Let’s revisit postcard marketing. That’s correct, we will discuss an old school method for getting motivated house seller leads. It’s one of those methods real estate investors have used since the inception of the industry. If you get one of these postcards close to your nose, I bet it will smell like it’s the 1980’s all over again. Seriously, postcards are a great way to get house seller leads in your pipeline, and we’ll discuss them in the paragraphs that follow.
We did cover the topic of direct mail for real estate investors in other posts, and we even had an experienced direct mail marketer as a guest on our REI Marketing Nerds podcast. Don’t be surprised: if we manage online marketing campaigns for finding motivated sellers (PPC, SEO and coaching), that doesn’t mean that we don’t value traditional methods as well.
In fact, we encourage investors to use multichannel marketing (including postcards), because that adds diversity to your lead stream. It’s simply putting the Parthenon model in practice.
Now off to postcards.
In direct mail campaigns, you can use letters, mailers, flyers, postcards, etc. And a lot of what can be said about direct mail for sourcing motivated house seller leads, applies to postcards as well.
However, let’s single out several features that are specific for postcards.
Postcards are affordable – in most cases, postage for postcards is cheaper than it is for letters. And since in direct mail campaigns postcards are sent in bulk, it’s a cost effective alternative to letters.
Postcards are accessible – or at least more accessible than letters. No envelopes, no enclosures, nothing to open, everything is available right away.
Postcards can be read fast – recipients can check the postcard out on their way from the mailbox to the porch, especially if you design an “attention grabber.” Your marketing message is consumed immediately.
Postcards are generic – they are less personal than letters. Everyone receives the same marketing postcard, unless you personalize yours and make them stand out (more on that below).
Postcards are obviously marketing – as soon as the recipient looks at the postcard, they’re aware that they’ve received yet another piece of marketing, so your postcard may end up in the trash along with many other similar types of mail.
Postcards have limited space – there’s not a lot of space to place your message (sometimes only a couple of sentences and a photo or a graphic). Also, competition is tough, and you don’t have a lot of real estate, pun intended, to set your business apart from the dozens of real estate investors who’ve sent a postcard as well.
All that being said, how do you design a postcard that brings motivated seller leads? We’ll explore this in the next section.
Now, this is just a postcard you send to the mailbox of a house owner – it’s not rocket science. However, real estate investors would benefit from a quick run through over the optimal choice for each element of the marketing postcard. This applies especially to those of you who decide to design your postcards by yourself, instead of hiring a professional.
Let’s dive in.
We’ll cover the text and the graphics.
You have several options when it comes to the text you are going to include in the postcard. Some real estate investors send text-only postcards (it works great if you use attention grabber like “notice” printed in all caps using a big font). Then, there is the standard two sided postcard design, where one side has graphics, while the other has the text. Alternatively, you can go for a design that is somewhere in between.
What you can’t leave out is the following:
You need to make your postcard stand out in the recipient’s mailbox, but you don’t have much space to do it. Don’t worry, it can be done. It’s what email marketers do when they optimize the subject line in an email campaign. Or what digital marketers do when they edit the opening sequence for a video ad. You give your best shot to attract the attention of the recipient.
The easiest way to do this is to use biology to your advantage. Now, the eye follows movement, but you can’t use 3D fonts or text that transforms when you change the viewing angle (you can, but it’s not recommended: it gets mixed response, it’s more expensive to print, and you’ll lose recipients with poor eyesight). What else can you do to make the recipient stop their internal dialog for a moment? Precisely what we did here – ask a question.
Questions boost engagement in social media, and they work offline, too. Once you have their attention, you can deliver your pitch. You can include social proof (for example, social media posts), to support the pitch. We will check specific examples of text for a marketing postcard in the templates below.
Before we turn to that, let’s examine another great way to grab the postcard recipients attention – graphics.
Nothing beats graphics when it comes to using biology to tease the recipient to take a look at your postcard. The visual component can draw the eye better than any text.
Unfortunately, every direct mail marketer knows this, so you have a lot of visual competition in the mailbox: flyers, regular mail, postcards, etc. Some of it comes from other real estate investors in your market. The rest of it comes from a ton of other retailers who offer products or subscription services. How to make your postcard visually different?
The jury is out on that one, and the only way to find out is to test multiple designs. You can use bright colors, like red or yellow, because it draws the eye. You can feature a distressed property as a backdrop – this is quite common in campaigns for motivated seller leads. And you can use a generic photo or a graphic, especially if you go for full color postcards.
The key for nailing the visual component of the postcard is to adjust the design to your target audience. As we already shared in the post on direct marketing, if you hire good direct marketing professionals they’ll be able to single out a postcard design that has brought results to other real estate investors. Some even present case studies. Just keep in mind that the campaign metrics in the case study apply to a specific market, and there is a chance that they might not work for you.
Enough with guidelines on designing postcards, let’s look at some practical examples.
In other industries this is known as building brand awareness. In real estate investing, this is a postcard (direct mail) campaign whose goal is to let house owners in the area that you buy houses in their neighborhood. It’s a general introduction, something like: “we are these guys and we give cash for houses” usually with a full list of type of deals you’re interested in.
“We buy houses fast, in cash!
We buy houses as is – regardless of their condition, size or location.
We buy:
houses in probate
houses in foreclosure
code violation properties
tax delinquent houses
XYZ Real Estate 5 555 555 5555”
This is the type of postcard where you let everyone know that you are ready to close on short notice. Of course, you first need to make sure that you are able to deliver. Once you’ve participated in a couple of transactions within the real estate market, you should be able to do this, particularly with all the help you can get from data companies on house prices in the neighborhood.
You can use a similar template to the one we shared above, and add:
“We give offer in 48 hours
We close within 7 days,
We cover closing costs for you
No commission fees.
Get at offer at (phone or website)”
In a nutshell, this is the postcard where you push your unique selling proposal (if you have one). Do your best to present your company as an authority on a certain type of deal by providing specifics about your process. The actual text can vary. For example, if you specialize in houses in probate, you can add something like:
“We have bought X houses in probate in the last X years.
If you are the executor of a probate we can help you sell the house.
We buy houses in probate within time constraints.
We can help you transport the household belonging you want to keep
And we make a donation to a charity the deceased cared about.”
There’s not much that can be said about offering compensation for referrals in a postcard. You simply include the specifics:
“We give $500 for referrals on houses.
To redeem your cashback, contact us at XXX-XXX”
and that’s it. You give incentive to the recipient to find a house for sale for you. Just make sure the postcard clearly states the amount of the compensation. Also, let them know that it’s a one time cashback as opposed to a finder fee or commission.
Yes, you got it right – this is the postcard version of a yellow letter. We are aware that postcards usually don’t have as much space for written text as letters, however, you can easily optimize any yellow letter template to fit into a smaller text box.
The yellow postcards can be easily customized these days. You can even add a touch of personalization by inserting the homeowner’s name or the full address of the property in the text. The recipient is bound to read it – after all, how often do they receive a handwritten postcard?
We won’t include yellow postcard templates here because we’ve shared yellow letter templates in this article.
It’s the mailed version of bandit signs, the main differences being: postcards are legal. So, no one can fine you for “postcard as a bandit sign”, and no official will set out to remove postcards from a mailbox. You can include the full company details and wait for the phone to ring.
You go for the bare minimum:
“We buy houses, in cash
In any condition, any situation
Contact us at XXX-XXX
XYZ Real Estate Company”
This is the type of postcard in which you introduce a limiting factor. For instance, “our budget allows us to buy only two more houses in this neighborhood.” Obviously, it’s impossible to create a sense of urgency in a sellers market (like the one we have now) where house offers create bidding wars and home owners can pick and choose the offer they like.
However, keep the idea about instilling urgency in house sellers in your back burner – the market will change at some point.
Give the recipient a reason to keep the postcard once they read it. The idea behind this type of postcard is to provide something useful, like a calendar or program of a local fair, so that homeowners think of your company when they need a service related to real estate.
With postcards, you have many options to become creative. For instance, you can print the postcard with instructions for folding the paper into a house. The object can vary, another example is an animal like the mascot of the local sports team.
Your real estate investing business will definitely stand out if the homeowner’s kids enjoyed doing origami papercraft with the postcard you sent to them as marketing. You can’t do this with a letter.
Suppose you design the perfect postcard for your next direct mail campaign. If you’ve been involved in the real estate investing industry, you know that the success of postcard marketing for finding motivated sellers doesn’t depend on postcard design alone.
Other aspects of the campaign, like
have a big influence, too, and we’ll touch upon them now.
Traditional (offline) campaigns for finding motivated sellers are as good as the mailing lists used in the campaign. Before you launch postcard marketing for your real estate investing company, revisit the concept of the motivated house seller to make sure you aren’t missing a group of home owners who might sell their house to you. Once you have a motivated seller list, you can further filter the entries to target the right kind of homeowner with the mailing list and bring quality leads in your funnel.
Of course, you can also send postcards to every house within a specific ZIP code, that’s a legitimate way to get leads, too.
It’s hard to determine the exact value of postcards (and direct mail in general) for real estate investors, mostly because it depends on the marketing plan you have in place. However, you are likely to run a postcard campaign alongside campaigns on your other marketing channels, like social media (Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest), pay-per-click Google Ads, and whatever else you have in your plan.
We’ve discussed the lessons that apply to both direct mail and online marketing in another post, and here, we will consider one specific element you can use in postcards: QR codes.
QR codes make it easy for users to:
They are great for blending traditional and online marketing campaigns. Real estate investors are inserting QR codes on business cards and postcards, and recipients become more savvy using them (except those who don’t use smart gadgets). So, you can consider adding a QR code to your postcards – they can help you create synergy between different marketing channels.
You can’t really expect that someone will sell you their house because they’ve received one postcard from you – the transaction is way bigger than that, even if your motivated seller is in distress. Therefore, plan your marketing presence in advance and think of ways to maintain it.
Direct mail campaigns are usually done in a sequence (two or three parcels in six months), so you can adopt the same sending frequency for your postcards. Also, establishing a relationship with motivated sellers before they actually need you has become the norm, and a sequence of postcards can put you on the map.
We can talk about postcard design, campaign must-haves, and sending frequency all day, but the measure of success in marketing ultimately comes from home owners – if they do what you asked them to do (call a phone, visit a website, book a meeting) then you are doing something right.
Now, we are the digital marketing nerds, and we won’t miss a chance to point out that performance metrics for online campaigns are far more elaborate than the feedback you get from postcard marketing. However, you will get valuable info from postcard metrics, too.
In direct mail, if you get a response rate of 1% – 2% that’s great. Some real estate investors report response rate of 6% from motivated sellers who were targeted with postcard marketing. As we mentioned above, double check each marketing case study you come across, because the two different postcard campaign might not be comparable.
The best way to find out which postcard converts more is to do split testing and to note the feedback you are getting from home owners in the market.
Postcards, along with letters and flyers, can carry the punch of your direct mail campaign for finding motivated sellers in real estate investing. They are one of the most traditional ways to get seller leads, but they can fit in your multichannel marketing strategy, along with your digital channels.
Postcards are cheaper than letters, they offer small text box, and they have a lot of competition in the recipient’s mailbox. Yet, if you pick the right graphics or if you write a good copy, you might get the conversion rate you are after.
Use one of the real estate investing postcard templates we’ve shared with you, or tweak them a bit to make it your own and start your direct mail campaign. There are a lot of ways to integrate your postcard campaign for motivated sellers with your online marketing, you just need to choose what’s in line with your overall marketing plan.
Follow performance metrics and change postcard design and copy accordingly. Every lead in your funnel counts, so act like it’s so.
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