Top Realty Chief Urges Direct Mail
Michael Duffy told agents to stay focused on listings
During a special webinar on listing development for United Country Real Estate, company President Michael Duffy encouraged agents to stay focused on getting listings and to use direct mail as an important tool to do that.
“How important is it to stay focused on listings? Never more so than in a changing market,” Duffy said. “No matter what the market does, you can adjust your income goal to whatever you want.”
He said even in soft markets you can get listings and make money. “One of the most proven and effective ways to do that is direct mail.”
“The number one listing office in the country and the number one listing agent in the country lean almost 100 percent on direct mail to make sure their listing flow is constant, steady, and enormous,” Duffy said. “… It’s not theory, it’s proven.”
He said the pinnacle of direct-mail marketing is when agents can personalize it.
Olde School Marketing President Rusty Dycus said letters in handwritten No. 10 envelops are most effective for direct mail. People respond to the personalization and open the envelope, beginning the first step of the sales process.
Olde School marketing offers handwritten direct mail services.
When people open the mail and read your letter or your flier, they engage with you and make a decision about you and your company. Seeing the time invested in personalizing the envelop or even signing the letter or card carries an emotional link that begins to build trust and relationship he said.
It adds an authentic connection of reaching out to begin two-way communication.
Postcards are great for brief announcements, Dycus said, but they often are discarded as ads. Handwritten mailers are opened at a significantly high rate and recipients engage with the messaging at a higher level because it’s personalized, he said.
Direct mail campaigns can be very localized or scaled to high numbers. The approach depends on an agent’s goals in doing the campaign.
Olde School Marketing has found that extremely localized mail tied to an event, such as a new listing or a sold property, can help connect agents to neighbors who may have considered selling their own home or property after seeing the activity.
The program starts with as low as 25 handwritten mailers that are targeted to homeowners or property owners surrounding the property.
Direct mail campaigns also can be scaled up to thousands. Two key strategies with large mailings are every door direct mail (EDDM), which covers every mailbox in targeted areas, or mailing to select prospects based on qualifying data, such as income, household size, life stage or other factor developed from big data-analysis and customer-type targeting.
“If you want to turn up the volume, do an enormous amount of direct mail so you can spend time where it’s most effective, spending time with property owners and buyers,” Duffy said, and let the direct mail and personalized mailing work in the background for you.
United Country Real Estate is the leading, fully integrated network of conventional and auction real estate professionals in the nation. The company has been an innovator in lifestyle and country real estate marketing since 1925.
Headquartered in Kansas City, MO, United Country supports more than 500 offices and 5,000 real estate professionals across four continents, with a unique, comprehensive marketing program. The exclusive program includes the highest ranked and largest portfolios of specialty property marketing websites, unequaled national print advertising, the largest internal real estate advertising agency, an extensive buyer database of more than 950,000 opt-in buyers and additional proprietary programs to advertise properties more broadly.
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