As you set, analyze and refine your goals for direct mail this year, Gooder Group can help.  During the month of January, all Print and Ship Postcards are on sale for 50% off! Take advantage of this money-saving opportunity to find new buyers and sellers in your market, but make sure you order by Monday, January 31, 2011 to take advantage of this huge sale!

Don’t forget that until the end of January, Gooder Group is offering brochures and handbooks for 50% off too — essentially, buy one, get one free.  Check out the 19 buyer, 28 seller and 11 general brochure titles and see which ones work best for your market.  REO, Foreclosure, Sell Fast, Short Sale and #1 Best Seller TAXES are moving fast!  Don’t miss the in-depth 24-page handbooks for buyers, sellers, financing and relocation too!

Gooder Group brochures and handbooks are designed to be included as a free offer for a “special report” in your marketing.  Prospects respond for further info and you engage the home buyer or seller in further discussion to assess their needs, timeline and exact situation.

Let us know how your New Year’s business resolutions are doing!

Setting goals also works for direct mail.  If you simply mail without specific goals, you aren’t making the most of your marketing budget.

Create your message — and offer. What are you giving your recipients in your direct mail?  Is it a free consultation, a brochure, an offer to sign up for email newsletters, an invitation to visit your blog or website, local real estate information or something else?  Determine what you provide in your direct mail.  If it’s a “billboard” about you, consider if that will meet and further your marketing goals.

Identify your target group(s) for the mailing.  If your direct mail piece is targeting buyers, what kind of buyers are most likely to respond to your mail piece?  Is it an individual in a certain neighborhood, of a particular age/life stage, a renter, a move-down buyer, a move-up buyer, an investor, those looking for distressed properties or just anyone?  The more narrowly you define your target market, the more successful your direct mail will be.

Determine what you want from your direct mailing. Do you want more email sign ups for your newsletter (at your website)?  More Twitter followers?  More likes on Facebook?  Just more phone calls or emails?  You need to determine what your goal is so you can measure how your direct mail is working.

Ensure your data is correct. If your mailing list is incomplete — missing names, empty fields for address information, guesses for house numbers, you’re not quite ready to mail.  Take the time to make sure your data is current and complete or your direct mail will fail before it even hits the post office.

Once your goals are in place, your direct mail can go out and your results can be measured.  (Remember, determining goals for email marketing campaigns ensures success with email as well!)

When you set your goals for direct mail this year, Gooder Group can help.  During the month of January, all Print and Ship Postcards are on sale for 50% off! Take advantage of this money-saving opportunity to find new buyers and sellers in your market!

Things aren’t rosy once again, but we’re moving forward with a new perspective.  The biggest piece of knowledge you might have gained is that one-to-one interactions work the best — just as you knew before the downturn, working directly with one person allows you to see clearly and exactly what their needs and wants are leading you to more closed business because of personal and reactive service.

You’re likely adapting this one-to-one knowledge to your marketing — separating your prospects into niche groups based on what their needs are, what their timelines are like, what their budgets allow.  Following up personally with past clients who are ready to move up (or down) or send referrals your way.  Looking for new leads by providing useful, detailed content about your local market — information these leads cannot find in the national and even regional news.

Most importantly you’ve learned that staying in touch and remaining visible allows leads, prospects and past clients to reach out to you when they are ready to make a move.  Continuing to market during the down times means continued business; cutting out marketing to save money means no business during the down times.

With personalized marketing, you’ve learned what works in any kind of economy.  Share what you’ve learned about marketing during lean times.

The postal mailbox is quite empty this time of year of marketing materials and any handwritten note will definitely stand out from the crowd.  It doesn’t have to be long or detailed or fancy, but something in your writing shows you took the time to sit down and write it yourself, the ultimate personal touch!

Let us know how you communicate around the holidays to express your appreciation for your clients and prospects.

Of course you have your website.  You likely have a blog, Facebook / LinkedIn / Twitter profile, various other groups and forums (both consumer-oriented and professional-oriented) that you belong to along with various other email activities that drive consumers and colleagues to these sites.  All these online components provide a treasure trove of information for consumers in the real estate market.

A key strategy to making the most of your online presence is tying your direct mail to your online information.  Direct mail can stand alone, but it’s stronger and more likely to result in a business relationship when you invite conversation to begin online — at any time.

Direct mail can deliver a little bit of content compared to online resources.  But, that tidbit of content your provide — along with the call to action — can allow the recipient to find more information on your online sites relevant to their real estate situation.

Building that bridge between print marketing and electronic marketing is necessary.  Invite more people to continue and deepen their dialogue online with you.  Direct mail is not a stand-alone effort anymore even if you try to keep it isolated.  It’s tied directly to your online persona — whether you invite the linkage or not.  (People will google your name to find out more about you even if you don’t include your website.)

Share how you’ve developed effective links between your direct mail and online content to benefit home buying and selling consumers.

There is no doubt that direct mail costs more than many other marketing methods, especially email and other electronic means.  Just because direct mail costs more doesn’t mean it’s not a viable and worthwhile marketing method anymore.  You simply need to be more targeted with its use in order for it to bring in business.

Direct mail works as you’ve probably used it in the past to garner new and repeat business.  They key now is to segment your lists of leads, prospects, clients and past clients and determine who is most likely to appreciate the mail piece’s relevancy to their situation — and be moved to action by it.  The impact of direct mail is significant if the right recipient gets an appropriate message with a specific call to action.

Share your successful direct-mail know-how.

You really need to take the time and energy to analyze your email and mailing lists and determine who is a cold lead, a hot lead, a prospect, a client and a long-term contact. And, you need to determine among those groups who are buyers and who are sellers. Further still, you should work to find out other details among the buyers and sellers including those who are relocating, down sizing, moving up, first-timers, etc.

The task is time consuming, but it is also vitally important. Consumers — like your home buyers and sellers — are bombarded with marketing messages constantly. The minute that you mistakenly market to them incorrectly (sending a seller-topic message to a first-time home buyer, for example) you lose them. Because it’s obvious to them that you don’t know what their real estate goals are, they are less likely to tune in further to your messages and trust you with their real estate needs.

If you’ve fine tuned your marketing to speak to the recipients’ specific needs, you are more likely to hold their attention, gain their trust and continue the conversation to build a relationship toward new business.

Segmenting your email and mailing lists is a necessary task. Building off of yesterday’s post about getting more detail in your database, be sure you track all the details you can about the leads, prospect and clients you communicate with daily. This depth of information will help you create marketing messages to your lists that are relevant and engaging.

Share your list segmenting successes with our readers. How do you keep the messages relevant for recipients?

If you bombard any contact with multiple email messages, you not only annoy, but are likely to alienate that person. However, if you drop postal mail on a higher frequency, you have a much better chance of getting the recipient’s attention while not sacrificing your reputation.

As long as your mail pieces are relevant and useful, what downside is there to sending more postal mail? Direct mail is still an accepted and typically more welcome way to communicate. We all know that email doesn’t cost much to create or send, but a mail piece is an investment. The sender often spends more money and time creating it and then additional money to buy postage for it. It’s an investment at many levels and recipients nowadays realize this too.

Let us know if you use direct mail to make an impression.

• The mortgage or rent is always due on the 1st of the month.
• Your cell phone bill (and phone minutes reset) on the 15th.
• You are keenly aware that the credit card billing cycle ends on the 25th, so if you want to make a big purchase and have the longest amount of time to pay for it (without interest) buy it on the 26th.
• We always call Grandma on Sunday afternoon.
• A certain magazine always arrives in Friday’s mail.
• Garbage day is Tuesday.
• You hit the gym each weekday at 6am.

It’s not that we look forward to all of these items, but they are part of our routine whether we get pleasure from them or not.  We simply come to expect them and plan — to some extent — around some of them.  Often these predictable items inspire us to action:

• On or after the 1st you make a point to check your checking account balance to make sure that the mortgage/rent payment has cleared.
• Cell phone minutes reset after the 15th so you “save” a long personal call for after that date when you have a reservoir of talk time.
• After the credit card billing date closes on the 25th, if you want to make a big purchase and have the longest amount of time to pay for it (without interest) buy it on the 26th.
• Gathering everyone around to talk to Grandma on the phone is a Sunday ritual.
• Your weekend downtime is often filled with reading this magazine that arrives on Friday.
• You clean out the fridge on Monday night in anticipation of garbage pickup on Tuesday.
• At the gym, you see the same faces each morning and strike up conversations with new friends.

Consider becoming part of your past clients’ regular routine to work to inspire them to action.  Mail them a direct mail piece at the same time each month — or each quarter.  A newsletter is a perfect way to keep in touch, provide useful information on real estate matters, remind them of your services and ask for referrals.  With a regular mailing schedule, they’ll start looking for your mailing, even expecting it if it’s full of useful information that they use, refer to and then pass along.

You can set up a schedule with other types of marketing you do too.  Market updates about home prices and other data in your area can be compiled and mailed or emailed at the end or beginning of each month to buyers and sellers.  Buyers will find interest rate updates useful and they can be posted regularly to your blog or website, or even your Facebook page or Twitter account at the beginning or end of each day.  Advertisements can run on certain days in certain publications or online sites where viewers will come to expect them.  Blog posts can be scheduled to be updated and posted each day at the same time.

Your consistency in marketing will gently remind (potential and past) buyers and sellers that you make it a priority to think of them.

How do you create a pattern of contact with your past clients?

Direct mail is meant to be held. To be read, studied, examined, tucked away, posted up. It has lasting power unlike many email messages.

The imagery and layout you choose for direct mail can have impact on the recipient. They are more likely to linger over your message, especially when it’s sitting in their hand.

Direct mail’s unique tactile feature allows it to transcend the sterile barriers of email to reach home buyers and sellers unlike other electronic methods.

Don’t rely solely on electronic messages, ads and interactions to build — and sustain — your business. Sometimes a simple postcard, flyer or letter in the mail can have more impact than you’d ever expect, only because it’s something that can be held.

Let us know what your direct mail/electronic marketing balance is.