Finally! Affordable Direct Mail for Real Estate Investors - powered by Happy Scribe

Hey, guys, how would you like to get your hands on the exact mail piece that all of my students are using today and get it for the same insanely discounted price with absolutely no catch? Well, this week I'm bringing on Mike, my personal direct marketing coach, Emmy Garretson, onto the channel to show you how Emmy is with Rei printmail. They are the premier full service direct marketing mail company for real estate investors across the country. Amy is an expert in providing custom direct mail lead generation as well as offering strategic real estate marketing advice and goal setting that is going to help you scale up and close more deals.

I promise I'll make this worth your.

While, so stick around to the end. We'll kick this off in three, two, one.

All right, guys, welcome to the channel. Thanks for joining me today. I have with me Amy Garretson. She is a direct mail marketing coach with Rei printmail. I had the opportunity to tour this, and he invited me to tour the facility here. Gosh. I think it was like, I don't know, was it back in during the summer sometime like that? It was warm out, but, man, this place was just they've totally got it together. This is like a next level facility. I never expected it to be what it was. So, Amy, thank you very much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

No worries. I'm really interested in finding out even more about rei printmail, and I would recommend you stick around to the very end because we've got something lined up pretty special, I think that I've been working with Emmy with, and I think you're going to get a lot of value out of it. So without further ado, Emmy, give us a little bit of your background. Tell us how you got into this thing, maybe what you did before you got into direct mail.

I grew up in St. Louis. I'm divorced. I have three boys, 1012 and 15. And honestly, I was a stay at home mom for the longest time and taught self defense on the side. That's kind of my background is martial arts. No kidding. Yeah, I know. So don't mess with me.

I like you even more now.

So, yeah, I basically, with the divorce, realized, obviously I needed to get a full time job. And I've always been interested in real estate, but wasn't quite sure how to jump into it. But one of my other passions is people as a counseling major in college. And really it's like my relational bank has to be filled every single day. And so I was trying to find a way to check all those boxes and not just like, be just working my rear end off just for the sake of making money. And so this opportunity came about, and I had done a little bit of sales and another job before this, and I was just thinking the rest of it seems like the perfect mix, where I can learn about the real estate, but also make sure that I'm affecting people's lives and helping them and being their go to and being the expert. I'm used to being the expert in the personal training and nutrition, so this way I'm now the real estate expert and I love it. So that's kind of what got me into it, was kind of combining those two worlds.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Good deal. So how long have you been with well, first of all, how long have you been in the business? Have you always been with Rei Print Mail?

I had a sales job in logistics before this and then with Rent Mail for about a year and a half now.

Okay, got you. How did you like the logistics side of it?

It was super boring.

I say it sounds riveting.

No, I literally was cold calling VPs all day long, so it was great training for here, honestly, because I am not afraid of the phone. I'm not afraid of people. I get shot down and I'm like, all right, who's next? So it was a great training for here because this is very much a family fuel. And the day I interviewed, I knew this was the place for me because I need to feel like people have my back. I need to feel like I am cared for. I also want to be left alone to be trusted in my job. And that's what Aria Criminal does.

Yeah.

And so here I literally almost feel like I have my own business, but yet I'm surrounded by people that literally have become like my family. And it sounds super cheesy, but I don't know how else to describe it. And I look forward to going to work every day.

You have an estimation of how many people that you've actually helped in this? Like, how many clients you have? Just throw out some numbers.

No? Yeah, that's great.

A little bit.

I have roughly 330 clients, and I talk to probably 50 people a day. Sometimes it's less. Sometimes I have phone conversations with people where we talk about life for 30 minutes before we talk about business. And some people are like, straight shooters, let's do it in and out. But no, I'm constantly helping people. I'm constantly taking my clients also back to my colleagues because I wish I knew everything. I don't anybody would be lying to say that they did. But between myself and my team, all these eyes on our clients because we all have different strengths and weaknesses in different markets here, I'm constantly taking my clients back to my colleagues to make sure that we are always making the best decisions for all the people that we're helping.

Good deal.

Yeah.

Thank you. Awesome. Like I said, I got to tour that place. I was like, Holy. Everybody was super friendly.

Yeah.

Almost makes you not want to leave. I was really to date. What would you say if you had to pick one? What do you think your biggest success is to date? Working with Rei print man, it's a.

Tough question, but yeah, no, it's a great question. I would say day to day, my smaller successes, which is still huge, would be when someone calls and they say, hey, I got a deal. I'm not here to sell direct mail. I'm here to help people get deals. And so it just happened that direct mail is the vehicle for that, right? And so when I call and I say I got a deal because of how I do my business, because I know a lot of my clients more personally now, because that's just how I approach my clients. When they say they got a deal or that they're getting deals, it means more to me because I think of their kids, because I hear their kids everyone's working from home, right? So I can hear their kids in the background. I know their wife's name. And so it means more to me because I know that I'm helping them reach their goal. But my biggest success, if you will, was this young guy came to me in Champagne, Illinois. He's new. He's a realtor investor. And he was like, I want to get a deal. And so I put together this letter for him.

I had the Acupuncture on it, which is the picture of the home and then a picture of himself. And we only sent out maybe 1600 of these things. And we have a reverse texting technology where it makes it easier for people to show interest in selling their home to you. And I am able to track those texts, and I lost count over 50 texts and crazy amount of phone calls to the point where I almost felt bad for him. He emailed me, and he was like, Lol. Lol. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. This is working and closing deal after deal. I can't keep up. We need to pause my next drop because my DA and I are, like, losing sleep because we can't keep up with all the amazing response. And I pulled that list for him. So that's my data. And that's why I always tell people it's not just the direct mail. It's not just the data. It's making sure you have the best of both. And that's what gives you a great direct mail campaign, right?

Yeah. That's something that a lot of people don't even know to expect. It when you start getting responses, first of all, there's a lot of trepidation because a lot of people, I think they think that this business is my wife would be the perfect example. She thought, Oh, my gosh, this is scammy. This isn't right. People don't do this. But I'm telling you, these people, I kept telling her, these people are out there. I know they're out there. So when you start pumping out mail like that and all of these calls start coming in. I used to send out about 4000 pieces of mail at a time. When I first got started, I had no idea, I had no metrics to base any of my responses. I had no idea. So I started sending out this mail and I quickly realized I'm going to need help with this. What you're talking about, your lists? The mail piece is an important aspect of it, but the list that you pull has got to be a solid, it's got to be the data in that list. You can send mail all day long, but if the data in that list is not accurate data, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

Really? I literally pull this all day long. And with my personality, the way that I operate just in my life, I'm not going to sit here and pull crappy data or allow someone to give me data and say, I think it's pretty good. That's not good enough for me because you're spending money with me. We're both taking time to build this campaign that you should be doing that close over. And so if it's poor data, I can put together the best campaign. If it's bad data, you're not going to get good results and you're going to blame me. And I'm going to say, well, your data is not great. So I really push that because it is just as important, if not more important. Sometimes in the mail, yes, I had.

To have one of those two factors, a list or the piece of mail. I would always choose the list because I just need eyeballs, I need the right eyeballs seeing my piece of mail. Yeah, there's a couple of things to this. Perfect. Since we're talking about direct mail right now, what are some of the things that you're seeing in the industry right now? What are some of the things like are there areas that are maybe are there different markets that are more popular with direct mail than others? And what kind of ROI are we seeing generally?

So it really depends on saturation. And then if you really think about it, obviously California is extremely saturated. Dallas, really, all of Texas, San Antonio, north and South Carolina are becoming the new Californias. New York is extremely saturated. What that means is the bar of entry is going to be higher. Because in order to squeeze a deal out of direct mail, because on average, like here in St. Louis, you're going to see about a 1% response rate. And in order to get one deal, you typically need to have about 25 phone conversations with interested sellers to do the math really quickly. St. Louis, you send out 2500 postcards, you're going to get a deal. California, you're like a fourth percent response. And so that's more like 6000 postcards to get one deal. So again, to break into that market is very difficult. People who are already there and money is rolling, it's not that hard for them because they understand, well, I have to spend four grand on direct mail. The sizes of their deals are, what, $30,000?

Yeah, totally scales. That's interesting.

Honestly, what we do is we stay ahead of trends. Back in the day, the bumblebee colors were popular, the black and yellow, and then people just ran into the ground, and now that's not really effective anymore. We saw this past year the pink Acupunics mailer, so the picture of the home pink postcard was rocking it out, and now it's switching to green for whatever reason. And so we get feedback from our clients, and we stay ahead of this works here, this doesn't work here. And I always tell people that we know what it works and what doesn't work, because when you make a mistake in marketing, it's not a cheap mistake.

Right.

So you want to avoid that money.

I know.

Yeah. So another thing that worked really well in 2020 and continuing to work into 2021 are the fake check me outers, because we're all looking for our check from the government.

So I do want to address something quickly as well, too, because there's a lot of people out there that especially those who maybe they're new or maybe somebody has maybe they used to send direct mail and now they're not doing anymore. But a 1% response rate, now most people are going to look at that, and they're going to go, 1%. Why in the world would I send out I think there's one famous guru out there that likes to say, I don't like a 1% return on anything. Yeah, but I think that there's a misconception about that because if you're pulling a list that is so exacting and it's so targeted, 1%, if you scale that against other different types of marketing and you consider other factors like deliverability and then of course, the piece itself 1%, it's not as bad as it sounds because you are super targeting the folks you're sending it to. Maybe for the sake of argument, even I just wanted to kind of dispel that number because it can be misleading. It can turn people off to a direct mail. But I just think you got to understand that direct mail is super finely tuned and targeted.

It is, trust me. You're not the first person to have addressed that with me. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I will get a newbie we call them on the phone and they're like, so what am I going to get, like a 10% response rate? And I'm like, no. Typically, if they were, for example, here, I'm like, it would be more like 1%, and they're just like fiberg acid. And my response, first of all, is that's an average, like my guy in Champagne, Illinois, I was just speaking of, he got like a 7% response rate. If you're talking about vacant land, they get typically between a 7% and 10%. So again, it depends on the market. It depends on your list. Like you were saying, I have some people who do like probate lists. Those tend to be higher percent response rate. Right. So honestly, what it comes down to is cost per phone call. And no matter what sort of marketing you're doing in order to get a deal, there is money being spent. And with direct mail, when you break it down, for example, again in St. Louis, if you send 2500 postcards, that will cost you about maybe $1,600.

The sizes of the wholesale deals here in St. Louis are about $9,000. So that's why I always tell people, they hear one person, they're like, what? And I say, Okay, would you spend 1516, get $9,000? And they're like, Yeah, that's what we're talking about here. So I always try to break it down into a way that they understand that there's a science behind it, and you can't really argue with it because that's why we're still in business.

I want to dive into something. Direct mail is your specialty, but it's part of a bigger system, right. With direct mail, it can be your only source of marketing.

Right.

And it can also be a supplement to whatever other marketing you're doing. Like if you're doing maybe Google Ads or Facebook ads or something like that. Also cold calling, it's a perfect supplement to kind of fill in those gaps and keep those touch points really high, right?

Yes. I would say on average, most of our clients use a mixture of digital and the direct mail. And reason being, if you think about it, how many texts, how many emails, how many commercials do you see all day long? And often times with text, people block the number or they'll delete the email. But what's cool about direct mail is you can't unsubscribe your mailbox, right?

Right.

And obviously you have a choice. Like, am I going to take this postcard into my home? But that's where our creative we have a full creative staff here, and we're constantly coming up with new postcards so that when the homeowner gets it, most of the time it's something they've never seen before, and it's enough to get it. If you can just get in through the front door, you're kind of golden because a lot of times someone will actually put it in their drawer and call six, eight months later.

I literally just have I got a call on Saturday from two years ago. This card I spent two years ago, and a guy called me on Saturday reminds me I got to follow up.

Yeah, but yeah, Cole calling. I always tell people, choose two forms of marketing to start. Choose them and don't test them. Choose them and stick to it and be consistent and go all in. Because if you test things and don't give it enough time, it's just never going to work. You have to really commit yourself to doing it, trusting the process, and knowing that I absolutely would say find a good mix of marketing that works for you.

Yeah, for sure. I don't know, I'm a big Google guy. Their recent changes, though, have me kind of well, the changes that they made, we can no longer target by zip code.

Right.

Facebook did that a long time ago. And so now it's a real challenge. There's a lot of money that can be wasted there if you don't know what you're doing.

Yeah.

And so it only makes sense for me, for my business to look more at direct mail and kind of pull away from Google a little bit. Google can get really out of hand. That's another really good point with direct mail is that with something like Google, you might not know from day to day what you're going to be spending. Of course you are going to set a budget, but you might not know. It could be one day, it could be you spend I know my monthly budget for Google was $3,000 a month, and there were some months that would be chewed up in a week, and then there'd be some months where I didn't know. So another good thing, if you're a budget minded individual, direct mail obviously is a very, very I mean, first of all, you can order exactly what you need. Maybe if you don't meet that number, you can always order more.

Exactly. A lot of times too, because the real estate market, it is constantly changing. I'd be lying to say that it's predictable. We always know what's going to happen, right? So I'm a direct marketing coach. By having me on your team, my coaching, my expertise is free. And so by having me as your one point of contact, we could always stop and pivot. And what I love to tell people too, is the fact that we do all of our printing on site. I can't say how many times someone has texted me and said, holy moly. I mean, I put the wrong phone number on my postcard. Even though I approved the proof that you emailed me, I just realized it and I ran back and said, Oh my gosh, stop. And sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don't, but it's just so cool that it's all right here. You're not calling a 1800 number and hoping to find someone who can help you out with your order. You always have me and you have myself, and I text people and we just try to make it really simple. Well, I'm super excited about what you have to share with you soon, about what we've been working on together.

It's a partnership. That's what we do as we partner with people to help them close more deals.

Teamwork makes a dream work. Alright, I want to jump in. I guess it's been, I don't know, we started this conversation maybe a month ago, something like that. And really what I was looking for was I have students all over the country and one of my big things is like what I talked about earlier is getting eyeballs on your marketing, on your advertising. And to me, it's far more important than, like I said, the actual mail piece itself. People can get really super creative with this stuff. You guys have it dialed in, but it doesn't do any good. A lot of it if you can't afford it. And so what I approached you guys about was finding a mail piece that is very simplistic, gets the message across, but that we can distribute to two to three times the amount of eyeballs that we're trying to get to. And so what we came up with was a solution here. And I'm going to go ahead and share my screen real quick because I did see this out. Let's see this. I was checking this daily, by the way, just so you know. I'm going to put the link to this postcard in the description below here.

And what this is, is we have come to an agreement on a postcard that they have created for me and that we're able to offer at a ridiculously low price. And what this is going to allow you to do is it's going to allow you to, let's say you have a list of, I don't know, you pull a list and you've got a list of 10,000 names. Well before, if you were looking at some other card that maybe you realize that, wow, this thing is I can only afford to send maybe 3000 of these or 4000 of these, maybe even 5000. That's only 50% of the folks on your list. What this card is going to allow us to do is going to allow you to mail a much larger list and get your message in front of more eyeballs. And that is something that I am constantly harping on, that even with my students. I get tired of hearing me say that because it is a constant ramming it down their throats. Get your message in front of eyeballs. And so here's what we have done with this postcard. If your list isn't at least 500, you're not going to be able to mail it, obviously, with this postcard.

But if you're over $500, you can mail this all day long and just walk you through the process. You're only going to be able to get this card, by the way, on my affiliate page. So click on the link below. It's going to bring you to this page. The minimum order amount is $500. If you have 10,000, you're going to plug in 10,000 here. And then if you need a mailing list, by all means click here and Emma is going to be able to pull you a list, but she's going to schedule a call with you. She's going to use all of that research and all that data in your specific market, and she's going to walk you through pulling the best list that meets your needs. If you already have a list, go ahead and click here and it's going to drop. I've got my little zoom controller in the way here and move it out of the way. On step two, we are going to select postcard, and then our postcard is this four and a quarter by five and a half. And this is the exact same postcard that I am providing my students.

We're making this available to the general public as well. So it's right here at the very top. It's called the sub two squad postcard. But this postcard, like I told you guys, very simple. It's super easy to read. It's not garbled up with a bunch of nonsense or what have you. Very simple message. It's got your name, it's got the property you're interested in and your phone number. And that's it. It's very simple. Really easy. So if we select this, we're doing the presorted or are we doing first class?

That would be if you wanted it to be shipped faster and also get unreturned mail, which honestly what we always tell people, if you have a great list and by the way, we scrub list for free, which means we get rid of any duplicates, we run into the national change of address and accuse it, which makes sure that all the addresses are complete so that there's as little mail going out with two undelivered addresses as possible. Go ahead and do the first presport indicia.

All right, guys, I have to interrupt the video here. I had to go back and edit this video because I wasn't thinking ahead when I created it, and something was brought to my attention that I just didn't think about. I was originally going to show you today's cost of each mail piece, but I totally didn't take into consideration that the postal service has the ability to change the cost of shipping at any time they wish. So I didn't want this video out there quoting you one price but delivering another due to a change in the delivery rate. Just understand that Emmy and I have come to an agreement to offer you a super high converting mail piece at, honestly, a never before seen price. I'm telling you, it's crazy. There's a minimum order of 500, but the price drops as soon as you break $1,000. But even at the 500 mail piece minimum, the price is just absolutely ridiculous.

So here's what I want you to do.

To find out today's cost for this mail piece to be produced and shipped, you have some options. One is to click the link to the direct mail landing page in the video description below and walk through the ordering process and get a quote. That way, while I'd love for you to place an order you don't have.

To if you just want to get a quote.

You also have the option of setting an appointment with Emmy directly by clicking on the link to her calendar. Or finally, you can simply pick up the phone and call Amy directly. She is super responsive and very easy to talk to. So, again, sorry for interrupting the video, but integrity is a big deal to us here at Subtle Empire, and I wanted you to have Auto upfront and updated pricing at all times.

So go ahead and pick one of.

Those options in the description below this video and get busy marketing your business today. Thanks again, guys.

We'll see you next time.