With fewer commercial real estate postcards and direct mail campaigns these days, your opportunity to stand out in your prospects mailbox is better than ever. In an industry that’s built on personal interactions and creating great customer experiences, direct mail is still a powerful marketing tool for real estate lead generation.
Postcards and other direct mail campaigns can be a great addition to your commercial real estate marketing plan and should incorporate a solid real estate graphic design, excellent photography and clear messaging. With those elements, and the fact that they are delivered right to your intended audience, you stand a better than average chance of getting your offering noticed. At BTS Brands, we specialize in the development and implementation of commercial real estate direct mail campaigns.
Having a plan for your direct mail campaign will accomplish several things. Most importantly, it will define what you want to achieve over what time and where you want to market your services. These are critical things to know because they will shape how you address each of the other tactics that go into your campaign.
There’s a long standing debate over form versus function in direct mail. The idea that a great real estate graphic design can’t co-exist with a great message is shortsighted. By giving adequate consideration to both, you can develop a piece that grabs a reader’s attention, is easily scanned and does what you intended the piece to do. The key is to go back and review what you wanted to accomplish with this postcard. If it’s to highlight the class A amenities of a newly remodeled building, then heavy-up the graphics and keep words to a minimum. Alternatively, you may want to have more copy points if you’re trying to detail the particulars of a new investment opportunity.
Postcards should be sent out in a coordinated, staggered manner. Sometimes businesses think that by flooding the market all at once, they’ll create a surge of inbound leads. A better and more measurable way of launching a postcard campaign is to release the mailing over a period of time. Drop a few then review. This will provide opportunity to really understand your inbound traffic, ensure follow-up and also make minor adjustments as needed along the way.
Tracking the performance of your campaign is essential, so make sure you have a well defined process in place up-front to handle that. This can be as simple as having your phone attendants ask how the caller heard of the offering and then noting which postcard it came from. Alternatively, separate email addresses or phone numbers can be used to track the performance of a specific real estate postcard. Regardless of how you do it, just do it and make sure that the intelligence you gather finds its way back into your commercial real estate CRM.
You’re probably already familiar with the key components of a postcard campaign such as having a great picture, a clear call to action, pitching the incentive and employing your real estate branding elements. In the past, using postcards may have become somewhat formulaic, but take a moment to re-think your approach and consider these uses as well.
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