard, we talked about this at AdWords nerds, we did sort of a, you know, a study of you know, what factors were correlating with which investors had the most success with their online marketing, right, we would go through and we would say, Okay, pick all of our clients for the last five years, or whatever it was, take all these factors, put it in a spreadsheet, do a correlation value and figure out like what is actually correlated with the amount of deals that they did the amount of time that they marketed all that stuff.

And I very strongly believed that what was going to correlate most powerfully with success was going to be budget size and market size, right? Big markets, big budgets, those things are going to correlate with deal flow and success. But overall, that wasn't really the case. There were some correlation there, but not very much. The number one correlated factor to long term success with online marketing was the strength of their follow up. Right? It was, how fast did they get to the lead? And how long? And how often and how well?

Did they follow up with those leads? Right, like Nick Perry, and many people listening to podcasts will be familiar with Nick. It's a very successful marketer, very successful real estate investor coach, just really, really great mind for setting up processes and systems was the first coaching student I ever took where I taught my Google Ads strategy to him. And then he went on to use it to really great success national Minister of wholesaling at the national level. I had him on the show recently. And we were talking and he was like, oh, yeah, just close to this is 2022. When we're recording this, he was like, I just closed a lead that came in and from 2016, right, like he has been following up with that lead ever since.

Right? And he just closed the right so it's it. This is such a massive force multiplier. I really, really want to want to make sure that people listen to this. This is not some like weird marketing detail. This is the difference between a positive and a negative ROI. So I want to start with copy. So we'll get to follow up and stuff. I have so many questions about that. I want to start with copy because I think copywriting is the critical marketing skill. I think it is under studied, it's under studied by me for sure. And I think investors particularly don't spend a lot of time on the copy. So

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(8:33) I want to ask you one. When you look out at the sort of the sort of ecosystem of real estate investor hoppy as it exists today, what do you see? What do you think about it? And to what are some things that investors can do to improve their copywriting? Generally, okay, so

(8:53) depending on the context of what you're doing, is going to change. Like if I come into table to do copywriting for real estate investors and to be you know, to be, to be honest, if we're talking about lead generation, in the form of direct mail, there's not a whole lot, because we're not trying to convince anybody to just sell. All we're doing is you're just trying to weed through all the hay and find out who's selling. That's it. We just we just try to get somebody to raise their hand to our cash up. Now, where does copy come into play into that? You could, you can be creative on to what you're up.

Copy, you can boil it down to who you're sending it to and what are you offering investors the only thing we're really offering usually on a 90% of investors out there is a cash offer so can't really do much with that. The other the third component the other component, is you might want to throw in a feature and benefit. So that feature benefits are like the basic fundamental like the first thing that somebody who's going through any kind of copywriting course seminar For mentor, that's like the first thing you learn it's very basic features of benefits. feature is what is our cash offer? That's what we're giving?

The benefit is what does that cash offer do for, for the seller, I think we, a lot of times assume that, that they know exactly what we're bringing to the table. But they don't realize that, that cash to get that cash offer could mean that they, they saves them from embarrassment if, say they're going to foreclosure. And they have to put a sign up to list the property. Because they're going to foreclosure that cash offer could mean they can sell with all their all the crap left behind. And I I actually had to deal with this. Not that I was a motivated seller, but But you have so much junk piled up in your house, and it's like, what the hell am I gonna do with all this, it's

(10:44) gonna go like, anytime you move, it's never been so painful in your entire life to like, realize just how much stuff you have. And like, you got that drawer that's just filled with like, had locks and keys, you don't like weird stuff. And it's like, I gotta move. That's like a nightmare, right? So,

(11:00) so how much of a relief it is to for a motivated seller. I mean, you don't have to be motivated to be like, This guy is gonna buy this house, and I don't have to be embarrassed by the amount of crap that I haven't good. I want to lift it up, just leaving the George sleeve that furniture behind, we're good. So there's about a dozen a hunt. You know, one of the best exercises that was that somebody told me to do early on in my career by an old school best shirt. This is, you know, I was having trouble being being face to face with sellers trying to try to, quote, convince them to even consider my cash offer, as he told me to sit down and write down 50 to 100 different ways that you bring value to a seller.

And that exercise really, it gave me confidence in what I can I that I actually bring some value to to this market, I think that's a lot of a lot of newbies struggle with that, it's like, they think it's just about price is just about the discounted price. When it's not that there's a whole lot more that goes behind in the sellers head that you can help bridge the gap, you can help bring bring a solution to it. So all those are the benefits that we can have there, that list that I wrote down is is a is all the benefits we can bring.

So that's something in terms of follow up marketing, going back to follow marketing, that is the biggest thing that a lot of people have struggle struggle with, from writing a follow up marketing messaging system is they can't think outside of the variations of are you still interested in selling that's like, you know, two or three variations of that. And that's their whole messaging format. But when in reality, there's like I said, there's a dozen or so benefits that we can actually remind them of we can say, you know, Hey, John, this is Tim, again, letting you know that we're still interested in buying your house, and you can leave all your unwanted things behind call me so we can lock in that price.

A simple like, I again, it's the it's asking if they're selling instead of selling, but you're also subtly giving them a reason why that they may not be aware of or to remind them of it again, you know, the next message may list another benefit or feature, you know, so that's probably the simplest way they can people can use copy is the whole basic principle of, of highlighting the benefits you bring to the table. And the other. The other thing, the other tip, I guess I can say this is probably the easiest tip I can give for for copy for improving copy for real estate investors.

It's not talking as if you're from the HR department. Okay? That's like, I see so many emails come in, from investors in different different businesses that I man, we've got, like some engagement. I'm not gonna go into that, but But email is stuff that comes into the table, these investors are starting conversation with us. And you know, they're talking as if like, you know, that is straight out of the HR department, everything's proper. Everything's proper English, nobody talks that way. So even if you're writing to a professional, if it's an attorney, even if it's an agent, a manager, a property manager, get the habit of and I know this probably goes against what you think is the proper way of writing, but it's really not right, like Joe Schmo, right like you talk.

That's probably because it just it you can communicate things more clearly. And you come in as, hey, this guy's like me, rather than you're setting your you're putting yourself up on a pedestal, which people don't like there's a famous negotiator, Jim camp, supposedly he taught Chris Voss, but he talked a lot about this called the Columbo effect, where you come into negotiation, and if you come in, all slick, all in a nice car, fancy car, you're setting yourself up really high on a pedestal, where people don't like looking up on that pedestal, they don't like looking up, they rather look eye to eye or even below.

So he says he talks a lot about how in negotiation, it's okay to stutter to to have your things fall on the ground to look kind of foolish or, you know, like, like Columbo and if you ever remember the show Columbo he's kind of aloof you kind of just you know didn't didn't think much of him so because the reason why is because then it it bro makes the barrier it the tightness people get when they're talking with a stranger. And so that now they can bring value to defenses a bit. So the copy tip for that, you know, just write like you talk law explanation, right, like you talk. Yeah,

(15:12) it comes down to personality, right. I mean, and I think the one the one criticism, not the one criticism because I have several criticisms. But one of the many criticisms I have, like kind of the state of investor marketing in general is that it's very hamachi. Right? It is extremely uniform. You can't tell the difference between any four companies, if you're looking at their websites, just everybody has this weird house logo that they got on Fiverr. And the company is called, like, I do something to houses you know.org or whatever.

And then there's no pictures of people and there's no personality and jet right in I think, even a little bit of personnel goes an incredibly long way. Like you said, that feeling of looking up at someone because they've established themselves as this really professional sort of formal shirt entity. That's anxiety inducing. And I think if you put yourself into this, the footsteps of a motivated seller that prisons already experiencing a lot of anxiety, they don't need the pressure of having, you know, like Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, walking into their house and being like, you know, giving them the Alec Baldwin speech from Glengarry Glen Ross, right? I mean, it's like, that's a lot of mixed media metaphors there.

But you get what I'm saying. It's like, that's the no one likes that. And so it's a bad experience, right? But if you're like, Hey, what's up? It's Paul. Like, even that is just more okay, I get I get who I'm talking to. Right. So I wanted to ask you, uh, let's, let's get into follow up specifically. So Omni drip, which is your your kind of product or service your company, right? You are focused on follow up. So let's define a little bit about what we're talking about when we talk about follow up, right? So we're talking about just as a general concept, usually, someone's coming to my website, right?

They're giving me their email or their phone number or something, they're opting in in some way. And then for whatever reason, they are not closing immediately, then in their right there, they're not just throwing their keys at me as they drive by my office, right, there's going to be a little bit more of a relationship building than that. So walk me through what we're talking about when we talk about, like a follow up sequence for people who aren't familiar with that terminology. Right.

(17:29) Okay. So well, like you said, this has to do with lead coming in, I think I had a couple of people who wanted to use this for cold emailing, it's technology like this, or this doesn't work that way, this is for a warm lead, you spoke with them, or they or it's inbound. So they've they've contacted you via your site via some kind of marketing number you have out there, there's two ways you can look at this for follow up. One is, it's more for like the after the after effect, when you when you really can't get a hold of a of a seller or you or that you've they've expressed you know that ready to sell that the majority I think of investors do it that way.

And that's fine. As long as they have on the front end, you know, the first three, four weeks, they have a very organized structure for manual follow up the other way you can utilize utilize what I do utilize what I've done for E commerce businesses is follow up begins right when that lead comes in, we have CRMs that are advanced that can do lots of cool things in simple ways where we can utilize automations utilize some click of the buttons and turn on a sequence as soon as somebody enters into our world to to start conversations to start building credibility report. Okay, so how I look at it is this, it's all funnel. As soon as somebody steps into a our world, they're giving us permission to market to them.

So if it's if they come into our world, there's different stages that can happen, right? They you know, the first stage is they miss a call from us. Okay, so that's, that's one type of follow up sequence, you know, we just keep powering them until we get contact, they miss an appointment when they book an appointment with us, right. So that could be a sequence or either you know, part of your SOP part of your procedure where you have something in place to send them before the appointment.

This is why I call pre selling because whenever I enter into a company with this isn't just real estate this is I'm actually doing this right now for another company that's outside of real estate, but I'm trying to pre sell the person before they get on sales call pre selling building rapport building them as the as the as the credible authority in their market in their local market for make sure making sure they know exactly what they're stepping into, before they get on sales call. That's that way the sales call isn't like is just a q&a type of thing. It's it's more of order taking, you know, so So that's one part of it.

There's different sequences that we set up that it's more event based so you get off a call with the seller they expect As to Hey, your offers too low, we're just going to go fix the house ourselves. Great. That's a sequence of follow up that we can do, where it leverages that exact scenario. So that that leverages the pain points of that exact scenario, or they just told us an objection. Right. So now we have copy that we that we can leverage to overcome that objection, right. Because realistically, for that sequence of that type of seller, most of them aren't going to be actually picking a hammer up and fixing themselves.

There's a point that we can give them value, we can tell them exactly Hey, these are the five items you need to make that give you the most bang for your buck for your remodel, pay, make sure that you tell your insurance, that you're remodeling or this this can happen. So we're giving value to so that, hey, we're credible source, we're been top of mind so that when they when they we so when they realize, hey, to do repairing how sucks, I'm not going to be doing this, I'm going to call that dude that keeps messenger me bugging me about all these all this value, add stuff, I'm just gonna I'm gonna call him back because I can't handle fixing the house myself. So that's one example.

So anyway, to answer your long story short, I look at as a funnel, there's, there's a sequence for pretty much any time there's a new event that changes. I, I leaked, I segment my leads as well. So what I mean by that is some of my sequences, I split them up into owner occupant landlord with tenants, and a vacant house lead, I don't do this for all of them. Because I try to keep things as simple as possible, I touch on my sequences, very simply, very clear cut cut, so that everyone can use it properly. But for some of you, I do split up where it makes sense.

And the reason why I do that is because the pain points of a landlord tenant is far different than somebody with a vacant house. Right? So that those are that's copy that I can leverage there that separates the two leads, right? If I get up, get off the phone, and they express to me that they you know, I'm gonna go go ahead and rent the house instead, I'm just gonna keep keep writing it, well, then I can leverage some copy that pertains to those pain points. They're going to they're going to discover later down the road, right? Does it make sense to send that same message the same type of copy to a vacant house lead or owner occupant?

So those are kind of the fundamentals for follow up like I mean to answer your question, what is follow up? Yeah, look at his two ways. One is, is you it's like an after effect. You after you've manual followed up quite a bit. Or it's a holistic approach. It's when they enter in you have a system in place, automated or manual that follows that lead from beginning of the funnel to the end of the funnel. I even have sequences I encourage people to put sequences in the after the deal closed.

Hey guys, hope you enjoyed part one of this episode is just too good to limit one show. Join us next week to hear the rest

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