Back to Email Marketing
Don't Mail It - Email It! (Part 1 of 2)
If you market to a geographical farm or are using one of the "by referral" programs that relies heavily on mailing pieces, your out of pocket expenses have just gone up another 3 cents per item due to the increase in postal rates. If you've been resisting putting technology to good use in your business, there's no better time than right now to make the shift. A simple place to start is to shift from traditional mail to email.
Email has a number of advantages over the traditional US mail. One of the most obvious benefits is the cost savings. If you currently do 12 mailings per year to your geographical farm of 500 homes, your current costs will be somewhere between 53 cents and 60 cents per item depending upon whether you use postcards or actual letters. Using the 60 cents per item, each mailing costs you $300.00 per month or $3600.00 per year. Now let's compare the same program using email. If you have the email addresses of 300 of the 500 people in your geographical farm, your costs would be reduced by almost $2000.
Another huge benefit of email is the time-savings. Research shows that it takes 6 contacts before a prospect will feel comfortable enough with you to do business. For example, let's assume that you regularly hold open house. NAR statistics show that only 2% of all agents follow up on open house leads. Part of the reason is most of agents hate picking up the phone to contact open house leads. To make your lead follow-up by phone effective, you need to speak to each person who attended your open house an additional five times. Assuming you had 20 open house visitors, this translates into 100 phone calls each week to effectively follow-up with your open house leads. In contrast, following up with email is quick, simple, and virtually painless.
Here's how it works - begin by obtaining email addresses at your open house. Next, on Sunday night, drop all your open house visitors a personal thank you note for attending the open house. Monday, email them with the new listings that came on the market over the weekend. Tuesday, email them information on loan rates. Wednesday, email them with information on new listings you may have seen on tour or caravan. You have now had five contacts. At this point, make contact number six a personal phone call. Having five prior contacts with the prospect makes it much more likely that you will be able to convert that prospect into a solid lead. CAVEAT: before you email anyone you meet at an open house, you must have his or her permission. Unsolicited emails are considered to be spam and can cause your ISP to shut down your email and possibly your website. Be sure to obtain permission before emailing anyone on a regular basis.
A third benefit of email is immediacy. Sending a handwritten thank you note for attending your open house is a great strategy. The challenge is you have to write it, mail it, and then hope it gets open and read. The process takes a minimum of 2 days and can sometimes take as much as a full week. By the time the person receives your note, they may have forgotten who you are and where they met you. Also, unless you call back and personally speak to the lead, a single hand written note is simply not sufficient to get the lead to do business with you. In contrast, sending an email thank you note immediately following your open house sharply increases the chance the prospect will remember who you are. Following up three more times over the next few days greatly enhances the probability the prospect will respond favorably to your personal call. This in turn, increases the likelihood the prospect will do business with you.
Whether you mail or email, there's one other important point to remember. Marketing research has shown that email and snail mail are pretty much useless unless there is either a telephone or face-to-face follow-up contact. Using email to increase your number of contacts not only saves you time and money, it also increases the probability the prospect will say "yes" when you call in person.
To contact Bernice Ross please email her at bernice@realestatecoach.com
