Metamorphosis Consulting, Inc.

Management Consulting Firm

2015 Prospecting: The Direct Mail Campaign

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2015 Prospecting

The Direct Mail Campaign

Every good agent knows that prospecting is one of the fundamental keys to success in business. The more contact or communication you have with people, the more successful you’ll be.

There are however, two major challenges that must be addressed in order to have a successful prospecting model. First, prospecting can be accomplished through a variety of approaches that include:

  • Face-To-Face Contact
  • Phone Calling
  • Direct Mail
  • Email
  • Social Media Networking

Although face-to-face and phone calling are the most powerful forms of prospecting, it is virtually impossible to communicate each week with everyone using these two mediums alone. Conversely, it’s easy to reach thousands of people via email and social media (ie. Facebook), but they are the least effective forms of communication. That leaves direct mail as the next obvious choice. Because direct mail is expensive, very few agents use it on a regular basis. Therein lies the opportunity. Using direct mail is an extremely powerful way for you to stay in front of your prospects, clients and your sphere of influence. Second, the message being sent must be customized or tailored to each of the four groups as follows:

  1. Hot Listing Prospects, including your Existing Listings and Expired Listings (HLP’s & EL’s)
  2. Buyer Prospects (HB’s)
  3. RMR – Past Clients, Advocates, Sphere of Influence
  4. Geographic Farm Area

Both the message and timing should be different for each group. For example, it makes sense to contact expired listings, hot listing prospects and hot buyers every week. For example, an article about rapidly rising home prices would be ideal to send to motivate buyers, but not the best choice for listing prospects. The same holds true for the other groups. Special event calendars and market data about a specific farm is great information to send to people that live in the same area, but would be of no interest to your sphere of influence.

Finally, information relating to general trends is great for your past clients, advocates and sphere of influence, but isn’t the best message to send to hot buyers and hot listing prospects.

As you can see from the explanations above, an efficient direct mail campaign can be complex and definitely requires some thought and careful planning.