What is Real Estate Direct Mail Marketing?
Real Estate Direct Mail Marketing is the practice of sending something – like a token, magnet, or postcard to prospective clients, asking for an appointment, or outlining a specific offer.
It’s also a fantastic way to showcase your previous work if you use your imagination.
Imagine a colorful postcard split into four blocks. Real estate direct mail marketing lets you showcase houses you have sold, with the happy buyers and their sales agents out front.
Because of the pictures, it will immediately attract the client’s attention and will ensure that you stand out from the rest of the crowd.
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Direct mail marketing helps you to engage with your selected audience and, in some ways, is better than digital advertising.
A survey taken in 2017 showed that direct mail campaigns had a higher return on investment than digital campaigns.
Real estate direct mail marketing can cut costs and track advertising campaign results.
Adding direct mailing to your marketing strategy also helps you to target the most likely buyers and sellers by region.
This makes direct mail marketing advertising very easy to measure. It will help guarantee good results and land you the prospective buyers you are on the lookout for.
The logical question is, “How can direct mail marketing work for real estate agents and investors?” Let’s expound on this topic a little because although it may seem that our entire world is now digital, surprisingly, traditional mail still has a fixed place in marketing.
Direct Mail Marketing Ideas for Real Estate
There are many real estate direct mail marketing ideas. Direct mail marketing of real estate would entail drawing up a real estate mailing list specifically for direct marketing.
This enables the estate agent to target only those people who are genuinely viable prospects.
With direct mail marketing, real estate investors can find prospective buyers and sellers from the mailing list. Any good estate agent will ensure that the mailing list is constantly updated.
Once you have your list, you can approach one of the many real estate direct mail marketing companies.
They will show you their selection of items to choose from, such as postcards, and after they have your details and mailing list, they will take over your real estate direct mail marketing campaigns.
This will leave you free to see clients and view properties instead of using your valuable time for real estate agent direct mail marketing.
How to do Real Estate Direct Mail Marketing
You may decide to do your direct mail marketing, but perhaps you are clueless about going with your direct mail real estate marketing campaign.
Direct mail marketing for real estate investors is a great way to connect with prospective clients.
There’s no reason direct mail marketing can’t be used to reach out to buyers, sellers, and investors simultaneously.
You will need direct mail marketing materials, specifically for real estate.
- Your prospect list is the most important and needs to be as accurate and targeted as possible. Your list can target people from a specific Zip Code area, but a more expensive and extensive list that checks for other criteria may be a better choice. It costs more initially but can be more cost-effective in the long run.
- Engaging a company like Home Value Leads offers innovative home value websites optimized to turn clicks into listings at a ridiculous rate. All you have to do is drive online traffic to the website.
- Real Estate Investors can also take advantage of direct mail marketing. Direct mail marketing for real estate investors works very well for investors looking to build their property portfolio.
Direct mail marketing agencies track customers through various means, like behavior marketing.
They can sell you a list generated by those prospective clients’ actions online.
You can even get specialized software to generate your list based on your custom criteria.
ListSource and Experian are two of the many companies that offer mailing lists explicitly targeting the real estate industry.
Real Estate Direct Mail Tools & Companies
Introducing direct mail into your marketing campaigns allows you to strengthen and grow relationships with your prospects and customers.
Direct mail lets you provide super-focused content and build deeper connections than using email alone.
Direct Mail Companies
The following companies are regarded as some of the best direct mail companies in the US.
1. Cactus Mailing
This simple direct mail marketing company offers not just mailing and printing services but also design assistance.
Although it lacks a design tool, you can upload your designs and use targeted mailing lists to speed up your marketing strategy.
Part of the service includes direct mail brochures and printing promotional brochures. What makes Cactus Mailing stand out is its Smart Marketing concept.
This provides a hybrid feature, combining digital tools like Google display ads with your real estate direct mail marketing materials to improve campaign results.
2. PsPrint
Dependable, top-quality, and budget-friendly – if you don’t already have a mailing list, PsPrint can get you one in under 15 minutes.
All you have to do is answer a few questions about your target prospects’ demographics.
They also allow you to handle all your custom printing services for a large selection of direct mail products online.
Just choose your product, upload your graphics and attach your mailing list (unless you are taking advantage of PsPrint’s offer of a mailing list).
The turnaround is extremely quick, taking only two to five days once your order is printed.
Additional unmailed prints are sent to you for free if they fit into one box. They also offer mail list processing, die cutting, and foil stamping.
3. Gunderson Direct
Almost 20 years of experience provides proven expertise, creative thought leadership, and expert strategy. Gunderson Direct has an immense network of data providers to ensure that your mail targets the correct audience niche for your services and product.
They also have a data team that measures each campaign to determine and calculate performance-based analytics to help you create future high-quality mail campaigns.
Direct Mail Tools
These days even direct mail comes with automization. There are some great software tools for direct mail that are listed below.
EngageBay
EngageBay offers channel management, contact database, content management, email marketing, event-triggered actions, and lead management.
SharpSpring from Constant Contact
SharpSpring offers campaign analytics, channel management, contact database, content management, email marketing, event-triggered actions, and lead management.
Bitrix24
Bitrix24 offers campaign analytics, channel management, contact database, email marketing, event-triggered actions, and lead management.
There are many more software tools to choose from, but the above list offers the most extensive selection of features.
5 Reasons To Implement Direct Mail Marketing
In this age of technology, you may wonder why anyone bothers with direct mail.
There are several good reasons to implement direct mail marketing, and here are but a few good incentives.
1. It’s Convenient
Consumers can read their direct mail whenever they want, which means that your direct mail will probably get more attention from your prospect than digital mail.
Your prospect can put their feet up, have a cup of coffee, and read through your ad at their leisure.
Digital mail means having a device at hand, sometimes where the screen is small, and the text may be unclear because of the size.
Enlarging means that your prospect can’t see the entire body of text at once but must read your ad one piece at a time.
Direct mail makes for much more convenient reading.
73% of Americans say they prefer brands to contact them by direct mail because it allows them time to read through the material properly.
2. It’s Effective
According to the Data and Marketing Association, only 20 to 30% of emails get opened, compared with 90% of direct mail.
Emails often land up in spam, being entirely overlooked.
The physical envelope or postcard will be glanced at least once with direct mail.
There is no way for the client to miss seeing it, and it will pass through their hands.
3. It’s Cost-efficient
According to the Data and Marketing Association, direct mail offers a 112% ROI, while new print and ink technologies help to keep manufacturing costs down.
4. Scientifically endorsed
Temple University’s neuromarketing research shows that physical advertisements have more influence on consumers than digital advertisements.
Because they are tactile, they impact the brain more, they affect the brain more, allowing stronger recall and a greater desire for the product or service.
5. Less Competition
Direct mail has a lot less competition than digital mail.
According to the USPS, the average American household receives only 454 marketing mail pieces per annum.
This means it grabs the client’s attention more effectively than your run-of-the-mill digital advertising platforms do.
Direct mail marketing for real estate agents means you might just gain an edge over your competitors.
10 Tips For Direct Mail Campaigns
Astoundingly, 75% of people who receive direct mail can recall the brand compared with the 44% of people who receive the same digitally.
Also, the average time a direct mail ad remains in the household is 17 days, leaving a constant reminder in sight for all that time.
Here are a few great direct mail marketing tips:
1. The bigger, the better
Here is a great direct mail postcard tip. The USPS upped the maximum acceptable size for a first-class mail postcard to 6 x 9 inches.
This change gives better brand awareness opportunities because you now have a bigger ‘billboard’ to present your product or advertisement.
Plus, the larger size makes your postcard stand out from the rest of the regular-sized mail.
2. Join with Digital Channels
A good direct mail advertising tip is to combine your direct mail with digital mail to create a hybrid mail campaign. This is one of the best direct mail strategy tips that there are.
You can match your direct mail data file to an IP address or Facebook.
You can also add email to your direct mail, either before you send out the direct mail, to peak the prospect’s curiosity or afterward to refresh their memories of your product.
3. Follow the Rules of Content Engagement
You need a compelling and engaging copy, clean and uncluttered graphics, and a solid call to action. Make it simple for the prospect to understand what steps they should follow next.
4. Use Personalization
A clever tip for direct mail is to use personalization. This doesn’t mean merely adding the recipient’s name.
It means using the data you’ve collected about your particular customer or prospect and then using that knowledge to interact with your recipients using images, specials, and targeted messages, among other things.
5. Keep it Interactive
Another direct mail marketing tip is to add technology to a direct mail postcard or package to make it engaging and interactive.
Some ideas include AR (augmented reality) functionality which shows the recipient 3D digital images.
Using scannable features leads to an interactive video experience or image recognition abilities that encourage mobile shopping experiences, special offers, and games when scanned. Making sure these applications are user-friendly is an excellent tip for direct mail, creating a positive and exciting brand experience.
6. Target Repeat Customers
Find ways to engage old clients and turn them into repeat customers. Give them excellent reasons to return in the form of special offers and new and exciting products.
7. Follow-up
One of the most important direct marketing tips is to follow up. Don’t just send out your mail and leave it at that. Give the prospect a couple weeks to respond, and contact them again if you hear anything back.
A good business practice is to ask the prospect why they did not take advantage of your offer. This way, you gain more insight into the client’s needs and wants, which will help you with your marketing strategies.
8. Do a Sample test
To ensure you don’t invest in a non-viable campaign, it’s essential to test your strategy. Send a small batch of direct mail to a target group to test the response rate and efficiency before expanding to your full-scale mailing campaign.
9. Track Response
Ensure that you have a system in place to track responses. If you don’t have promotional codes or some tracking form, it’s impossible to know your campaign’s success.
Using the data from monitoring responses enables you to adjust and amend your campaign to improve it in the future.
10. Practice Patience
There’s a reason direct mail is called snail mail. You need to give your direct mail campaigns time to produce results before you write them off as a bad investment.
Patience can lead to great success stories of new business and engaging repeat clients.
Conclusion
Direct mail has presented better results than digital because of its tangibility.
It offers trust-building, versatility, simplicity, cost-effectiveness, excellent response rates, and more.
Real estate investors can use direct mail marketing to contact prospects and get their attention.
With all these advantages, direct mail is one of the best marketing tools for B2B and B2C brands in 2022.
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