Direct Mailing for dummies

I have never done any type of direct mailing and I want to do this to try and find some parks to buy. Can anyone who has done this give me any pointers? I have a park list but not all of the owners are listed so I am also wondering about finding the owners. So far to do this I just try serching the park address in the county tax assessor website but this only works part of the time.
Thanks for any info.

Many of the people here have spend thousands of dollars building state and national MHP listings to support their direct mail strategy. Frank & Dave’s bootcamp offers a base listing of 10K parks nationally to start from and you can build on it for your target markets from there. Websites like mhvillage.com have inventories like this for purchase as well, but I have no idea of their quality or accuracy. Many counties have codes for MHPs too, you can ask them to run a report for you or provide the code to you so you can run it yourself.

At the end of the day there are many very manual elements to get this data today, and nobody has a complete listing as things change so often.

You can use Parlay 2.0 to overlay a generic GIS onto your Google Earth.

http://reportallusa.com/products/parlay/

It’s $300 per year, but worth it if you plan on sending out a ton of direct mail. If you only need to update a small list, the trail is a free 200 searches over 14 days. When you go through your list, be sure to record the property’s parcel ID number as this will be what you use from now on to search it in county records.

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Great tip Charles. Thanks for that!

@CharlesD,

First, thanks for all you great posts on this forum. I had my 30 minute call with Kevin the other day, really enjoyable as well.

Who do you all use to send the actual mailers? Are you all doing postcards or letters? I remember from your podcast on this that you talked about saying something along the lines of, “We drove by your park last week and have identified it as a park that we would be interested in buying”. Do you handwrite the cards so that this line is more personal? Would love to hear the details. Thank you. Will.

@wilbus

Our typical letter is a printed, personalized letter and we usually have someone local stuff the envelopes and handwrite the addresses on the envelopes. We’ve done postcards (our response was too low to make this worthwhile again) printed business letters (2-3% response rate), printed personalized (usually +5%), and handwritten letters - either handwritten or looks handwritten (+5%).

It’s usually important to cover the following:

  1. who you are - this distinguishes you from the others who send mail and allows you to connect more effectively with people you’ll bond with. (this is pretty hard to convey on a post card)
  2. why you feel their property is a good fit for you
  3. call to action - there should be more than one call to action in a well written letter and you should always give multiple ways they can contact you i.e. your address is at the top of the letter, you phone number on the letter, email address. Some people are nervous about making the call to you so every now and then you’ll get a letter back or an email from a potential seller.

Your letter is a sales piece at the end of the day. You are selling the owner on connecting with you. You should put an enormous amount of thought and effort into your sales pieces and follow up so that you can maximize the money and time you’ll be spending on this. We probably spent $10,000 on direct mail in the last 12 months but we’ve bought 6 properties through that effort and have 3 more currently under contract with a handful of others that are close to contract. It’s money well spent when done correctly.

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@CharlesD

You rule. I can imagine that opening an envelope and unfolding a letter feels much more intimate than flipping over a postcard. Great advice.

I’ll listen to you direct mail podcast one more time and then follow up with some more questions. Thanks again. w.

I just completed my first direct mail set. I spent a lot of time building my database and cross checking info (LLC info, names, addresses, etc). I sent 61 personalized letters and included a personal paragraph about me. The results have been better than I expected - 10 contacts so far, 7 of which will be ready to sell in the near future.

That’s over 300 lots in the “pipeline”, which is more than I can handle alone. A good problem to have!

Thanks @CharlesD for your detailed responses here.

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Great work @JohnnyAloha - did you also utilize the “handwritten” letter, or ‘yellow letter’ format? Congrats on the progress so far!

I used a typed letter, hand signed, and individually addressed. Simply followed the advice above. Worked great.

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