How to Increase Your Real Estate Direct Marketing Responses in 2022

Now is the time to start working on how to increase your real estate direct marketing responses in 2022. If direct marketing is part of your marketing mix, you already know that the post office has announced that the next postage increase will be in July 2022. Then it will increase again in January 2023 and then again in July 2023. Therefore, it’s time to start planning on ways to save on postage as well as increase in responses. 

Direct marketing is very effective at driving responses, when done correctly. So if you can keep your costs down, direct mail can effectively increase deals or sales.

5 Ways to save on postage for Direct Marketing

As postage increases, so will the cost per response. Therefore, it’s important to start making these 5 changes now to your campaign. 

1. The most fundamental way of decreasing your spend is by constantly auditing your mailing list after each send. When you receive undelivered mail, it’s going to be important to remove them from your list. Don’t waste money or time advertising to people who will never receive your message. 
2. Ensure that you are paying the least amount to postage based on the size of your mailer. The maximum size allowed will depend on the material you are sending. For example. You can go to a 6.125 x 11.5 if you’re sending a card or envelope. And if you’re sending a folded self-mailer, your max is 6 x 10.5.
3. Avoid having lumps in your mailer. Your mailer should be a regular shape and have consistent thickness throughout. 
4. If you can, do not use dark colored paper stock or have printed images around the address area. There is something called the USPS reflectance standard. This means that if a postal OCR machine cannot scan the barcode against the background, you will have to pay more for postage. 
5. Make sure that your layout allows enough space for the address block in the OCR read area. This area should be 1.3 to 2.5 in size. Mail pieces that fall outside of this ratio could cost twice as much!

Now that you know these 5 strategies to reduce your spend on direct marketing, you can start saving more money now.

5 Ways to increase response rates to Real Estate Direct Mailers

Decreasing costs for mailers will help improve your cost per response, but if you can do that and increase responses, you’ll find that your costs will go down across the board.  Here are 5 ways you can increase responses to your direct mailers. 

1. When you are sending a direct mailer to a specific type of person, make sure you have properly segmented your list. If you are not segmenting your list, you should think about it. Some people on your list may not be the ideal person for your mailer. For example, if you’re only targeting users of a specific age in a particular zip code, did you screen your list to ensure everyone is within those parameters? 
2. It’s important to have a clear and concise offer with an expiration date. This will help give your receiver the right action to take with urgency. 
3. Test different size postcards to see if you can get more responses. For example, if you’ve always had success with 5.5” x 8.5” postcards, try a 6” x 11” postcard. A test may cost a few extra dollars but if you can improve your response rate, it will more than pay for itself. 
4. It’s time to evaluate how often you’re sending your mailers. For example, if you’re only mailing out 4 times a year, you may want to consider doing it 6 times. It has been shown that if you send a second mailing of the same piece to the same list, it can generate up to 50% of the response of the first mailing. Although there is a limit, so do not saturate your list with mail. It will have a negative effect. 
5. Lastly, consider how many options you are giving people to respond to you. Is it just a phone number? If so, you may want to consider adding an email, a text number, and a website if you aren’t already. Having multiple options to choose from will help increase your response rate. Additionally, if you add a business card, this tends to improve response rates. The presence of a business card communicates a response is requested. 

Using 10 strategies to increase your direct marketing response rate

Now that you know these 10 strategies to decrease spend on postage and how to increase responses on mailers, you can now work towards getting more leads generated with your direct marketing pieces for your real estate business. Once you get leads and you’re struggling to fund them, learn how you can solve that problem with our investor kit.