Real estate direct mail marketing is a form of marketing where you send physical promo material, including letters, postcards, brochures, and other print material, to the mailboxes of potential clients.
Even though it sounds somewhat obsolete in the age of digital media, direct mail marketing is still effective, especially in industries like real estate. That’s mainly because it uses actual material, which offers a better chance of attracting people’s attention. Naturally, combining print and digital real estate marketing material is best.
To see how this works in real estate and how you can use direct mail to attract new potential clients, we’ve prepared some essentials for building a successful direct mail marketing campaign.
Why Direct Mail Still Works in Real Estate
It seems logical that direct mail can attract more attention than digital ads, and the data supports it.
Research shows that over 91% of promo mails are opened and read, while people spend 45% more time engaging with them than with digital ads.
The most interesting part is that the ROI of direct mail is clearly excellent. For every $1 spent, you get $42 back, which is undoubtedly impressive.
Stepping back from the data, it’s clear that direct mail can be incredibly beneficial in real estate for several reasons:
- Homeowners tend to retain print material for a while, making it a great reminder of your services.
- It’s ideal locally if you want to build up your brand image and establish yourself as the local expert.
- It can serve as a method for attracting users to your online marketing material, like detailed listings and your website.
Building a Real Estate Direct Mail Campaign
To build a successful direct mail marketing campaign, you need to create a real estate marketing plan first. You need to define your audience and messaging, and plan the budget. Remember that direct mail campaigns are often cheaper than online ones.
The cornerstone of the campaign are the mailers you’ll use, and you can use several of these:
- Flyers: They can highlight property features and offer marketing insights.
- Postcards: They could have QR codes that lead to listings, but they can also be standard holiday postcards with your info.
- Brochures: These can come with a portfolio of properties or info on your agents.
You can also use infographics, door hangers, business cards, letters, and much more. You only need the right design and print services to help you. MAXA Designs can help you with design and integrate the right print partners to provide full service.
But let’s get back to the topic at hand and cover the steps you need to take to launch a real estate direct mail campaign.
1. Define Your Farm Area
The most crucial step is to define your farm area. That’s the geographical area or group of neighborhoods where your agent will focus their lead generation activities. Narrowing down your area of operations makes it easier to concentrate marketing efforts and have a bigger impact.
It will help your agent get the needed localized expertise and increase the chance of people opening and reading your direct mail, largely because it’s more personalized. In turn, this will lead to higher conversion rates and better ROI.
To choose the right farm area, you need to:
- Analyze turnover rates and focus on those of 5%, 8%, or even higher.
- Check the average sales price in the area, as it will determine your potential commission on an average sale.
- See what the competition is doing and what you can do better.
- Study the demographics to understand the people who live there.
- Always start small, with a manageable number of homes.
To put this into perspective, imagine a farm area with 350 homes and an 8% turnover. It also has good prices and comes with less competition than the rest of the suburb you’re looking at. You study the demographics and realize the location is predominantly made up of families with kids of school age. As the neighborhood comes with good numbers, you decide to make it your farm area and focus on creating direct mail with messaging targeting the demographics.
2. Craft a Clear and Compelling Message
Once you have your farm area and target audience, you must create a compelling message with the most significant impact.
Focus on the value proposition or a key offer. You should write from the perspective of the reader and place them first. The content needs to answer what you offer and what is in it for them.
Bear in mind that having a strong CTA, highly personalized content, and emotionally resonant language are crucial.
- Strong CTAs: Have concise and clear CTAs that tell exactly what the reader needs to do next. Good CTAs that embody this would be Call now for a FREE market analysis or Visit (link) to learn what your home is worth.
- Personalization: Generic mail will end up in the trash, so ensure it's as personalized as possible with specifics about the neighborhood and tailored offers.
- Emotion-rich language: Tap into the reader's emotions by giving them peace of mind, igniting curiosity, focusing on benefits, and showing trust.
3. Design for Attention and Brand Recognition
Your direct mail won’t even be opened and read unless it attracts the person it’s meant for. The only way to achieve that is with a design that screams “open me!” It needs to grab attention while reinforcing your brand identity.
Ensure you take good care of your designs' color, layout, and imagery. A clean and uncluttered layout is key, while the color should strive to evoke emotions. Images should be relevant and high quality.
To achieve all this, you can use tools like MAXA, one of the best real estate marketing software. Besides giving you the tool you need to design your direct mail, we’ll help you create and print it. Moreover, at the core of our tool is helping you stay on brand and creating professional designs.
For instance, using the tool, you could create a Just Sold postcard with standard size, a high-resolution photo of the sold home on the front, and a bold and catchy headline above. It will use the colors associated with your brand, while the back of the postcard will have your contact info and subtle local landmarks to connect it to the farm area.
4. Choose the Right Mail Format and Timing
Even though it’s good to use different formats of direct mail, it’s still important to use the right one for a specific situation and to send at an appropriate time when it’s bound to have the biggest impact.
Here’s how that works for different formats:
- Postcards: Great for sending traffic to your website, brand awareness, event invitations, and quick updates. They are not overly personal and not suitable for longer messages.
- Flyers: Ideal for longer messages and lots of visuals. You should use them for neighborhood guides, property guides, and other longer marketing pieces. However, their costs are higher, and the design can be complex.
- Letters: Ideal for personal messages, can be used to address specific homeowners' needs, introducing yourself to your farm area, and more. The costs of letters are the highest, and they might be too formal for some people.
When it comes to timing, consider the seasonality of direct mail. Spring is great for mail targeting homebuyers, summer for updates, fall for year-end market reviews, and winter for simpler holiday greetings. Bear in mind that you need to stay consistent with your mail, even in slower seasons like summer and winter.
5. Track Results and Optimize
Sending mail is not the end, because you still have to monitor the whole campaign and track results. If something’s not working or you see an area for improvement, you must also optimize. All this will ensure high ROI.
Speaking of that, you need to track ROI by looking at the response rate, generated leads, and conversion rates. You can also track more customized identifiers, which will be clearly connected to direct mail, like QR codes, custom landing pages, dedicated phone numbers, and promo codes.
Also, don’t forget the value of A/B testing as it can help you optimize your campaigns. However, a bigger part of optimization can come from refining lists based on who responds to your mail, because you can pinpoint a specific demographic on which your marketing has the biggest impact.
Lastly, always ensure you’re optimizing your messaging too, based on the data you receive and the market's changing conditions.
Bonus Tips for Success With Direct Mail
We’ve discussed the main aspects of how to do direct mail marketing for real estate, but there’s still more you can do. Here are some bonus tips to consider:
- Integrate with digital follow-ups: You should reinforce your message digitally, and you can do that with targeted social media ads and QR codes in your print material, among other methods.
- Hyper-personalize with neighborhood data: Go deeper with your direct mail by offering micro-market trends, new popular businesses in the area, sales on specific streets, and more.
- Strategically knock on doors: You can always use mailers as icebreakers, all in an effort to knock on doors a few days after the mail arrives. You can easily start the conversation and earn some initial trust by mentioning the mail you’ve sent.
- Partner with local businesses for cross-promotion: You can always partner with a complementary type of company in your farm area, like a home stager, hardware store, or a reputable mortgage broker.
Wrapping Up Your Direct Mail Strategy
As you’ve seen, direct mail marketing can be incredibly beneficial in the real estate sector. Moreover, building a campaign isn’t as difficult as you might think.
The preparation phase involves defining a farm area, crafting a message, and setting up print material design. Once you decide on the format and timing for your direct mail, you can start the campaign while tracking the results and optimizing when needed.
The only thing you need to do is begin, and if you’re a part of a real estate brokerage, feel free to schedule a call with MAXA to see how we can help you with your design and print needs.
%20Systems.png)
.png)
