Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast, and this is episode 186. Show notes for today's episode can be found at retipster.com/186.

Today, I'm talking with Paul do Campo. Paul is a professional copywriter and real estate investor. He helps real estate investors with their follow-up marketing. Today, we're going to discuss using the right words in our communication, the importance of follow-up, how to implement follow-up, and how Paul has figured out how to use the right blend of communication to win repeatedly as a real estate investor.

I'll just say before we get started, the conversation you're about to hear was recorded on a day when my voice was pretty bad. So I apologize in advance for that.

Also, the audio quality was lacking just a little bit. I think you'll be able to hear everything we say, but just want to give you a warning ahead of time. Sorry about that. We'll try to do better next time.

With that all out of the way, Paul, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Paul: Thank you, man. I appreciate being on. We haven't spoken in a while. It was way back when I had you on my show. Things have changed quite a bit. Went from land to copywriting, and that was mainly of necessity to quit my W-2 and get into something that can support myself month for month.

Now, what do I do for investing? I actually sold off all my land notes. I'm actually working on selling one more off. We're hypothecating it out. I'm just kind of shifting gears here, pivoting my money into other sources.

And what I do today is just OmniDrip. I mentioned it. So that's a company I set up. We help investors with their actual follow-up, meaning like drip sequences, their automation, the copy, the content that goes into long-term follow-up because most investors we deal with, they're not really sure what to say besides, are you still interested in selling? They follow up infrequently.

A lot of my clients, they're winning over deals after three, four months. That's three to six months. It's kind of a typical range for these long-term sellers that just aren't ready yet. They're winning them over with 50, 60, 70 touches of follow-up.

So we have to be a little more creative about what we say. It's not just repeating the same direct question, “Are you still interested in selling?” It's being a little more creative and bringing more value upfront, building up credibility, driving them back to the website, driving them to articles, sending them follow-up mail, and sending emails of course.

Seth: You've got experience with houses, with land, and with notes, right? Of those three, how would you segment, this percentage of my experience is with houses and this percent is with land. How much time have you spent in each one of those different realms?

Paul: Yeah, I'd say more so in land. I probably spent a lot more in land. And my journey back in 2016, like everybody else, I jumped into wholesaling. A lot of land flippers, they start that way. and difficulty of it and sending lots of mail, cold calling, door knocking, all that, shifting over to mobile homes like Lonnie deals.

Seth: Lonnie deals? What is that?

Paul: Like the trailers or the mobile homes that you flip? You don't own the land and you sell them on owner, just like land, you sell them into notes.

Seth: Okay. Just out of curiosity. Did you say Lonnie deals? Am I hearing that right? What does that mean? I've never heard of that.

Paul: That's what I think the terminology for it. There's a guy named Lonnie Scruggs. He wrote a book on it back in the 70s called Deals on Wheels. It's just basically land, but with mobile homes. You don't own the land. It's in a mobile home park.

A really good return on those, but I just didn't like the rehabbing part of it. I didn't like chasing sellers, chasing buyers too, because there's chasing on both ends.

And then transitioning into land, which I love, because there was no chasing at all, except for the selling part of it. There's a little more intensity to actually get that property sold.

And then, from there, I had to make a decision because I needed to quit my W-2. I was doing copywriting gigs as well. And I made a decision to just go full-time in a copy because I already had clients, and it was exceeding the income I was making in my W-2. So I decided to quit my W-2 and just focus on copy for two years.

Seth: So when you say copywriting gigs, so were you doing copywriting for your W-2 job as well? And you had copywriting gigs for various companies on the side? Tell me more about that.

Paul: No, my W-2 job, I was actually a pipeline welder. I was a pipeline welder and foreman for the natural gas utility back in Southern California. It was actually a good job in terms of benefits and pay. I just wanted the freedom.

Seth: So how did the copywriting thing come into your life? Like, when did you even become aware that that was a profession? And it's like, okay, I love it; I want to do that.

Paul: I discovered marketing copy out of necessity back in 2016, because I really sucked at this whole sales and marketing thing to get houses. I came from blue collar. And when you make that shift from blue collar, and that's all you've done your whole life, and you come from a blue collar family, you don't know anything about sales and marketing. Making that shift if you don't have that personality is really a struggle.

So I, by accident, became Investor Carrot's copywriter for about a year.

Seth: How did that happen by accident?

Paul: Well, I knew about copy. I kind of knew, like, I heard about it. I read a couple books on it. And Carrot had sent out an email to all their members. And I was a member at the time. I had my own Carrot site.

And they said, hey, we're looking for a copywriter. And I said, why not? So sent it out, did their application. They chose me. I don't even, I was so surprised. Like, you know, what the heck happened here? I'm not even trained. I don't even know what I'm doing here.

Seth: Did you submit examples of your work or something? Is that how they chose you?

Paul: I don't exactly remember the application process. I didn't have any work to submit. So maybe there are some examples that I just put together on the fly there.

But the funny story is they actually then got rid of me the first two months because I kept submitting work that had a bunch of errors and because I was just really bad at proofreading. It was kind of depressing at the time because I was like, man, I actually enjoyed doing that. It was a very high hourly pay for what you do just right.

And so a couple months went by and I reached out to the person, like Trevor's right hand gal at the time. She's not there anymore. But I said, hy, if proofreading was my only reason why you guys got rid of me, how about you guys give me another try? I'll go out and hire out of my own pocket somebody to proofread all my material, make sure everything goes through.

They're ecstatic about it because they really enjoyed what I did. They were excited that I'm trying to solve the problem. So I got back in with them as a contractor and hired my own proofreader to do all that. Got better at proofreading, got better and better at what I do. From there, gigs kind of just started happening.

I started… one of my clients was a land developer, a big land developer who entitles, he buys his large lots that can fit a hotel, can fit a large multifamily. And they were doing something unique. He hired one of the best list guys in the country who works with Dan Kennedy, Craig Simpson. So that was fun working alongside him. The idea was they entitled these large lots, they own these large lots, they get the planning in place, they get the architects to create the hotel, blueprints.

And one of them happened to be in Vegas, like not on the strip, but just one block away from the strip. And they sell these, they put these together into a direct mail package, and they send it off to the top investors in the U.S. or maybe the world. I don't know what their list was, but I put together the package, the copy on it. And that was really fun.

Craig and I both parted ways with them because they were just taking too long in between projects. They would finish it and they wouldn't even send it. It would take months and months to even send. And now that thing is outdated. The letter's outdated and the list is outdated. So we'd end up just naturally parting ways and being too busy to fulfill for them.

Seth: I'm curious about going back to your story of how you got into copywriting.

So it sounds like you were sort of self-taught. It's not like you went to school for this. You just read a few books and it resonated with you and you figured out how to write in a way that was compelling and got people to take action. Is that right?

And if so, what books were you reading that were so influential to get you into this?

Paul: Yeah, it's just self-taught. Most copywriters are self-taught. There's not like a course in university on copywriting. There might be now if you get into like the whole CMO world and marketing world.

Some of the books… I would say Gary Halbert was influential on me. He's long gone. Bring that name up and even investors sometimes know who that is.

Ben Settle, who's alive today, he's an email copywriter. He was very influential on me.

Joe Sugarman, who's long gone, and I own his book. And probably a really good book for investors. Joe Sugarman, he only has like two books published. So that's a really good book.

So I'd say that the idea of copy is taking the problems that exist in the market, the deep-rooted problems, and then bringing the solution in a way that fits the market today.

So let me tie this into land, okay, because I started practicing this with land, because I was buying lots, I was selling lots, and I decided to do something a little differently. I decided to take my pages that display any lots I have for sale. I started to write it in a way where I'm displaying what exactly this lot's going to do.

We talked about it before. You can sell land in one of two ways. And I'm not saying the other way is bad; it's still going to work.

But you can sell it as, here's my half acre lot in the desert. Here's the coordinates. Basically selling it as a commodity, right? And when you boil it down to those roots, you're selling it as a commodity.

Now, I'm not saying that doesn't work. And a lot of investors became very successful doing it that way.

To optimize it a little bit more, I decided to sell it like, what am I actually solving here? And what's the actual use case of this land?

Most of the time, I was selling mountain lots. So after about a handful of sales, I already kind of understood my market. My market where people, city folks, because there was only one mountain range in that area, and the city folks were buying it because they dreamed of having this cabin in the woods.

Okay, so rest and relaxation, getting away from the city folks, making the city the enemy. All that I was really bringing into the front fold of the copy. And I did this with emails too.

Actually, I really liked what was happening with emails because most of the time people are doing, hey, here's our deal of the week. Instead, I decided to shift gears. And go more into being a brand that people enjoy reading, not for the sake of, oh, let's check out their deal, let's check out what he has to say today. I would be on the lookout for stories that really sell the lot that we have for sale.

So for example, I remember hearing about the story in the news that happened in the area where nurses and doctors were caught in this specific hospital having certain relations with the clients who were in comas. And it was a true story in the news. And there's other stories, like finding maggots underneath their bandages because they weren't cleaning them.

So I think my subject line was maggot-infested cities or something like that. I talked about that story. And then I pivoted into the call to action, which was our mountain lot, which was to get away from all these city people, to get fresh air, to be away from the millions, population, and et cetera.

So I just brought the problem up, brought up the solution with the real reason why they want to actually buy the land. And what I started seeing is that people on my buyers list, people I've never spoken to at all, would email me out of the blue and say, hey, I've been on your list for three months now, ready to buy. And it'd be one of the easiest sales I can make.

So it wasn't hardly any chasing. That's what I started seeing because I realized, and this is nothing new, by the way. You see this done in coaching. You see this done selling software. And in my OmniDrip brand, you see this. You develop a relationship with your actual buyers list.

Seth: How much work is it to be on the lookout for these stories to create this newsletter and all this stuff to entertain people with the end goal of, “I hope you'll buy something from me at some point”? How do you make the connection between, “I'm here to entertain you,” and connect the dots all the way to, “Okay, now buy this from me.”

Paul: Yeah. It's more of an art than a science. The more you do, the more writing begets writing or ideas beget ideas.

So, when somebody who has never done this before, it's like, I can never do this. Yeah, you haven't really done it before. And then, and when you start doing it, when you start looking out for stuff, in time, I mean, this is what you're supposed to kind of do as a salesperson is connect problems with solutions, right? And you're either doing it face-to-face, digging for information, really asking the situational, the problem questions of the salesperson. Whereas a marketer, you're doing it where you already know the market well enough. And you're choosing the biggest pain points.

And that could be through analogies. That could be the stories you've heard. It just comes from doing it enough to where, oh, this is a really cool analogy to show my audience.

So being entertaining is far more, and I've sent over at the time of this recording, I've probably had like 2,000 email blasts, not like 2,000 individual emails, but like 2,000 blasts, lists of 5,000 people to 60,000 people. My bread and butter today, I'd say, is like if anybody asks, hey, can And can you work one-on-one with me? My one-on-one package is email marketing. So every month we're talking to the list. We're creating relationships with that list. We're selling something to that list.

I would say after all that, the least valuable method of communication is education. It's just education. Just like, here's the three ways to do this. Here are the five ways to do that. It works to some degree. What I've realized is people tune out of that after so much. And people tune more into when there's even a subtle or slight entertainment factor to what you do, whether it be podcasts, whether it be articles, whatever it is, there's something in how you communicate that's actually somewhat entertaining.

If you don't believe me, look at the highest paid people in the world, they're all entertainers. Look at Donald Trump. He's kind of entertaining. So people do keep coming back because there is a slight entertainment factor to what you do.

Seth: Yeah, that's interesting. So like, what makes education entertaining? I don't know if you know who Ramit Sethi is, but he is a phenomenally good verbal communicator. Every time I hear him talk at all, I'm just kind of captivated by whatever he's saying. And I think what's going on there is he knows how to use the right words, but also vocal tonality and inflection and stuff just to make him not sound monotone. It's just very entertaining to listen to.

So is that what it is? It's just surprising people at what you do? Or what makes anything entertaining versus boring?

Paul: Yeah, that's a really good question. Ramit Sethi is hard to understand if he actually went out of his way to learn all that or if he actually does that already naturally.

So one aspect to that is bringing personality into the fold. Everybody has a personality, everybody has something that they can share. For emails, specifically, it's personality-driven. You look at Russell Brunson, he almost does the opposite of what is taught, which is slow down, be professional. The guy is a fast talker.

The key, and he mentions this, to what makes him wildly successful (in webinars specifically, because his pivotal moment is when you learn how to do webinars and sell via webinars) is he is an extremely good storyteller. And he ties it in and he brings up another story and ties it into what he's teaching. That is one aspect of doing it.

Telling stories, tying it into what you're teaching or selling that grows a relationship with something. People become friends because they like the other person. They like their personality. And that's kind of what you're doing with an email list as well.

I mean, back to what I do with OmniDrip with, you know, flippers, and we have some land guys that are clients as well with their acquisition side with their follow-up. If you come in with your follow, you know, everyone has drip sequences, but those are the dry, boring, direct questions of, hey, are you still looking to sell? Hey, are you still looking to buy? Those direct questions are 100% self-serving. They don't do anything for the other person. You’re an annoying pest at that point.

So what we bring in is we add a little more creativity. So what does that mean? That means that we're talking about what the cash offer actually brings the table. I'm bringing humor messages too. We have humor messages, like if somebody hasn't responded for a long time, I'm putting in humor messages into it. We're driving them back to an article. So for example, if the seller says, hey, I'm going to be fixing the house ourselves, we're driving them to an article that talks about the five top rehab items, the best bang for your buck.

And that has its own purpose for authority building, making us the experts in that field.

Seth: Can you give me an example? What is one of these humor messages? What are you talking about when you say that?

Paul: We'll send a text message out. We have different variations of all kinds of that. I'll say, hey, we haven't spoken in a while. “Press one if you've been swallowed by a gator. Press two if you actually did reach out to sell your property. Press three if you actually want me to be eaten by a gator. And this was all a mistake. You never wanted to sell your house.” That produces a lot of LOLs, but it's at least a response back, right?

So driving a response back to start that communication. Because that's the bottom line of follow-up is we want to move them. We want to start a conversation again, move them along the pipeline. If they haven't booked a call with us, that's the next step. We want to move them in our pipeline.

Seth: You brought up OmniDrip. What is OmniDrip?

Paul: Yeah, it's a brand I created by leveraging everything, all this copywriting experience I just talked about, and helping investors with it.

So what can a copywriter do with investors? People think it's writing your letter, your direct mail, which is all fine. But for me, the highest use and the best value I can bring for an investor, the ones actually doing lots of volume, is boosting their follow-up marketing.

So that all the leads that they're getting now, because they're only going to convert, you know, maybe 10% or less of those leads that come in (10% would actually be really good organization, if you can do that, I'm talking about single-family). And making sure that we are increasing that by having better follow-up long-term, better SMS, better email, better tasks, voicemail scripts, better articles, all following the seller or the lead, I should say. To either find out if it was all a mistake, that's always a good goal, right? If the lead was actually not selling one or moving out of our system.

Or two, when they're finally all ready, because this happens a lot, they ghost you, they're ignoring you. They actually are a lead. They actually are a really net quality lead. They're actually going to sell at one point. It's just that life gets in the way. There's more priorities.

Seth: Yeah. So when you say help with follow-up, so does that mean just writing the copy for them? Or is this like a CRM system that manages the follow-up? Or is it like the initial outreach? Is it that too? Like what specifically does OmniDrip do?

Paul: Yeah. So that's a good question. I don't sell a CRM and I purposely do that. I'm not planning on ever selling a CRM. We utilize whatever CRM the investor uses, you know, so they don't have to switch a CRM. That's a pain. Switching a CRM is a pain.

So we utilize whatever you have. Most CRMs have automations already, meaning like you can activate a sequence for a lead and then, and it sends out a sequence of emails, SMS, et cetera.

And so we plug, I have content already. We have hundreds and hundreds of variations of it for different types of investors. And we make it so it's semi-custom. We plug them into the CRM for a single family investor.

Right now, it's like 24 sequences for land flippers. It's cut in half or less.

Seth: Is this email? Because usually when I think of copywriting, that's kind of the default that I go to. But it sounds like this is like direct mail. This is texting. What communication mediums are being used here?

Paul: Everything. Because if you narrow down to one communication medium, you're really minimizing the pool of what you can do because people are going to unsubscribe. You're going to hit reply to stop. And then if you're only utilizing one way of communication, you've just eliminated any communication from that lead.

Seth: If somebody comes to you off the street, what would be the top three you would recommend?

Paul: Top three sequences?

Seth: The top three communication mediums. Is it like direct mail, texting, and something else? Or what would you need?

Paul: Okay, I say manual tasks to call, right? We still need to make those calls. So that'd be one. Two would be SMS and three would be mail as well. So follow-up mail.

So follow-up mail is what we add in, which is very different from the typical mail.

If somebody comes into my world and they know who I am, they opted in, they want a cash offer, whatever it is. And they already know me somewhat that we've already kind of spoken, or they went through my portal or my website. So it makes no sense for me to send out a letter that says, Hey, I want to buy your house. Makes more sense for me to send out, for example, a greeting card that says, Hey, I appreciate you trusting us and taking the next step.

Or if they said no to my offer, it makes sense for me to send out a greeting card that says, Hey, we understand that our offer doesn't work for you, but we're here if anything changes.

So that type of mail that goes out, if we haven't heard from them and they fill out a form and it's been 30 days and no response, I send out like a pattern disruptive type of postcard, like a dog. And it says, Hey, what in the world just happened? Get them to read it and says, hey, you fill out a form from our website here. Just want to make sure that you actually have the intention to sell? Let's connect again. We have your cash offer waiting.

Seth: You're saying that you recommend people start with a cold call, right? Cold call first, have some kind of conversation.

Paul: The cadence, you're asking about like, what's the cadence of all this?

Seth: Like, what's the order?

Paul: It depends on the sequence. I mean, okay, this is for people who have already inquired, right? So this is the big opportunity. You know, everyone's focused on lead gen, which is hugely important. Everybody needs those leads. But a lot of people who've been doing this for a little while who already have that lead generation in place, they know how to do it.

The next opportunity to optimize their business is actually the leads that are already in their CRM. The leads who have already said yes to them at one point, but they sell with someone else.

Seth: When you say yes, does that just mean responding in some way?

Paul: You sent a mailer out, they called back, they said they'd like to get an offer, right? You sent out a mailer saying, you know, I'd like to buy your property. They called back about that. And then that lead disappears. It happens all the time. That lead falls through the cracks. Maybe you got them an offer and then that falls through the cracks.

So there's all kinds of breaking points in your pipeline after a lead comes in.

Seth: And correct me if I'm wrong, but... So it sounds like when people come to you, they already have a big list of people that have already responded in some way. You just help them squeeze more value out of those people, essentially?

Paul: Yeah, exactly. It's not so much about cold outreach. We focus on the leads that they already have, and we focus on their continuous stream of leads that are coming in. If they're going to continue doing business, they're going to continue having leads come in and optimizing those leads to make sure we're squeezing as much as we can from it.

Because most investors operate in a very low conversion rate. Their KPIs are really low because they're only focusing on the leads that you needed to sell yesterday. Their hair is on fire and they forget the ones that are still on the fence. They don't seem to have any intention right now, but they actually do have, they're going to sell. It's just a matter of time. It's a matter of fixing whatever things they have going on and they're just ignoring your text, which has nothing to do with you.

And then they end up selling with someone else just because they forgot who you are. They're going to forget who you are if you're not following up intentionally and building your credibility and your brand with them.

Seth: So what does a good follow-up sequence look like? How many times are we following up? What are we seeing? How are we communicating with them? What order? And at what point do you stop? At what point is like, okay, I've kicked this thing enough and it's not going to work.

Paul: Yeah, that's really a question. And so, we're always improving to see what works. And it's hard to say it in audio right now, instead of having a visual infographic. But whenever it's ours, I have this infographic of an actual pipeline. That's what I used to do as I weld. And so there's all these little gates. There's about three or four gates that you have to open that a lead flows through until you finally have a deal closed.

So when a lead comes into your system, you send out a mailer. They said, oh yeah, we're interested in selling our property. You gave them a cold call and they said, oh yeah, actually we're selling our property.

That lead is now in your pipeline. Now there's all these steps along the way.

So I would say that our first sequence that we have is when a lead is fresh, they enter into the top of funnel. They said yes right away means they have a hot inquiry to move along with you, but for some reason they're not responding. That happens a lot. Actually people who buy leads from other vendors or PPC leads, even SEO leads. Those are a little less often.

Seth: Just gonna stop you there. So you said they said yes, but they're not responding. So how did they say yes? Does it mean they did respond?

Paul: They did respond, but then the communication stops.

Seth: Okay. So they responded one time in some way. Maybe they didn't say, yes, I want to sell, but they said something, but then they are not continuing to respond after the second contact?

Paul: Yeah. It happens a lot with single-family businesses. So they see an ad about selling your house. They fill out the form. So that's the initial inquiry. That's the saying, yes, I'm interested.

And then communication stops. Like you're trying to call them back. They're not answering. You're sending them text, manual text, hey, let's get an appointment so we can talk about your property so we can get you an offer. Communication stops.

So going back to my pipeline, that is the first opportunity then. That's the first opportunity we can optimize those types of leads.

So with those, I'm highly aggressive, meaning I probably have like three or four auto text messages that go on the first day, a task to call, two emails that are sent on the first day alone and a mailer that's on the first day alone. Because the whole idea is to we need to get them back on the phone with us. We want to move them now into the next stage of our pipeline, which is the appointment.

Seth: Yeah. So in that situation, when somebody has said yes once, but then they're unresponsive, it sounds like the most effective way to break through that and actually start the conversation again is just to hammer them from every angle until something happens. And how often does that still not work?

Paul: So that particular sequence right there only lasts for about 30 days. So most of the time they get in contact probably midway or before that, actually,

Seth: Did you say three days or 30 days?

Paul: 30 days.

Let me clarify. It's not 30 days of every day we're sending them. Different steps. It tapers out. So it's hammer on first, then we start tapering like maybe three days, then five days, and 15 days. So it's about 30 days long with that sequence.

And then there's a task that gets sent out to whoever is, you know, the lead manager, whoever owns the lead to go ahead and put them in a different sequence. That's a lot less aggressive. And it's about a year long. Maybe it starts off a 15-day follow-up, and then tapers out to 30 days, maybe even 45 days towards the end of the year.

So that would be the cadence of it. Early on in the funnel, yeah, we're hammering hard. And you have to hammer with some intention of bringing value. It’s not just sending three messages in one day asking, “Are you still interested in selling?”

Again, I'm going back to that, because that's what I see often, that stuff gets ignored. If they're not in the moment right now, if they haven't prioritized selling their house, that stuff gets ignored. And then it also gets unsubscribed. And so you're creating a bigger chance of getting unsubscribed and stopping that communication from them.

So again, the intention is still hammering, but we still do it with value because we want to get them back on the phone. If we got an offer from them and they again ghost you, you put them in a different sequence that's maybe less aggressive like that because they moved down our pipeline.

Does that make sense?

Seth: I think so. But I guess a couple of things I'm wondering, And first thing is, do you have any kind of measurable, quantifiable way to tell when we do this stuff with OmniDrip, the result is this, we get this many deals. When we don't, when it's just that one and done, then we get this many deals.

Like how much of a difference does this make to go through all this stuff to keep trying to get ahold of these people?

Paul: Yeah. So I have anecdotal, not quantifiable, like stats. And if I told you, I'd probably be lying because nobody has enough stats to give you a true figure.

But when my clients do implement this, I mean, I have a review on my website. He's a single-family house flipper wholesaler. And he said it's added a hundred thousand to his bottom line. He's doing at least a deal, two deals per month.

I have other people that give actual measurements of, Hey, this is added X amount.

So I don't have like, if you do this, it's going to increase it by X percentage because the truth is that's really hard to measure with the CRM.

I've reached out to clients after we plugged everything in, ask them, Hey, how are things going? I want to make sure things are working. If it's not working, then I’ll try to fix it.

I've had clients say, you know, I haven't really noticed anything yet.

And I dive into their CRM and then say, we'll go into deals closed, see their inventory of deals closed. I'll dive into it and say, Hey, this was actually in a drip sequence. I see the activity here.

They responded after that. And it looks like you closed the deal two weeks later. And they're like, Oh yeah, that's right.

When you have a system like this, you tend to forget where the source came from. So that's another layer of complexity of measuring this stuff.

Seth: I will say, like you said, there's no way to really know what might've been because it's just, you just can't know that, but I'm pretty sure it makes a massive difference just by my own experience.

Something that I am pretty bad at is, uh, I don't like to annoy people. Like I don't like doing email campaigns to people saying basically the exact same thing seven times over again. I don't want to be a pain. I don't want people to unsubscribe, all this stuff.

But there have been a handful of experiences in my years of blogging where I've been pushed pretty hard by people to promote their thing. For example, you know, whenever I attend a conference, certain conferences, the person that runs that conference wants me to send out emails to my audience, tell them to show up there to meet me and hang out at the conference. And my default would be to send out one email and that's it. And if they don't come, they don't come.

But I'm being pushed to send out seven emails like once a month over the next five months or whatever it is. And I'll tell you, every single time, there is somebody who, not somebody, several people that respond, like the second email who didn't respond to the first one, and then the third one that didn't respond to the second one, and then fourth and fifth. Every single one gets results.

Whereas if I just did one, I would be losing a ton. So I'm sure this follow-up makes a big difference.

Paul: This is not theory. This goes across all industries where you're doing a lot of marketing on the front end and the back end.

And so going back to what I said, I've done about 2,000 email blasts. So that comes out to an email blast a day for five and a half years. For other companies, for myself, the more emails I send out for some kind of promotion, for example, the more money we make. That I know for a fact.And that's my peers who have sent out more emails than me, who are more involved with email copywriting than I am. They say the same exact thing. You still have to be a little more intentional about what you say. The stronger the relationship you have with that audience, the more money you're going to make and the more it's welcomed to send out more.

I haven't talked about this, but this is warm marketing. We have to think there's a lot of things that get mixed up when you're talking about cold lead generation versus warm conversion, warm communication with somebody you already know.

Very different rules, cold marketing and lead generation. Investors get this all mixed up and that's a whole different ballpark.

We're talking about converting people who already know you. There's this old ad guy named Leo Burnett, ad guy in the fifties. And he coined this term called “friendly familiarity.” And that's where that is the component element that really sells. It's not so much like, oh, this headline pulled you in, all of a sudden you wanted to buy. Most people are skeptical.

In direct response marketing, the guys that make a lot of money selling financial newsletters, they make a lot of money on the small percentage of the population who are called hyper buyers or hyper clickers, whatever you want. The people who are just like, oh my God, that sounds amazing when you buy it right now and they buy it and they don't ever use the product.

That only encompasses 5% of the population. The rest of the market, they're very much more skeptical and very much slower to make a decision. So the people who capitalize on that by creating a relationship in the long run come out a lot further.

Seth: So friendly familiarity. I mean, that sounds like a big deal to grasp what that means. Does that just mean like building rapport with them over time through your writing or something? Or what is that?

Paul: Yeah. Leo Burnett actually put this in analogy. You think about the insurance salesperson who sells insurance and this is in the fifties. So you see him on the bus every day. You know who he is. You know, he sells insurance. He's told you before. He's kind of pitched you before that, but every day you see him on the bus. Maybe he tells a story. Maybe you just shoot the hay with about different things going on in life.

Then when that person, something happens in that person's life that then says, you know, see somebody die in the family and the family doesn't have any way of ensuring that, decides I better call whatever his name is that I see every day.

That is an example of friendly familiarity, always showing up, and just showing up with value too. That is like the key to long-term email marketing with your warm list, not cold email lead generation, which I've done, different story. People show up to your show because they know who you are. You're the friendly familiarity. You're consistent in showing up.

People like consistency. So I've been on cash buyers lists that wholesalers reach out to. Hey, can I put you on my cash buyers? Sure. That's fine. Never hear from that person ever. Three months later, I get an email. I don't even know who the person is. Three months later, it's like, I have a deal here. I have no idea who this person is.

If I don't know the person who shows up in my email inbox, I tend to hit spam because I think it's a cold outreach. So I hit spam every single time. I'm not the only person that does that.

Anyone who's growing a buyer's list, don't only show up even days later. Show up immediately in their inbox because the meetup, the meeting is fresh in their mind. And so you want to continue that as time goes by. People buy things or end up selling things to people they trust and they like.

Like, trust is one of the biggest factors in actually moving a transaction down the line.

Seth: Do you know who James Clear is?

Paul: I've seen his content, but I don't know much about what he does.

Seth: Yeah, he wrote the book Atomic Habits, and it's been like a huge bestseller. I don't know how many millions of copies it's sold.

He's got this newsletter. It's kind of funny. Like, I get tons of different newsletters, some of which I've signed up for, some of which I haven't. There are certain ones that I just instinctively, I literally don't even see what they say. They just get deleted.

And James Clear is one that, I don't always read it, but I never delete them because when I see them, they're really clear and simple and to the point. It's not like a wall of text. There's actually not much text at all. It's just like a handful of valuable things and it's always really good stuff.

And it seems like that's kind of what we ought to be going for, right?

Paul: It depends on the market. I'm not going to say that the short form is better than long form.

The most successful email copywriter I know, he sells courses. He sells in the copywriting space and niche. There's different markets, different niches. Real estate investing is a whole other niche. And within it, you have land investing. And so you have all these hot people who are looking for more information.

Well, copywriting is one of them. It's a whole other world where you have people just diving into copywriting.

And so the most successful person I know in that niche who does very well, he uses very long form, very story-driven emails, and he sells really well doing it. Story-driven emails about him. “Hey, I was sitting at the bus stop one day…” I mean, they're, they're entertaining and it's not just a story for the sake of a story. Sometimes it is, but he's one of the most well-known. His name is Dan Kennedy. You could look him up is you'll see his email. There's long stories. Companies, copywriters eat it up because they want to learn how to do what he does.

So it depends on the market. And if I'm selling to CEOs who have very little time, I might be more brief, more to the point. Ben Settle is one of them. Ben Settle is one of these that sells to business owners. His stuff is very short to the point. They're not long drawn out and some of them are.

The point of it is, at the end of the day, what I'm looking for every email I send out is did I increase or decrease a relationship with my list? Most people are looking at what's my open rates and what's my clicks. That has seen absolutely no correlation with revenue, with more opens equals more clicks equals more revenue. I've never seen that. And my peers will say the same exact thing.

Seth: So if that stuff doesn't matter, then how do you know if you've deepened your relationship with your audience?

Paul: That's really a question. And that comes from revenue, right? Revenue is the number one metric, but also the engagement you're getting. You're still getting replies back. You're getting replies back from people. The metric that I watch, most people don't watch this, but I watch email revenue per contact.

So if I'm writing for a software company, for example, and they're trying, they have the same goals of mine, create a relationship with that list, be a personality-driven brand rather than just a box brand that nobody cares about. We're going to drive that principle in. And then we're going to look at what's our email list, how much revenue is attributed to that email list. We want to look at that every single month and see if it's sustaining, if it's growing, et cetera.

So that's probably the number one KPI I'll be looking at.

Seth: I guess in order to use that as a measurement stick, that means each email needs to have some kind of a revenue generating objective to it, right?

Paul: Yeah. That's a good question. I don't look at per email because, and here's why. The common idea is like, oh, let's take the best performing email and throw it into our drip sequence. Okay.

I've done that plenty of times, you know, recycle it back, we get the best one, I've done multiple metrics, open rates, clicks, and revenue, put it back into it and recycle it, send it months later.

I've seen it where it did okay, it did the same, and I've seen it a lot of times where it actually was the worst performing one.

So here's a really great way to see what your relationship is with your list is to start split-testing subject lines. Put a really bad subject line in, put a really good subject line that you think would do great, and then you experiment with all this.

If you see not much difference between the two when it comes to opens, that means people are opening your email because of who you are, because of the sender name, rather than the line. If you're getting a huge fluctuation of people opening because of the really sexy direct response type of subject line, it means you have more people opening because of the subject line rather than the sender name.

And that's the objective. I want people to open because they see that name come in. You know, here's a really good example that ties into SMS marketing.

I'm a subscriber to J. Peterman catalog. They sell clothing, high-end clothing. And I get a message every single day from them. A lot of times I'm not into buying clothing. I'm not even into it, but I'm still on their list and I still open it up just to check out what they have. And what they sell, it's usually a new offer about some type of new jacket, some kind of bomber jacket, whatever.

I'm still on their list, even though I get hammered every single day by them. And they're wildly successful in this industry of selling clothing. And so they know what they're doing. They're sending it every single day. Without skipping a beat.

Seth: What is it they're saying that's keeping you from saying stop?

Paul: Because the idea in the back of my head is like, you know, one day I want to buy something from them. One day I will. So I'm going to keep them on because they're always sending value in the form of an offer and a new jacket, whatever it is.

It's not like I go and open up each one. I'm not like, I see it, sometimes I don't open it. Most of the time I don't open it. I still allow it because they've built that trust. Again, going back to trust. They built that trust with me that I still want to keep there in the loop to make sure I don't miss out on anything.

So tying it all back, it's all about the trust and relationship you have with your list.

Seth: It sounds like we're talking about newsletter-ish stuff, which I think is pretty relevant. Earlier in our conversation, you were talking about selling properties and getting people to be interested in the properties you're selling.

And again, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's kind of when this newsletter-type thing makes sense. And I guess you'd have to have a lot of properties in your inventory continually to justify all the work it takes to keep entertaining people and all this stuff.

But when we're talking about the acquisition side of things, where OmniDrip comes in, do you say, OK, Seth, we're going to take all your existing leads who have responded to you and we're going to start saying this specific message to this person on this day through this medium. The next day, we're going to say this thing through this medium.

Like, is that kind of what you do? Like, say exactly what to say and through what means we say it?

Paul: Yeah. After a client is done with us and on a drip.

So here's the before. Before, they might have maybe two or three drips. They kind of use it. The whole operation is, yeah, a lead comes in and I'll set a manual task to call. If they don't answer, I'll set another manual task. If they don't answer, I'll set another manual task.

So that is the “system” of follow-up. After we're done with them, they're going to have 20 different sequences.

So let's put this in a scenario. Now, after they're done with this, with us, a lead comes into their system. It's a landlord lead. They got done talking with them. He's interested in selling this property. He's got tenants in place. You give them an offer and then all of a sudden communication stops.

So what do you do with that? Before, they would just… most people would just call it dead after three or four or five manual tasks, or you can drop them into one of the sequences, which in this case would be the offer to low landlord sequence, drop them into that, let it work in the background for you. It's just going to send out the text messages automatically. If your CRM does that, it's going to send out the emails automatically. It's going to send out tasks for you to call back. It's not going to be every day.

This sequence right here I'm talking about is not an everyday sequence, far from it. It's going to send out emails that drive it to an article, SMS to drive you to an article. It might send a couple of direct mail pieces, not a whole lot, one or two. It's going to send you a task for a Loom video to send a personal Loom video to this person.

It's no different than a text message. You'll get a task notification that says, hey, follow up with this lead, send them a Loom video. Here's how to do it. Here's what you should say. It's a landlord lead. That lead now, whatever happened, we want to get them back on the phone to either text reply, Hey, I actually sold my house already.

That's a good thing. Get them off your list. You don't need them on your list anymore. If they sold it already.

Seth: When you talk about, “it's going to send all this stuff automatically,” and so that makes me think there's a CRM involved that's actually executing this stuff for you. But you said you don't work with a specific one, like you just work with whatever they have.

So are you like setting this up for them? Or are you saying, here, Seth, take this stuff, you set it up. This is what you're going to do.

Paul: No, we set it up in their CRM because a lot of investors don't quite understand how to set these things up. So I don't just give it to them.

And plus, they see more value in us doing it for them. If I just handed somebody, here's the templates. Well, for one, it's not made to their business because if a client comes in, I want to make sure if they do face-to-face appointments, we make sure that the messaging matches that. We don't want to send something that sounds like you're a 100% virtual investor. Hey, let's get on the phone to get details.

If you'd rather do face-to-face, we want to make sure everything matches to your business. So we put your URLs in place. We create articles for you, put it on your website.

Yeah, so if we hand out a template to people, they're never going to do it. And so I'm interested in getting people results at the end of the day. So we want to make sure that everything is in properly, that they're using it, they understand how to use it.

And because I've done the template thing and nobody ever really… Like you get back to them like, oh, you know, I don't know if it's working.

I don't know. Did you install it all? I installed about half of it.

I'll tell you the amount of content we input into their CRM, I've done it before. I have a team that does it. It's taken me like 8 to 10 hours to input into the CRM. So if I just hand them that template, they're going to be overwhelmed and they're just not going to do it.

Seth: Yeah. I think I heard you say somewhere that it's shown that it takes over 70 touches to convert those long-term leads.

When I hear this, it almost melts my brain because I don't want to follow up 70 times. That just sounds terrible. But the way that you do this is it happens automatically, right? And then does it stop after 80 times or something? Or when do you call it quits?

Paul: So to go back to that, to give some context to that, I know that from diving into clients, CRMs, and some CRMs, not a whole lot do this, but they'll tell you like, what's the average amount of touches it took before this person turned into a deal, right? They'll tell you that.

I keep seeing 70. I saw 180 there a day with a deal, 180 touches.

Now, that's total touches. That means they came into your CRM, they opted in, they filled out your form or they called in, and then you're just manual tasks, your call attempts, voicemails left. After they get in contact, transaction coordinators talking with them. So that takes into account too.

I'm seeing that number, these high numbers of 60, 70, 180 touches on average to see for these deals to convert. So what does that look like in the whole big picture? That's not like manual tasks. That's not you picking up the phone and making 180 calls. That is a combination. The manual, final calls are probably a small, probably a quarter of that or less. The rest of it are emails and SMS.

Okay, I'm going to tie this back. Going back, it's about friendly familiarity again, right? So I am trying to get touches in place. So I'm breaking these tactics down to the very minute detail, meaning if I send out a task for you, Seth, to call somebody to follow up with them, my task is going to tell you, call that lead. If the lead doesn't answer, leave this voicemail and I give you the whole framework on what to say.

And that task will then say, manually text them and paste this, then send this text their way after you leave the voicemail. And that text usually says, “Hey, I just called you about our offer. Do I have the wrong property?” So that's three touches.

So in reality, that's three touches, friendly familiarity. They're getting the missed call notification, the voicemail notification. If they have voicemail set up, they're getting the text, the manual text. And driving them also to an article on the website, that's a fourth touch. And if you want to get geeky about it, if you have a pixel set up now, you have ads being put in front of now, you're getting more touches.

So the point of this, again, is driving back home to this friendly familiarity, getting that and awareness up.

Seth: I don't know how much you track this, but when a lead is finally converted into a deal and closed, is there any common denominator you notice that's making that happen? Like, was it because the investor used a certain marketing medium, said a certain thing, offered a higher price or something else?

Like, what buttons should a person be pushing to increase their chances of closing?

Paul: That's a question I don't have an answer to because every investor I come across operates in a different way. They run a team of acquisition managers, or it's just the solo, like he's the owner and he might have a lead manager or an assistant, but he runs the appointments. And so he has a wildly better conversion rate than the other guys.

And they all use sequences differently. Not wildly differently, but I know an investor who loves how aggressive our form-filled sequences are. That's what I was describing to you, where it's like seven touches in the first day. He's using that even for leads that aren't even in that part of the stage yet. Maybe it's a lead that he gave an offer, but they dropped out of nowhere.He'll plug into that one. He loves doing it. He gets a response out of it.

And a lot of them have different lead sources. That plays a big role because your cold calling lead is far different from a guy who throws out a form. So that one calling the lead takes far longer to convert versus a PPC lead.

Seth: Yeah. So when it comes to something like texting or email, when somebody can say stop or unsubscribe and basically just kill that line of communication, what are some examples of things you say that actually get people to react and respond the right way without saying stop?

Or maybe another way to say that is, when people do say stop or unsubscribe, are there any common themes in terms of like, what was said in that email or text when they did that? What are the things that are making people opt out versus stay on the line with you?

Paul: In a 10,000-foot view of everything, because that's hard to measure. Again, because I don't really look at unsubscribes. I have a peer that looks more at this. And he actually says, he says this, the more opt-outs I get, the more money I make on a promo. So the more emails you send, yeah, the more opt-outs you're going to get.

Seth: Is that person in real estate or some other business?

Paul: Another business.

Seth: Okay. So that's one thing just to be aware of. I mean, it's could be a different type of recipient.

Paul: Yeah. Obviously different personality, different industry, different product.

But it's not like I, with real estate investors, we don't plug in daily emails in that way. Like a daily email might come in the first three days. And then after that, it tapers, there are emails like, you know, in a year span, that person's lead is probably getting 11 emails. So it's not a whole lot. So we're not sending a whole plethora of emails like that.

I don't have anything in real estate. I don't have anything to say as far as what is the good number. But I think a lot of people are scared of the unsubscribes. So that's why they tone down the frequency.

When I say everything I've seen outside of real estate, inside of real estate, everything I've seen is the more we send, the better outcome you have.

Seth: Yeah. So I guess your big discovery is like opt-outs and unsubscribes are not something we should be afraid of. Almost like lean into that. Say what you're going to say. If people want to leave, they'll leave. Don't worry about it. Is that your thought?

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. Because, again, we're plugging in multiple mediums, right? So if we do get unsubscribed, which is a natural part of all this marketing, it's not a bad thing to have unsubscribed. They come back later. We see they come back later anyway, right?

So they're not ready yet. They're still searching for a solution later down the road. And they fill out another form if you stop consistent marketing, right? And they come back later back into your SMS list.

But yeah, I'm not afraid of unsubscribes. Unless it's a huge, this is a caveat to that, understand what is an exorbitant amount, huge amount for unsubscribes rate. So in email, I'm looking at like half percent. So are we under half percent? Okay, we're at a healthy unsubscribe rate.

If you're getting 2%, 3% unsubscribe rate on email, don't remember what the SMS one is (SMS is higher than email; it's natural to get a higher unsubscribe rate in SMS than it is in email). But if I'm getting a huge amount, you're doing something wrong, either lead quality is completely off or (maybe this, I've seen this happen with people) merge fields are broken. So the dynamic fields, like you send out some emails, and it’s supposed to say, “Hey, John,” but instead it says, “Hey, first name.”

And so, all the merge fields are broken. And so people are like, yeah, this is garbage, and they unsubscribe.

So that's typically when you have a high unsubscribe rate, there's something technically wrong or wrong with your lead source.

Seth: Yep. Sometimes I like to ask questions like what I'm about to ask. It's kind of a ridiculous question. I know it's going to be hard for you to answer, but I just ask it anyway, just to get your thoughts on it.

So I know you said you recommend multiple different communication mediums like texting and email and calls and mail and all this stuff. So if a land investor could only use one marketing medium, they're not allowed anything else. What would you recommend?

Paul: I would say calls. Still continue to call because now you're eliminating automation. Now you're eliminating everything I do, which is fine.

I'm not going to say and hide behind, oh, email is the best way. I don't think so. Email works for real estate investors. Email works because it's an added layer with SMS. I recommend email last (this is for acquisitions, by the way), because you don't get a whole lot of replies back.

And that's a mistake I hear people say like, well, I don't get a whole lot of replies back from email, so I'm going to eliminate it. It's a terrible reason to eliminate a medium because marketing is not isolated from one another. It's not like they only see your SMS and your email is a completely different world.

No, everything connects with each other. They just read your email about some kind of scam going on in the market today. They relate that, again, friendly familiarity. They're relating that back to you and your brand. They see your text messages. They're going to respond to their most comfortable medium, which is usually text messages.

But it still adds to the story. It still leverages problems and pains. It still brings up your brand.

So going back, though, if you had no no other means of doing it, I'd say call.

Seth: And when you say that, are you thinking like hire a cold calling agency to reach out to people or just do this follow-up? Or are you thinking like, no, you Seth, you do the call.

Paul: So you're talking about cold lead generation. Again, so we want to mix the two.

Now cold lead generation is different. If I'm talking about warm follow-up, like actually following up with the person who came in already, who said yes to you already, calling would be the number one, I'd say. That's why I still keep calls in my automation.

Seth: With that in mind, again, is that me personally calling or is it like you can hire a cold calling or I'm sorry, just a calling agency to do it?

Paul: Yeah, either one. You, as a business owner, typically have a higher conversion rate than somebody who you hire. That's across the board; I've seen it in other organizations I've worked in.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's you or somebody else, but calling is probably the better means. Because the SMS you have, again, going back to the unsubscribe, the SMS is going to have a chance of getting unsubscribed. Same with email. mail. Once that stops, it stops.

But calling is a little different. Until they call back, tell you to get me off your list. But then we want that call back. Then that creates a conversation point with them. We're getting face-to-face with them.

Seth: It's interesting how you're saying it doesn't matter. Because I know, I mean, maybe it depends on the quality of whatever agency you hire, whoever the person is doing it. Because I've heard some recorded calls that are just awful. I mean, it still works because there's not many other people doing it, but it's still not good as opposed to like, if I'm doing it and I care and I have better communication like that, that makes a huge difference.

Is it more about following the right script then in that case?

Paul: Yeah, I said that assuming that the other person doing it is doing a somewhat decent enough job, right? That's assuming that, right? And that rule goes into play for anything. If you have somebody who builds out drip sequences and emails, they don't know what they're doing. They're going to do a far less job if you're just going to do it yourself. So that goes to anything.

But assuming that calling, if you're going to use somebody else, obviously hire somebody. I mean, I hire somebody that knows what they're doing and you've vetted them, et cetera. So yeah, I think that goes without saying.

Seth: And if somebody could use two marketing mediums for follow-up specifically, would it be calling and what else?

Paul: Call and text message. If you're going to use auto text message just to use text message. Yeah.

That's the higher responsive medium that does get more responsive than any other medium. It doesn't mean you shouldn't use the others because it's cheap to send an email. It doesn't take any extra effort except building it up front to send that auto email.

But if you only had two, I'd say call and text message and do a cadence of either one. Calling, text message, calling, text message, a kind of repeated cadence like that.

Seth: So it sounds like texting gets more responses, but calling is more effective at actually closing deals?

Paul: Well, I mean, closing a deal means you're getting on the phone with them over the year. I mean, unless you're assuming closing it via 100% virtual, you're not even talking with them?

Seth: It happens less frequently, but it can happen. I've had that before.

Paul: Yeah, I've had that in land, especially. Funny enough, I had that happen more often with email than any other, like than text, for example.

But I mean, you get contracts in the mail too. So that's mail, I guess. That's the contactless medium. Mail can be one of them too, right? That was my mode of operation: just get the contracts in the mailbox. I've never talked to him at all. Then send him an email about the whole process, right? Send him a check.

And so it's kind of hard to say which one is best. Obviously, we just went through like each scenario is different, right? So some people might take that out of context where I just said, and then say, oh, that means for lead generation, cold calling is best. And then text messages.

Not necessarily. I mean, I didn't do that when I started in land, I was just sending mail out and I'd have a pretty high conversion rate on contracts.

Seth: Well, it's kind of interesting. Even when we started this conversation, I was kind of coming into this with certain assumptions, and I think you were too.

And it's important for people to recognize that because I think for land investors, this is definitely changing, but historically over the past 10-plus years, there used to be literally zero follow-up. People just didn't do it. You send one letter and that's it. You move on.

And we're in this world now where follow-up is way more important now and can be much more effective. And a lot of these things we're talking about are like my questions are framed in the context of almost like cold outreach. But that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about, no, these people have already responded in some way.

And that's just a different conversation when you already have some kind of connection with somebody versus not.

Paul: It's optimizing a different part of your business. All businesses, if you look at just the factory, you're putting them down a conveyor belt. I'm just talking about one part of that and optimizing that part. And there are other parts to optimize. One is lead generation. The other, selling the property. That's another part to optimize.

So yeah, it's just a different mode. I mean, depending on where you're at in your stage. Like you said, it's changed, right? From when I flipped land, I wasn't worried. And on the acquisition side of things, I wasn't worried about follow-up. Didn't really need to be. And if I was, I'd have too much property. I'd have a bottleneck in my conveyor belt, right? Which is a good problem to have, but it can be a really bad problem.

Seth: I did wonder about that whole conversation of following up more versus just doing more cold outreach to new people. I don't know if you have any cost comparisons on this, but like, what does it cost to implement this follow-up stuff versus, no, no, let's not do that.

Let's just keep reaching out to new people. Like what is more expensive, do you think?

Paul: That is a really good question. So, okay, I can relate this more to single-family because wholesalers and flippers have this problem more, right? It's land flipping.

Seth: The land is going that direction now. So it's a relevant thing to talk about.

Paul: So I'll say this. You're familiar with Dan Kennedy, right?

Seth: Oh, yeah, for sure.

Paul: Everybody knows Dan. He's not the only one that said this. He talks a lot about this in his newsletters, things like that.

And so in his books, people spend a huge amount of resources on the lead generation, and then they spend very little money on the follow-up, and that's the least expensive marketing avenue.

So this is a cost comparison. A lead, a call that comes in for a flipper, comes in, it's going to cost maybe $150, $180. Maybe on the high side, it's going to cost $300 per lead. So if you're buying leads from a vendor, those can cost $250, $300 a pop, okay? Very expensive lead.

So you can then, if you decide, I'm going to just do more lead generation, understand you are moving a lot of money into that front end to produce the same results or a slightly better result. While if you implement some sort of follow-up, especially if it's automated in a sense, let's take follow-up mail. The follow-up mail we implement, it'll probably cost you per lead an extra 10 bucks per month.

So maybe per lead, it costs you 10 bucks. So you're adding 10 bucks into that $310. It's fractional to follow up, especially if you have some automation in place right now. If you don't have automation in place, you have to hire somebody to do the follow-up for you. That adds on to your costs.

It's still not as much as buying that lead because we're all buying leads. We're doing, we're buying leads through your time, with your money. And that is a huge amount of resources to get that lead.

Seth: Yeah. And I'm wondering, if somebody responds, under what conditions would you say we should not follow up with this person? Like, is it only if they say, I hate you, don't ever talk to me again and then you don't do it? Or like, if it sounds like they're 90% on no, but there's just a tiny little piece that's like, well, maybe. How do you know when to disqualify them versus continuing to follow up?

Paul: I would say for me personally, I would do it until they unsubscribe, right? I'm going to say every lead that comes in is a viable lead until they say no. That's my modus operandi.

Seth: So like on the phone call side of things, if you're emailing them, texting them and calling them, if they unsubscribe from the email and the text, does that mean you shouldn't call them anymore? Or do they have to cuss you out on the phone and that's the unsubscribe?

Paul: Yeah. Most investors operate this way, which is fine. An SMS unsubscribe. That's one channel they didn't subscribe from. There's still the email. So different channels.

I'm not a lawyer. So like if an attorney tells you no, that no means from all channels. I don't know if that answers your question, but everyone's going to feel it differently. For me, it's a no from each channel.

Seth: Well, Paul, I appreciate your time. If people want to work with you or talk to you more about how this stuff works and pick your brain more, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Paul: Yeah. They can go to my site, reiomniadrip.com and easily contact me there. There's no salespeople behind it. They can just reach out to me. They can call me at my phone number on my site as well.

Seth: Sweet. Yeah. I will include a link to that, along with a lot of other stuff we talked about here at retipster.com/186. That's the show notes for this episode.

Paul, thanks again. It's great to talk to you and hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Paul: Likewise, man. Appreciate it.