Land flipping is a popular way to make money in the real estate market. To be successful, you need to use various marketing strategies to find unmotivated sellers and close deals quickly.
One of the most effective marketing strategies for land flipping is direct mail marketing. In this blog post, we will discuss how to use direct mail marketing to flip land for profit!
What Is Direct Mail Marketing?
Direct mail marketing involves sending out offer letters to potential land sellers. The purpose of these letters is to make initial contact with the property owner and request more information about their parcel.
It is a relatively easy and cost-effective way to reach the most potential sellers as possible.
Why Do We Use Direct Mail Marketing?
In the United States, some laws restrict or make cold calling and email marketing difficult to near impossible.
The CAN-SPAM act is a compliance guide for businesses that dictate how they can contact people through email. While it does not make it impossible, it does create enough of a barrier that it's not worth our time.
There is also the issue of finding email addresses and phone numbers, whereas a mailing address is openly available.
So, direct mail is our best way to reach as many sellers directly without the risk of breaking any laws.
You will send out hundreds to thousands of letters in your Land Investing career as only a small percentage of them will reply, but those that do will be well worth the investment. It is also important to keep in mind that house flippers will have to send out HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of letters to achieve the response rate that land flippers regularly achieve.
Pros and Cons of Direct Mail Marketing
There are several reasons why land investors use direct mail marketing to find potential deals. Here are some of the main benefits:
- It's a relatively low-cost way to reach a large audience.
- You can get more information about the property owner's motivation for selling.
- Determine if they are interested in selling their land or not.
- Get an understanding of how much they think their parcel is worth.
There are, of course, some things you should be aware of before you start your direct mail marketing campaign.
While there are many benefits to using direct mail marketing, there are also some downsides that you need to be aware of.
- It can be time-consuming if you don't implement automation.
- It is an investment in itself as letters and stamps get can expensive.
- There is no guarantee when or if the recipient will see your letter.
These first two issues can be solved by hiring people on your team to help you with the more remedial tasks & automation through a good CRM.
The Land Profit Generator Investment Dominator is designed to help you with exactly this.
What Do You Put In Your Letter?
One of the most commonly asked questions when it comes to direct mail campaigns is ‘what do i put in my letter?’
The first thing to remember is that there are two different types of letters that you can mail to land owners, the neutral letter and the blind offer.
The Neutral Letter:
The neutral letter is designed to open up the conversation between you and a prospective buyer.
The purpose of the neutral letter is to find out if your buyer wants to sell their land. The letter will include all of your contact details and will invite the land owner to contact you should they be interested. You can expect to get anywhere between a 2% – 15% response rate on your direct response mail campaign using neutral letters, depending on how you have selected your counties.
Once a land owner confirms that they are in fact interested in selling their land you can send them an offer.
The Blind Offer
The other strategy you can use is the blind offer.
When sending blind offers, you need to analyze all of the properties in your selected area to establish what a fair offer would be for each parcel.
This involves a lot of research, including assessing the topography, access to utilities, whether it is in a path of growth, and the value of comparative lots in the area. Only once you have established the market value and decided what your bottom-line offer is for the lot will you send out a blind offer.
The benefit of sending out blind offers is that it lets the property owner know that you are serious about buying their land. However, the downside of using blind offers is that you will end up spending a lot of time on each property – without knowing if there is any possibility of a deal.
What is the best direct mail marketing for land investors?
In my experience, neutral letters are a much more efficient way to secure land deals.
If you decide to send out blind offers, you will need to do research on 6000 properties before you send out a single letter. If you get a positive response from 5% of the blind offers you send, it means that 95% of your time and resources could have been better spent elsewhere.
On the other hand, if you send out 6000 neutral letters and 5% respond, you will have 30 properties to value knowing that there is a possibility of getting each one under contract.
If time is money, the equation is definitely in favor of the neutral letter.
Get faster results and better profits in your real estate investment!
