How Do You Define What a Good Mailing List Is? Part 2

Part 2

Most people become discouraged and get hung up in the response rate. The response rate is irrelevant people. What relevant is how much money did you spend, and how much did you get back? It doesn't make any difference what the response rate is... it really doesn't matter how many calls you get.

Of course it matters if you get none! But the easier it is to define your list . . . the easier the list is to get . . . the more calls you get but the less of those calls are productive. Does that make sense to you?

You mail to people in zip codes and you are going to get flooded with calls. You mail to people with foreclosures you are going to get a handful of calls (but they are good calls). I would rather have three calls from people in foreclosure tha
I would thirty calls from Zip Code mailers. Then there is the whole big old line of list in the middle, divorces, bankruptcies, out of town owners, expired listings. All of these lists are worthy of your attention and all of them work.

Will all of them work with every mailing? No!

You have to play the marketing game and what I have the hardest time getting people to understand this it doesn't matter if you got a hundred calls and you only bought one house. It doesn't matter. To get a hundred calls it is the cost of a hundred letters. People get hung up... "Well I got a hundred calls and they are all junk." No. There has got to be some in there that weren't junk. That is all you are trying to do. If it takes 100 calls to get one deal that makes you 30, 40, 50 grand, who cares? In the end, if you are making a profit, does it matter if you spent a small percentage to make the sale? Think about it in those terms. And think about it this way-if you have more than one property, you will be making more than one sale!

Hopefully you agree. Now say you have had good success with an ad in the paper and you are trying to target back into some neighborhoods that you really like. What you are now wondering is if within those targeted neighborhoods there is a way of sorting that list. The answer is yes. But that is something that can take a while to get into because there are so many ways to target and sort lists and some lists you can get from list brokers, some lists you can't. You won't get foreclosures from list brokers.

Have you ever thought about just mailing to people with delinquent taxes? Every city publishes that list. Every city that has a tax lien or a tax deed sale publishes that. There are thousands of them every year. People with delinquent taxes it appears to me like they would be fairly decent target. Certainly, probably more target than zip code mailers. But I can tell you right now you can make a million dollars a year if you didn't do anything but mail the yellow letter to zip codes if you get it! And you can do it!