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Remember when “they” said that video killed the radio star? If so, then you must also remember them claiming that Y2K would cause worldwide blackouts and that email would replace direct mail for real estate marketing.
About 44 percent of direct mail pieces do end “up in the trash without being read,” according to the folks at 41pounds.com, a group devoted to “saving the environment 41 pounds at a time.”
But, instead of looking at the glass as half empty, the truth, at least according to their statistics, is that the glass is quite full – 56 percent of direct mail doesn’t end up in the trash without being read.
Then, compare that with email statistics. More than 75 percent of email is never opened. We would imagine that agents who force people to divulge their email addies before giving access to listings have an even higher failure rate.
So, while more than half of direct mail doesn’t get tossed, almost all business emails end up in the trash.
Is there another marketing channel that offers comparable odds for brand exposure as direct mail? If there is, we haven’t heard of it.
If email isn’t working as you’d hoped, it may be time to cough up a few bucks, find an active farm area and incorporate at least a bit of direct mail in your marketing plan.
Why use real estate direct mail when email is free?
Email is free, or low-cost, depending on how you use it. But what good is your drip campaign doing your business if nobody (or very few recipients) actually opens those emails and reads them?
You can go online and find tons of advice on how to increase your open rate – everything from changing your subject line to finding that just-right time of day to send your emails.
The bottom line is that consumers are bombarded by email to the point where “Today, it’s not unheard of for an individual to receive 1,000 messages a day,” according to Dave Crocker of emailhistory.org.
Think about your inbox. How many business emails do you actually read? If you’re like most of us, they get deleted immediately.
One thing we can say with a great deal of confidence is that few, if any, consumers get 1,000 pieces of snail mail a day. In fact, it’s doubtful they get that much direct mail in 6 months.
Because of this, real estate direct mail pieces don’t have the competition that emails do. In fact, all that talk of the death of real estate direct mail as a marketing method caused a drop-off in the volume of “junk mail” that consumers receive, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
Most of your competition is still laboring under the idea that real estate direct mail marketing is “old school.”
Don’t set them straight.
“If competitors are abandoning the mailbox, they’re leaving you with a huge opportunity to dominate the channel that achieves the highest response rate,” says Debora Haskel of IWCO Direct.
Less competition for your marketing message is a good thing.
Real estate direct mail and consumer trust
A couple of years ago, the people at MarketingSherpa.com interviewed 1,200 consumers about how they felt about various forms of advertising.
The question before them was “In general which type of advertising channels do you trust more when you want to make a purchase decision?”
Before you slap your next ad on Facebook or shell out for a PPC ad, check this out:
The study finds that ads consumers receive in the mail are the third most trusted, behind TV ads (at number two) and print ads from newspapers and magazines (number one).
Wait, aren’t “newspapers and magazines” on the death list mentioned at the beginning of this post?
But I digress. While 76 percent of respondents trust direct mail ads, 61 percent trust search engine ads and 43 percent trust “ads embedded in social media.”
Those pop-up ads everyone despises? Naturally they came in last, with only 25 percent saying they were trustworthy (gotta wonder who these people are, right?).
Volume down, response rate up
Ok, so real estate direct mail pieces get more eyeballs than email marketing pieces. What’s even better is that, as the volume of marketing messages via direct mail has decreased, the response rate has skyrocketed.
The statistics are breathtaking
“Direct mail still pulls a higher response rate than any digital direct marketing medium,” according to the number crunchers at Data Targeting Solutions.
Citing studies from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), they go on to say that direct mail’s “response rate ranges from about five to nine times greater than that of email, paid search, or social media.”
So, yes, a real estate direct mail campaign may cost you more than your email drip campaign. In fact, ANA figures that each response will cost you $49.20.
Considering your possible net from each response, we’d say that it’s money well-spent.
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