One thing I’m trying to get better at is “working” my leads, or exhausting my efforts with all the initial leads that I pulled for a campaign before I move on to the next one.
When I first started, I sent out a campaign of ~800 postcards and after about 3-4 weeks when the calls and website submissions died off, I figured there was just no more interest and moved on my next campaign.
I now realize that there’s a chance I lost some potentials deals from that campaign by not following up with those leads again and again.
That being said, I’m curious to see what others are doing and to what extend do you follow up before your efforts with the campaign are just not worth your time anymore.
As I’m writing this, I realize this likely only applies to those of you doing postcards. I don’t do blind offers but I assume that is more of a “Take It or Leave It” situation.
I would say that the “best” practice is to always follow up on cold leads, whether you’re doing blind offers or not.
Someone might not be interested in your offer today, but that can change if life hits them with the right circumstances.
That said, I’m pretty terrible at doing this myself!
If I could snap my fingers and have what I wanted in a CRM system (Eh-hem @Jessey, @rockwood) I would love an automated follow-up system.
For example, when I used to work for a large house-wholesale company, our CRM had different categories we could place leads in declaring them as hot, warm, or cold.
Base on whatever category they were in, a series of pre-produced ringless voicemails, text messages, and emails would go out on specific days and times.
For example, if the lead was tagged as cold, the automatic follow-up would be spread over the next 365 days.
If they were warm, it would be over the next few weeks or months and if they were hot they would be spread over the next few days.
If a lead in any category responded to something, the CRM would notify the acquisition team immediately (I believe through email, text and through creating a task) and then they’d reach out accordingly.
Something like this would be EPIC to have in my land business!
I don’t do any follow up on mailers, but thought about doing another mailer to the same people maybe six months later. How else could one follow up given the tools we have available?
@Jarenb I assume when you say “cold” leads, you’re referring to someone that responded to some marketing material at some point so you have their email or phone number to do the additional follow up.
However, I’m thinking more along the lines of what @freesiapropco is getting at. In other words, I pull a list of 1000 leads from DataTree, mail them, get 20 responses which I can do additional follow ups as you mentioned, but what about the remaining 980?
Just like you mentioned with the cold leads, the 980 might or be interested in selling today but maybe they will at some later point in time.
How much effort should we be giving those 980 before it’s a waste of our effort/resources? How many more times do you typically mail these folks? Do you change your postcard when you mail then again? I know I read @retipsterseth postcard template blog and he mentions using the NOTICE Postcard the second time around.
Anyways, I know there’s no right/wrong answer to this but I’m just curious to see what others are doing and what has worked for them.
Honestly from an 80/20 standpoint, when it comes to following up I would focus just first on people who responded - the 20 people in your example.
In regards to continuing to mail those who did not respond… I think this is a point of debate.
I’ve heard in the land flipper community that you should only mail the same list once in every 6 months or so.
I don’t know if I agree with this though - every other type of real estate investing strategy (and for that matter, every other industry even outside of real estate) I’ve been exposed to doesn’t consider a direct mail list exhausted until it’s been mailed 7 or more times.
A part of the power of direct mail is branding, and being “top-of-mind” so that when someone decides to sell at some point, you’re the first person they think of.
If you have a particular county you like and have had a lot of success in… I don’t know if it would be a bad thing to mail to it every time you do a campaign, or at least more consistently than you do other counties.
For example, I do this with Saint Johns county Flordia - maybe not in every new campaign but probably every 2-3.
If you do something like this, there will probably be months you don’t get anything from your mail drop in that particular market, but direct mail is like fishing.
Sometimes you catch a large amount of fish and sometimes you don’t get any!
It doesn’t mean fishing doesn’t work, it just the nature of the beast.
@jarenb yeah, that is a really good point about being “top of mind”.
I was talking to one of the gentlemen that I bought property from and he mentioned he was getting multiple mailers per week to buy his property. When I asked why he decided to sell to us, he mentioned, “I don’t really know, I guess you were the first piece of mail that came in after I decided to sell the thing.”
I like the county I’m in and I think there’s potential for more acquisitions. It’s a hot market right now and I don’t mind paying a bit of a premium if I can still turn around and make some profit on it quickly.