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Real Estate Yellow Letter Marketing
Hire Virtual Assistants to Help Write Ad Copy, Build Your List(s), and Send Out Postcards
Goal:
Yellow Letter Marketing is a specialized type of Direct Mail for Real Estate Investors to generate off-market motivated seller leads.
Now, there’s one very unique thing about these letters:
They’re designed to appear as if they’re hand-written by an actual person commenting on the seller’s specific property.
And typically, you want these to include details about how they can get in touch to get a no-obligation cash offer from you as the investor.
How It Works:
There are a lot of great Direct Mail vendors catering to Real Estate Investors, with a whole suite of existing templates to run Yellow Letter Marketing for Real Estate Investors.
REVAS+ Members get access to a variety of Yellow Letter Templates, and you can even outsource the writing via services like Upwork & Fiverr. In theory, you can delegate the whole process of creating your Yellow Letter Direct Mail content from scratch.
When it comes to content writing, most Real Estate Investors prefer specialized, U.S.-based copywriters who can write the Yellow Letter Marketing content for you. We’ve even seen some Investment Groups successful by being highly selecting in hiring Overseas Copywriters!
If you search around, you can find many proven templates that other Real Estate Investors have used (highly successfully) with Yellow Letter Marketing to generate tons of off-market seller leads.
NOTE: You should never rely on sending a single Postcard to a particular Prospect. The Rule of Thumb is that you’ll need to reach a reach a Prospect 7 – 12 times before they will take action based on your messages.
Once you have the direct mail sequence edited & ready for action, you can easily hire an Overseas Virtual Assistant to help you print, send, and track them.
To avoid the same person receiving the same content over & over again, you can also use your Copywriting Virtual Assistant to help you create a sequence of Yellow Letters – as many as 12 – to get the best results in your Direct Mail Yellow Letter campaign.
Pros:
The pros and cons of Yellow Letter Marketing are pretty similar to Real Estate Direct Mail in general.
The biggest difference, of course, is this a specialized type of campaign…
… One that’s already been proven effective in action on the front lines of a real estate business, especially for investors.
So, the biggest “pro” of this type of Real Estate Lead Generation is that it’s going to help you generate motivated off-market seller leads, ESPECIALLY if you’re targeting people who are in some type of a distressed situation on their property and need to sell fast and/or need to sell in as-is condition.
The best thing about that situation is that you can send this type of direct mail marketing to any Real Estate Owner list.
- You don’t need their phone number.
- You don’t need their email address.
- You can always get the addresses.
So this is something that you can send out to your entire target list…
And it’s one of the broadest and most proven ways to generate off-market seller leads for investors.
Cons:
The biggest downfall of Yellow Letter Marketing is that it’s expensive.
You see, you’re probably going to want to have your yellow letter inside an envelope (it’s not just a postcard).
It is possible to use the same type of “Yellow Letter” strategy in the slightly cheaper Postcard format… but there’s a reason people send Yellow Letters with handwriting & a live stamp:
If you want it to appear as it came from a real person, you want a printed piece of mail inside an active envelope with a live stamp on it.
So you’re basically looking at a hard cost of around dollar per piece printed and mailed.
This is obviously a weak point because your Cost Per Lead on Yellow Letter Marketing tends to be a bit higher than things like Real Estate Telemarketing or online advertising.
However, it still is a very targeted method of generating leads and (more often than not) can still create a great ROI in spite of its high cost.
Work Estimate:
The main components of the Yellow Letter Marketing, similar to any other direct mail, are going to be your List and your Ad Creative (the actual messages on the letters that you’re sending).
The only way to be successful will be with a good List and a good Mail Sequence.
Fortunately, there are many places online to find proven Real Estate Yellow Letter Templates (including a REVAS+ Membership), that you can use to get the best ROI… but even if you’re electing to use proven Templates, we always recommend at least a little bit of customization, so that
- your brand,
- your unique selling proposition,
- and your track record…
… all your own business’s strong points can shine through.
To prepare your campaign ready and get your 7 – 12 mail pieces ready, you’re probably talking about 20 to 40 work hours with a US-based Virtual Assistant (Copywriter).
And that’s just to customize everything to your business & make sure it’s pristine content.
(After all, you want everything to be tip-top since you’re spending about a dollar per piece to print and mail it — perhaps even a little bit more.)
You can expect that many Work Hours using a US-based Virtual Assistant, plus the cost of printing and mailing the letters…
… and then of course you’re going to need some type of list.
Finally, you can expect about $0.75 to $1.50 per piece, including Printing, Postage, and Mailing.
Concluding: while it’s not the cheapest type of campaign to launch, it is definitely one that is scalable to large list sizes, and with the right average transaction value, Yellow Letter Marketing can be very profitable.