Direct Mail Marketing 101 for New Realtors: Why Use It?
In the first part of this three-part series on direct mail for new realtors, we looked at the questions you should ask yourself before starting a direct mail campaign. In this part, we’ll look at why your real estate business should use direct mail marketing.
There are several unique benefits to direct mail marketing. The most significant is that direct mail allows you to promote your business to a highly targeted audience in a cost-effective, timely manner.
Why should your real estate business use direct mail?
Doing business without marketing is like smiling in the dark. While you might know you’re doing it, nobody else does. No matter how good your business is at achieving results for its customers, few people will know without any marketing efforts.
Direct mail allows your business to get the word out and promote its services. For a real estate business, direct mail lets you effectively target both buyers and sellers in a clearly defined, targeted area to generate a consistent flow of leads.
Using real estate direct mail, your business can communicate directly with its target audience and deliver its marketing message. You can explain why your business is the best in its category and why you’re worth choosing over competitors.
Some of the unique advantages that direct mail offers over alternative marketing channels are:
It’s highly targeted and relevant
One of the most important factors in any marketing campaign is relevance. One of the biggest advantages that direct mail offers over other marketing channels is that you can carefully target the audience you’d like to receive your message.
Modern direct mail marketing databases allow you to target residential homes, for example, while ignoring unprofitable commercial or industrial addresses. You can also target your campaign based on the value of an owner’s home and other factors.
This allows your real estate business to deliver its marketing message to the people that are most likely to respond. With the right targeting, you can reach a precise and clearly defined demographic that’s most profitable for your real estate business.
In addition to being highly relevant, direct mail is easy to personalize. Technology such as variable-data printing allows your business to customize its postcards for each recipient, increasing relevance and improving a campaign’s response rate.
It’s immediate
Unlike other marketing options, which often require several weeks to move from concept to live campaign, direct mail is immediate. New digital printing technology means that your business can send out direct mail campaigns almost immediately.
This allows your business to capitalize in the marketing power of immediacy. With direct mail, you can send real estate postcards right before a sale deadline, before a major holiday or as soon as a property goes onto the market.
In fact, the only marketing methods that offer a faster turnaround than direct mail are cold calling (which is against the law or closely regulated in many states) and email marketing, which is all too often deleted unread.
It’s extremely cost effective
When used effectively, direct mail marketing is one of the most cost-effective direct marketing channels available. Even a relatively small campaign can produce a large amount of profitable leads for your real estate business.
Thanks to on-demand printing technology, there’s also no need to invest in a large direct mail run to produce a profitable campaign. Instead of worrying about mailing a large enough audience, you can send a relevant message to a small, targeted group.
Finally, since there’s an online interface between you and your direct mail service, it’s easy to make alterations to messages, designs and printing options in very little time.
Learn the ‘how’ of direct mail marketing
In the next part of our three-part guide to direct mail for new realtors, we’ll look at the ‘how’ of using direct mail to promote your real estate business and create a flow of new buyer and seller leads.
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