Why Your Real Estate Postcard Marketing Needs a High Tech Reboot

Even though I'm a giant proponent of real estate technology and the Internet, I still believe that postcards are an important tool in a Realtor's arsenal. Though some comment on my posts and vehemently disagree with my thoughts, the truth is that the vast majority of you still believe in this practice.

In fact, if you search our library of articles, the articles that have the most traffic (by a factor of 2 or 3 to 1), revolve around postcard marketing, choosing a geographic farm, real estate farming best practices, and the like. This is very telling.

While my beliefs about real estate postcards and geographic farming remain unchanged, I do believe in and agree with those of you that think everything needs to somehow tie back into technology. To those ends, any of you doing traditional postcard farming need to find ways to incorporate technology into your efforts. How do you do this, you ask? Well today you're in luck! Here are a few easy ways you can reboot your traditional postcard marketing campaigns and give them a high tech upgrade:

1) Use Capture Codes to change your weapon from a shotgun to a rifle

If you aren't familiar with capture marketing, here is how it works:

• You send postcards out to your farm area
• The postcards have a call to action, guiding the homeowner back to your website, a landing page, or wherever you want to guide them. There is also a special offer code on the card that is unique to them on the card that they will use on your site.
• Homeowner goes to your website, punches in the code and their email address (NOTE: Make sure your capture system asks for email addresses), at which time they get the item of value they were promised in the call to action.

When you use this form of marketing, it is CRITICAL that the item of value you offer can change from mailing to mailing. Simply offering the same people the same thing, time after time is not going to be well received by homeowners for too long before they start flat out ignoring you and your messages.

The reason you need this type of system in your postcard marketing is to target your approach. Geographic farming is you, casting a very large net, touching everyone. Without the code and without being able to track exactly who is marketing, you simply wait and hope someone will call you for a listing appointment.

By using capture marketing, you can take those that use the codes, put them in a separate, specialized campaign (like, say, an electronic marketing campaign), and cultivate those leads, staying in front of them more often and maximizing the chances they will call you when they are ready to sell.

2) Leverage one form of marketing into another

Whether you are using capture marketing with your postcards, or simply are drafting very strong calls to action on your postcards themselves, you HAVE TO always think of things in terms of using one marketing vehicle to leverage another. The more ways you can get homeowners to interact with you and your messages, the more likely you are to capture them as clients.

How can you do this? With the capture marketing described above, it's easy to understand. Simply send cards, and as people respond, you are also collecting their email addresses. This allows you then to put them on electronic marketing programs, catapulting your brand awareness in homeowner's minds.

What if you don't want to use capture marketing? What then? One way you can do this would be by using strong calls to action to guide people to landing pages on the Internet.

When a homeowner goes to your landing page to get the item of value, they give you some information (commonly their name, email address and phone number). Again, you can use this information to put these people on additional follow-up campaigns, through other channels such as email or phone calls, furthering your brand in their minds and maximizing the chances of getting them as clients.

3) Your database is valuable. Leverage it to do more business!

One of the things that always amazes me is the frequency with which I run across Realtors® that have massive marketing databases yet cannot figure out how to leverage all their hard work and make their day to day lives easier in the process.

All the time, we find agents that have been doing the first parts of this article, yet once they have that really great, "meaty intelligence" about the homeowners in their marketplace, have no idea what to do next. What you need to do is make sure you are putting this information into a system that makes it easy to dissect and analyze the data. The most common, easiest way to do this is by using a good CRM system that is built specifically for real estate.

Having a clean, easy to use CRM system will make you so much more powerful and allow you to leverage your data in ways you never thought possible. For example, let's say you come across a new buyer client that is looking for a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home located within your farm area. Of all the properties currently on the market, they can't find one they like. Do you just wait for more to come on the market? Not if you have a solid CRM system that is running your database.

Simply pull up a list of all people that own a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home that have responded to your postcard mailings in the last 6-8 months. Craft an email explaining that you have a buyer interested in a home like theirs and fire it out. Why wait for the listing to come to you? Use your database in a powerful way to go directly to the business.

Even more, if you're super lucky, you'll not only find a home for your buyer client, but also end up representing the seller in the transaction as well. I think we can all agree that double ending a deal definitely does not suck.

So there you have it. While there are many, many ways you can incorporate technology to reboot something traditional, such as postcard marketing, these are a few very good places you can start.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.