Since our post (prompted by a contest hosted by Bob Crane):
Is Marketing Your Strong Suit? Our 100 Day Checkup...
April 21st - Fifty two mailings (the first mailing of a carefully designed mailpiece that took a few months to develop) went out to carefully selected homeowners.
Of those - only one was undeliverable / no forwarding address.
May 3rd - a followup letter went out to the remaining fifty one homeowners.
If you had asked me a year ago (before we returned to the 'Rain) whether there was any point in direct mail, my response would likely have been "print is dead".
Once we returned, I began to think differently, in large part to posts and comments by Barbara Todaro - thank you Barbara!
May 16th (this past Monday) - a call came in from one of the fifty one homeowners.
They wanted to meet with us to discuss the possibility of listing their home, and we set an appointment to meet at our Scottsdale office for a "let's get acquainted" meeting.
That was yesterday.
It went very well.
They have decided to list with us.
Today we are heading for their home in an "upscale" gated community to do a "property preview" and collect info we need to create an accurate market price analysis.
The "high level" game plan is - based on the preview today, plan what (if 
anything) needs to be done to the property to get it "Ready for Showtime" prior to professional photography.
Those activities will be completed by the end of July, with the listing going Active in August.
All recent sales at first glance range from the mid 500s to the mid 800s.
The second listing of the week - the first being described yesterday in a Members Only Post:
Thank You Active Rain - The Drops Begin To Fall Again!
The homeowners we met with yesterday stated that our mailpiece was "unique", it really grabbed their attention, and they would have been calling us even without the follow-up letter.
Music to our ears considering the time and effort spent designing it starting in January and it being ready for distribution on April 16th.
One out of fifty two.
About a 2% response rate - so far.
And the numbers "cost of mailpiece" compared to "potential revenue generated" make very much sense - "very rough estimate" ROI of 12 to 1 - or better - depends on price point of the listing.
So - we are cautiously optimistic.
We plan/hope to mail 50 mailpieces per week, plus a series of followup letters that we purchased from our very own Marte Cliff here in the 'Rain some time ago.
If the numbers continue, that would result in 1 listing per week.
Time will tell.
If you haven't checked out what Marte offers - I encourage you to do so - her letter sets beat anything else we've seen - and we've done a lot of research - hands down! Here's a link to her website. And no...Marte was not aware I was going to write this, nor do I receive any compensation for doing so, I just want to highlight an excellent resource to fellow 'Rainers.
So that's the update.
We'll report more when we have more numbers to crunch.
How are things going in your world?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Click the button below to Subscribe to our Scottsdale Arizona Real Estate blog!
All images purchased and licensed from Shutterstock , shared from YouTube, sourced from Vectortoons, or were taken by the author unless otherwise noted.
Comments(20)