Greg Helbeck is a real estate investor outta San Diego, California. He gets deals every month from direct mail.
Can you? Yes, but only if you avoid the following five fatal mistakes.
“Trust me,” Greg says. “I’ve sent hundreds of thousands of postcards out, and I’ve made hundreds of thousands of dollars back, but I’ve also made a ton of mistakes along the way. I’ve gone through the hero’s journey with direct mail, I still do it, and it is a core component of our business.”
Read on for my review.
The first thing, Greg explains, is that people who fail with mail do not have realistic expectations. So that’s fatal mistake number one: just having the wrong expectations.
“At the end of the day,” he says, “direct mail is all about math and probability. Right? If you send enough pieces out, you’re gonna get a certain amount of calls back, and a certain percentage of the people who call are gonna have a property they wanna sell. Which’ll allow you to make a certain amount of offers. And buy a certain amount of homes.”
Okay, so what should those expectations be? Depends on your market. San Diego’s gonna look different than Omaha, Nebraska, which is gonna be different than Baltimore, Maryland.
But it’s also gonna depend on fatal mistake number two, which is mailing a bad list. Right? This is what sinks most people’s ship. They pull a list that’s not proven, blast ’em with mailers, and then wonder why their phone’s not ringing.
You have to get in front of people who’re distressed, who need to sell their place fast.
Which brings us to fatal mistake number three: not mailing consistently.
“Before I made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, in profit, doing direct mail,” Greg says, “I failed miserably. And the reason I failed is because I wasn’t doing it consistently. Once I did it consistently, I started making tens of thousands of dollars a month.”
“So if you’re not gonna mail consistently, save your money. Do another marketing channel. Don’t even waste your time with mail. It just ain’t gonna work.”
Number four is not tracking the results. This is huge. People who fail with direct mail are basically just spraying and praying. Right? Crossing their fingers and hoping it works out.
They either get a deal and make their money back or blame the list, the mail house, the postcard, or the guru who taught it to ’em.
People who’re serious about losing weight or building muscle track their calories, their macros, their workouts, how they slept last night, the supplements they took. It’s the same thing with this.
Track, tweak, improve, repeat.
“The fifth thing is they don’t test different mail pieces,” Greg says. “I’m not suggesting you go out there and create some unicorn mail piece, but people who fail, they just send the same thing over and over and over again. Even if it’s not working, they just keep using it.”
“If you wanna be successful with direct mail, you gotta test out different mail pieces that are proven.”
“And I recommend you just try the mail pieces out from some of the big mail houses. They’ll put winning campaigns right on their website for you to use.”
And here’s a bonus for ya: the sixth reason people fail with direct mail is they don’t work their leads hard. They just wait for this dream seller to text ’em like, “Yo, I wanna give my crib to you for pennies on the dollar. Hit me back.”
C’mon.
If it were that easy, everyone would be killing it in real estate.
So be persistent, follow up, get creative, show empathy, and you’ll get deals.
Greg has Million Dollar Direct Mail Templates you can buy for $27, as well as 1-on-1 coaching that’s by application only.