Guest contributor BrokerageU says:

Last month, I wrote about a guerrilla marketing strategy that we are experimenting with that is designed to utilize your real estate website to track responses when dropping postcards or flyers on your farm.

We Have a Plan

If I told you we were dropping "Just Sold" postcards on a farm, you might think, "Yeah, so what, I've got a service that does that for me," or something along those lines.

Even though we use a "Just Sold" vehicle, we have a thoroughly thought-out plan, and what we believe to be a relatively unique approach to this well known strategy.

If you didn't read the original blog post, I encourage you to go back and get the background on this strategy. Here's the link: Use Your Website to Track Flyer and Postcard Responses.

Test, Tweak and Try Again

I wrapped up last month's analysis of this strategy with the above, Test, Tweak and Try Again, and showed you a snapshot of some major tweaks we made to the landing page.

Tweak, Test, Try Again – New Landing Page Test

Month Two – The April Drop Results Are In

We discussed in the previous article the results we saw after dropping about 2,700 postcards on this farm prior to making the tweak on this landing page, here's a recap:

• 8 visitors to the Home Values Watchlist landing page
• 8 visitors to the HARP Help OC landing page
• 2 phone calls from the HARP side of the card (one was a lender trying to figure out what we were doing)
• No conversion on the Home Values side of the postcard

In April, we dropped another 2,700 postcards to the same farm. Didn't change a single thing on the postcard other than update the just sold listings. This time, we saw a little bit different results.

Google Analytics for April Home Values Watchlist Postcard

Home Values Watchlist: April's postcard drop attracted 52 unique visitors to the landing page (see Entrances). Let me see, compared to eight from the previous month, that's a....hmmm....well, it's a LOT MORE PEOPLE!

The interesting thing here is that the number of visitors has NOTHING to do with the changes we made to the landing page – they didn't see the landing page until they typed in the URL. I'm going to attribute this significant increase to familiarity.

The simple fact that we dropped this postcard twice may be the driving force behind the increase in traffic...but who knows? I guess if we see another increase in May, I might be more confident that repetition drove this response.

Notice how the traffic then pushed to each results page, SFR, Condo, Million+ – this is a positive sign that we made the right decision to segment the traffic at the landing page instead of just landing the homeowner on an IDX results page sorted by highest sales price (which was about $1.6MM).

In theory, by making the landing page more relevant, we should be able to increase conversion....AND WE DID! One CMA, or "What's My Home Worth" request.

Funny story with this CMA request. On the form, we only had name, address, email, and phone fields, but didn't make either of the two contact fields (phone and email) a required field. So the CMA came in with an address, no name, no email or phone...but we had an address.

Making Lemonade - What do you do with a CMA when you only have an address? You guessed it--you DELIVER IT! While the agent didn't get a listing out of it (yet), he did totally blow away a homeowner by hand delivering the report.

HARP Help OC: Saw a drop in landing page traffic with this drop, but a significant increase in phone calls.

Google Analytics for April HARP side of Postcard

HARP Postcard Calls April

After the first drop, we legitimately only had one phone call. April's drop generated four phone calls on the HARP side with a total talk time of almost 30 minutes. Again, maybe it was the familiarity we built from dropping the postcard twice.

---

More Tweaks for May and Why

Tweak #1 – Main Landing Page: The first major tweak we made in April, but had not tested, was the segmentation of the property types on the landing page. I'm going to call that one a success. This time I made another couple of small tweaks that I expect big results from:

May Tweak – Title, Color, Form Fields

We made two big changes to the CMA call-to-action that I think will make a big difference in conversion. First, we changed the title from What's My Home Worth? Get Your FREE Report Here (in a blue font) to the above title in an Orange font.

We also added a field to the form with the hopes of encouraging homeowners to "make a case" for why they think their home is worth more than their neighbors. Will let you know next month if this works.

Tweak #2 – Segmented Values Landing Pages: The next thing we did was to take the CMA call to action and move it above the IDX search results page on the individual landing pages. This was a bit of a #facepalm moment--why hide the call to action below the fold?

Moved Call to Action to Above IDX Results

I have high hopes that this tweak will increase conversion. If we went from zero to one in April, and we get two in May--that's a nice pattern.

Take Aways

What I don't know as of this point is how geography and demographic changes will affect results. I've got a couple other guinea pigs in the wings for more testing. We'll let you know how that goes as soon as the numbers start rolling in.

Ultimately, what I really want to accomplish with this project is to show you how powerful a website can be if you know how to use it. What other offline marketing strategies do you know of that allows you to directly track interest, make changes, and see results instantly?

I'll check in again next month and let you know how this campaign is coming along. In the meantime, if you have any comments or questions, fire away. I don't mind crowdsourcing the evolution of this campaign because I ultimately believe that we're moving in the right direction and welcome any input or ideas you might have to make it even better.

Until next time...

To view the original article, visit BrokerageU.