Postcard Questions

[Dj]

We have done very little of sending postcards. When we did, there was a lady in the office (gone now) who did them for us, so it was really easy. Now I find that if I want to do any I need to do it myself.

After doing a little research here, I find you all talking about
Overnightprints and Vistaprint

Are they any others anyone would like to recommend?

Now let me ask the hardest question I have: where the heck do I get all the addresses or labels, etc. ?? Are there any services out there that do this for you?

[Goknights]

OP.com has provided a great product and met my expectations as far as quality. They use a thick stock paper which makes it impossible to print labels directly on the cards. Another small problem with OP.com is that the shipping times seem to very greatly. Orders did to take 5-7 days and now it seems to take closer to 10 days before receiving my order.

As far as the addresses, I would contact your local board of realtors. there are many options available to you and I'm not sure what your board offers. A membership in my BOR includes access to some very helpful information.

Good luck. I hope that helps.

[clairegrrl]

You should also check with your favorite Title Company. They usually offer this as a service for a small fee.

[ResaleBroker]

You can always try the USPS: http://www.usps.com/netpost/reachcustomers.htm

[Borino]

Color for Real Estate (CFRE) for decent postcards, and your favorite title co for raw data sets - you should do the final filtering (date purchased, non-owner, etc) based on who you want to reach.

[Dj]

Color for Real Estate (CFRE) for decent postcards, and your favorite title co for raw data sets - you should do the final filtering (date purchased, non-owner, etc) based on who you want to reach.

sorry what do you mean by "you should do the final filtering (date purchased, non-owner, etc) based on who you want to reach"

[Ryan Ward]

Dj,

If you have access to a mail list (our mls offers for free) you can uncheck all homeowners that have recently moved in to the area or uncheck the non-occupied so that you are not wasting money on people who aren't going to be selling or won't read your cards. This way the business you are soliciting is more targeted. Your ad dollars will either allow you to reach a larger more target audience or you can save money by not sending cards to low priority sellers.

Always scan your list if possible to weed out certain types.

For ex: I don't send to anyone who has been in there home less than 3 years - others may say 2 or 5 years. It's up to you. Also, If you notice that it is not owner occupied then you are wasting postage on a tenant (if you are soliciting listings) and so on.

You could also make a second list on non owners to solicit buyers or find the owners and solicit listings.

It takes a little time to set up on the front end, but, should be worth it. You can usually just update the list once a year or so.

hope that helps

[Borino]

sorry what do you mean by "you should do the final filtering (date purchased, non-owner, etc) based on who you want to reach"

I would get the raw data update from our title company and load it on our system (about every 30 days).

Then I'd create a mail list:
- Only non-owners, and mail to their mailing address
- Only non-owners out of state, and mail to their mailing address
- Only owners that have been in their home for more than 20 years
- Only owners that have been in their home 3-6 years (based on our research of the most frequent sellers)
- Match with expired listings database and include all expired listings in the general area
...etc
- At the beginning I also removed all real estate agents, but that later became to tedious.

Anyway, you get the idea. The goal was to target specific home owners and match them with the specific mail piece message triggers.

[Ryan Ward]

Borino,

I have always used the lists provided by my MLS. It's free. Is there a reason I should use a title company instead?

I beieve it does the same thing and it downloads to a .csv automatically so that I can merge the mail list onto my postcards.

I can customize to a specific sudivision, street or any other way I want. Then I simply check or uncheck those that I want to eliminate.

[Calum]

Hi DJ,

I’m not sure how many postcards you’re planning on sending, but we generally do a carrier route sorted mailing, that way we don’t have to mess with any addressing or labeling. When we get the cards printed we have them all pre-printed with our Postal Indicia and the words “ECRWSS Postal Customer”. If you’re interested PM me and I can email you a pdf of what our card looks like. The benefit of a carrier route mailing is one, you don’t have to mess with any addressing or labeling and two, the postage is $0.127 per postcard. The drawback is you have to mail to the entire carrier route, so depending how the carrier routes break-down in the area you’re mailing, sometimes you end up having to choose between mailing 700 cards or 1,500 cards.

If you do want to do a traditional addressed mailing, as a Florida Realtor, you can log-on to floridarealtors.org and use the tax roll data, which allows you to search the tax rolls and then they have a pre-formatted label option, or you can export the data into excel and do your formatting from there.

I hope that helps.

Good Luck,
Calum