Making money flipping houses has become extremely hard.
Those days when you’d flip over 7-8 houses per year by simply approaching potential sellers in and around your town are long gone, thanks to the cutthroat competition.
House flips are down 18% nationwide as of August this year.
The reason is simple: there are too many individuals and companies in the market. According to an estimate, over 138,410 companies are in the house flipping market.
Stand Out to Beat the Competition with Handwritten Direct Mail
In hard times, the only way to strengthen and expand your house flipping business is to stand out.
People wanting to sell their houses are out there. They just aren’t trusting the tons of emails and advertisements they are seeing daily.
If you stand out and build trust with your prospective customers, they’ll respond and deals will start coming in.
How to stand out?
Handwritten direct mail.
Here’s how handwritten direct mail gives you an advantage in a saturated market where everyone is doing the same thing.
Your Competitors are Doing Email. You Should Try Handwritten Direct Mail and Make a Difference
On average, an American sees over 4,000 ads every day. A whopping 89% of marketers say email is their primary mode of reaching out to their audience. Over 57% people say they receive too many promotional emails or ads in their in-box.
Result: declining trust and no response rates.
Compare this to handwritten direct mail, which taps into our age-old desire to look and feel the message exclusively written for us with wet ink.
57% people say receiving direct mail makes them feel valued.
Result: direct mail’s average response rate is 5.3%, much better than that of email.
Handwritten direct mail is an amazing way to expand your house flipping business because fewer people are using it.
Less clutter means more chances to stand out.
Less Competition, More Chances for Growth
According to USPS, total mail volume has declined by 29.85% since 2006.
And guess what, direct mail response rates have grown at a remarkable pace since 2006.
There is a 173% jump in response rates since 2006 for house lists and a 194% increase since 2006 for prospect lists.
Notice the pattern here.
Declining usage, increasing response rates.
Caveats
If there are so many benefits, ever wondered why fewer people are using handwritten direct mail?
The answer is simple: executing handwritten direct mail campaigns are a bit tricky and requires a strategy.
For starters, it’s time consuming. Let’s say you have a list of 1000 contacts. You want to send handwritten yellow letters to these contacts.
You will need to:
- Buy packs of envelopes
- Buy rolls of stamps (a single postcard stamp costs 34 cents)
- Cut stamp rolls carefully
- Print messages on every letter by hand.
- Print yellow letters using a high-quality printer (on average this printer would cost $2000).
You get what I’m trying to say.
Outsource Your Direct Mail Campaign to Make the Most Out of It
Solution: outsource your handwritten direct mail to those who do it best and take care of what you are good at.
For example, Yellow Letters Complete takes care of font styles, stamps, papers, yellow letters, mail and posting process at an extremely affordable cost. You also get to choose from hundreds of beautiful postcards, yellow and white letter styles based on your requirements.
Another problem a lot of real estate investors face is the lack of motivation for repetitively approaching their leads with handwritten direct mail.
By the time they complete their first “touch” and complete posting process for 1000 people, they are too tired to do the same thing in 3 months.
And a campaign that doesn’t target its audience multiple times using the proven strategy of multi-touch campaigns is doomed to fail.
On average, it takes 8 touches before you reach a deal.
When you outsource your handwritten direct mail campaigns, you won’t slack and avoid neglecting multiple touches.
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