Real Estate Marketing - How to Measure Your Direct Mail Success

Eugene Schwartz, writer of Discovery Advertising, said it best: "There are no replies in direct mail except diagnostic test answers. You don’t cognize whether something will work until you prove it. And you cannot foretell diagnostic test consequences based on past experience."

What he intends is this. You can take something that have got worked for another existent estate marketer, apply it to your ain audience, and have it flop. Or it could be a huge success. The lone manner to cognize for certain is to seek it and diagnostic test it.

Sure, there are "best practices" you can begin with, and you can learn a batch from the successes and failures of other marketers. But to get the best possible ROI on your existent estate marketing investment, there is no replacement for testing.

Think of it this way. Best patterns will set you ahead of 75% of your competition. Testing can assist you excel the other 25%.

And Now for the Good News
Direct mail do testing easy. In fact, it’s 1 of the easiest marketing mediums to track and measure. If you direct 500 postcards out and get 25 phone phone calls about that postcard, you’ve just measured a 5% ROI (if we could all be so lucky!).

Advertise through radiocommunication or television, and your consequences are much harder to quantify.

You don’t have got to be an analyst or mathematical statistician to begin a basic testing and measuring programme for your direct mail. Here’s Associate in Nursing illustration of how simple it might be:

Step 1
Send a agriculture piece using buyer’s (or seller’s) usher as primary offer. Use this piece for a specific clip period of time -- let’s state two months.

Step 2
Path and record all responses that come up from that card. When you get an electronic mail or phone phone call from a prospect, inquire them how they heard about you. If they say, "We received a postcard mentioning your buyer’s guide," then chalk up a response to that peculiar card. Stop numeration at the two-month mark and compose down the sum number of responses.

Step 3
Next, set a single component of your Mailer -- let’s utilize the newspaper headline for this example.

Step 4
Send your new Mailer and path the response over the same clip period of time as you measured the first. Example: Out of 200 pieces mailed, postcard 1 generated seven responses in a two-month period. But postcard two generated 11 responses in the same clip period of time.

Postcard two is the victor (or the "control"). And because you only changed the headline, you cognize specifically what led to the increased response ... a stronger headline!

Toss the weaker headline, maintain the stronger one, and repetition the procedure with a new "challenger."

Now go on this one-element-at-a-time method for other parts of your mailer. Diagnostic Test the layout, the wording, the offer and the list. Pretty soon, you’ll have got a combination of best headline, best graphics, best layout ... best everything. Run it until the wheels autumn off!

"But how make I cognize which card person is responding to? Maybe they’ve just held on to card number 1 for a long clip and are calling in response to it (instead of the current version)."

Easy. Just put a small codification in the corner of each piece to allow for tracking. Example: Code 144 bes postcard one. Code 155 bes postcard two. When a prospect phone calls in response to your postcard, I can practically vouch they have got got got the postcard in manus (or nearby).

Then you simply have to ask, "I trust you don’t head my asking, but I like to track my postcards to see which 1s have been delivered properly ... is there a number in the lower left corner of the card?"

This is a basic but reasonably effectual attack to testing. I won’t travel into the widow's weeds of statistically valid samples, because it’s beyond the range of this article. Just cognize that you have got tons of ways to track responses. Where there’s A volition to test, there’s A manner to test.

Use your imagination. Keep it simple. And above all else, be consistent.

If you desire to learn more than about testing (and about proved advertisement techniques in general), I urge a book whose name states it all: Tested Ad Methods, by Toilet Caples. To travel the free-information route, just type "how to prove direct mail" into any major search engine.