In some other recent posts I’ve been discussing selling your house in a weekend. This continues that discussion by talking about using your buyers list.
Step number nine is to contact your existing buyers list. We talked about this a little bit when we went over voice broadcasts, about being able to voice broadcast to all the people that have ever called in before on your properties. But let’s say you have a list of names, addressses and telephone numbers. You could do several different things; you could do a direct mail piece, where you actually send out postcards or a letter or something to people on your list to let them know that you have this property for sale. If you’re collecting email addresses, you could do an email blast to them to let them know you have this property for sale. If your list is small, you can go and look through and see the people that are in this price range that wanted houses before and call them specifically to let them know you have this house for sale, and you could do a personal call that way. I do not usually do ALL that stuff.
I use lots of simple tools to leverage my time. I use voice broadcasts; I would do a postcard mailing, because it’s easy for me to take my list, export it to the US Postal Service website, put together a quick postcard and have it sent out without having to worry about it. I can get all that done within 30 minutes to an hour. So it’s very time effective, and I can just get it done and put it out there. Make sure you contact your existing list in order to let everyone else who has ever worked with you looking at buying a house that you’ve got another house for sale.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not yet seen the special free downloads page for real estate investors, check it out now.
Jassen: That is awesome. Next thing I want to talk about is how to take your – this list that you’ve been talking about building this whole time. You’ve got this list and so what are some ways that you can cultivate new business specifically from that list?
James: Yes. I think most people are under the false illusion that they’re going to convert a very large number of people directly from their website or other direct marketing into clients. While it does happen, it is much easier to get someone to come on your website, order a free special report or a free download and join your mailing list and over a period of several contacts, begin to know, like and trust you and then when they’re ready they’ll actually contact you about your service and actually become a client. So what you want to do is you want to have regular contacts with your internal list, people who have requested information from you, people that are existing clients and reaffirm that they’ve made a good decision being with you, reestablish yourself as an expert. Do all those things and there are four ways that you could use that to cultivate new and repeat business and referrals actually from your internal list.
Number one is the monthly newsletter. I personally would prefer if you’d physically mailed it – I’m not getting a kickback from the post office. I’ll tell you why you should actually mail it. It’s because people discount e-mail. So if you actually take the time to go print out 8 ½ x 11 two-sided newsletter once a month, you can upload your newsletter to the U.S. postal service, you can upload your mailing list to the postal service. They’ll do all the printing and mailing for you and it’s dirt cheap so you can definitely go and do that. But you should mail it out because it’s going to give more value. People are going to notice it. Even if they throw it away, you’ve now gotten the hits on your name and your information where someone else the next day or two days later says, “Hey, I need an accountant.” Guess what? They just saw your name and they’ve been seeing it every month for the last six months and they’re going to think of you. More so than someone else who’s just sending them an e-mail once in a while. You definitely want to have some type of physical mailing and get it in their hand. So that’s number one.
Number two is occasional e-mails with updates, promotional offers and special reports and important announcements. I think you should e-mail your client base regularly and just let them know what’s going on. Maybe you’ll tell them, “Look, I’m about to take vacation here in the next two weeks. So I just want to make sure that if you have any needs that I’m available for you over the next two weeks or if you’re going to miss that then I’ll be back in a month, a month from today in order to handle anything you need. So let me know if you need that and by the way, we have a new client discounts where it’s free hour consultation and 10% off your first tax return,” whatever it is you’re going to offer. So you could go ahead and do that. Put out any special reports you put out there so you could get occasional e-mails where you do that. I think that’s really important too.
The third thing out here is to give them access to you via social networking sites. I told you before that social networking is really about getting to know the person. These are things you like outside of business. They want to feel like they know you more so than you’re just an accountant. So give them access to you. I mean, create a Twitter account and share with them when you do certain fun things or vacations you take or restaurants you go to or sporting event, share whatever your hobbies are. Then people will know, like and trust you and be more likely to do business with you by becoming involved in those things. You can use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all those different social media type websites in order to do that.
The final way that you can actually use your internal list to cultivate and get new business and repeat business and referrals is there are definitely applications out there on the web where you can take all the new blog articles and contacts you’ve added to your blog over the last week. It is called RSS to email. You can have it automatically sent out once a week to your entire client base where it says, “Here are the new articles I wrote with like a one sense description of what’s included,” and they can click on the link in order to read those. You can set that up so that it automatically happens. If you’re adding contents to your blog there’s going to be an e-mail sent out that lists all the different content that that was added and you don’t need to do anything extra. It just gets taken care for you. So I think that’s a good way to do e-mails more so than the newsletter you know. The one I recommend is MailChimp.
Jassen: Okay. The purpose of the RSS e-mail feed is to get people coming back to your website, right?
James: Right. They just keep your name up there so that when they finally do need you, you’ve established yourself as an expert. They know you. They trust you because you’re constantly there, you’re reliable. They’re willing to do business with you. So they’ll do referrals to you especially if you ask. If you put down there, “By the way, I love your referrals,” or if you highlight people that have given you referrals – yes, you want to go and do that type of e-mails so it’s consistent and top of mind awareness.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. You gotta see this: The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book
If you have a property that you need to fund and you have been growing your email list of potential private lenders, use the Email Blast for Private Money Checklist to contact them to line up someone to fund your deal.
In this checklist we cover making sure you have setup a webpage or at least a single PDF sheet about the deal so that you have something to show your potential lenders about the basics of the deal.
We walk you through using your email broadcast service—and definitely not your regular email account—to send out the email message to them.
We remind you to check your key information in the email like your links and contact information. We have you check each link to make sure that you are not about to send out an email with an invalid link.
We also remind you to send yourself a copy of every email blast you do and to archive them so you can look back through them if you ever need to.
And finally, we remind you that you need to process all remove requests from people that no longer wish to receive your emails to be in compliance with the law. This is just one of many reasons why we do not recommend you use your regular email account to send out these emails, but insist that you use a professional email broadcast service.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. We have a huge amount of information on how to raise private money for our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members in the Real Estate Investor Wiki.
We break our active buyers list into two major groups: retail or rent to own buyers and real estate investor wholesale buyers.
In our Active Buyers Checklist we deal with them in very similar ways. We contact them each time we have a new property that would be appropriate to send them.
For our retail buyers and rent to own buyers we would do a blast out to them with each new property that we have to retail or offer on a rent to own. We do our blast usually via, but occasionally also use voice broadcast.
On rare occasions where we happen to know a particularly well qualified buyer and a property that would be a good fit, we will get on the phone and make a personalized call to them.
For our real estate investor wholesale buyers we use a similar strategy of blasting out the info on the property to them. Like the retail buyers list we also use email and voice broadcast, but since we often have fax numbers for our wholesale buyers as well, we have also done fax blasts successfully on occasion.
There tend to be certain investors that have proven—through doing several transactions with us—more serious buyers that others and we do, from time to time, make a call to them before blasting it out to the list.
Having a big, healthy buyers list is one of the keys to running a successful real estate investing business and especially true of running a successful wholesaling business.
Until my next post,
James
If you have taken my advice and invested your time (and possibly money) into building a large buyers list, then congratulations! You’ve taken the first step that very few people ever actually take. For those familiar with Aesop’s fables, you are definitely not the grasshopper that wasted away the summer while the ants worked hard to gather food. You are the ant and have done the necessary work in advance – when you were supposed to do it!
Now, let’s take a moment to discuss some ways that you can work your buyers list to realize some of the potential that you have built through your efforts.
For most investors, you’re not going to be sending great investor articles, resources and tools to your buyers list to build up your credibility and name recognition. Personally, I think that you should consider doing this, but I realize that most investors lack the time and desire to do this, so I will not press that point. However, you should certainly be sending out deals to your buyers list and here’s how.
There are 6 major ways to communicate with your buyers list: personal phone calls, voice blast, personal e-mails, e-mail blast, personal fax and fax blasts. You can group these 6 ways into two major categories: personal contacts and blasts (also known as broadcasts or mass contacts).
The personal ones should be easy to understand. You personally call, e-mail or fax a single person on your buyers list about a particular deal or just to keep in touch with them. These types of contact are of the highest value to you in building your relationship with that particular buyer and I strongly encourage you to do this with your top buyers.
However, when you have tens of thousands of buyers on your buyers list like I do (or even a hundred for a local investor), the practicality of personal contact for anything more than your top buyers goes away. That’s where the blasts come in.
You can use e-mail blasts, fax blasts and voice blasts as a means to get your message out about a particularly exciting deal to your list of buyers. It is important for me to stress that you need permission to send e-mail, fax and voice blasts to buyers on your list. That is why we emphasize getting this permission as you build your list.
Also, there is a fine balance between too many blasts and too few blasts. If your list only hears from you with a great deal once a quarter they may forget who you are or that they gave you permission. If you blast them 5 times a week, you risk annoying even serious buyers with too many contacts. Personally, I aim for 1 or 2 contacts per week after I have established myself in their mind. I establish myself in their mind by doing a few more frequent contacts up front during the first week or two after they’ve given me permission to contact them.
If you need information on what services we use to send out our e-mail, fax and voice broadcasts, you can check out those in the free special report that I give away on the recommended providers I use. To get that, just sign up for our mailing list and you will be given access to our download page..
Until my next post,
James
A few minutes ago I posted an article about how I updated the list of recommended email broadcast and autoresponder service providers.
I also made a short video describing the difference between email broadcast and autoresponders as well as briefly describing how investors can use the new recommended provider free to have us help develop a relationship between them and their real estate investor list.
Watch the email broadcast and autoresponder video below:
Sincerely,
James
P.S. If you are a real estate investor Bronze Member (consulting client) with us and need help setting up your system, let me know as that is included with your membership.
