Best Of: Direct Mail Postcard Strategy for Movers

Hey my friends, it's Louis Massaro and welcome to another best of edition of the Moving Mastery Podcast.

In this best of episode, you'll get a behind the scenes look at some of the live trainings that I do for moving companies. These might be clips from my moving sales academy, live three day seminars or live online training that I do. Or they might be some of my Moving Mastery Monthly trainings and highlights from those that I do every single month for our members. I know you're really gonna like these because it's more of a deep dive tactical training and a look at some of the work that I do as a trainer and success coach. I focus so much on helping you take your moving business to the next level by implementing new processes and strategies to help things run smoother while increasing profits. That's what these special episodes are all about. These are my best of trainings right here and exclusively on the Moving Mastery Podcast. In these live trainings, a lot of times I'll have a presentation on the screen or a flip chart where I'll be drawing stuff out. You won't be able to see that, but you'll still get an idea what I'm talking about. So make sure you break out your notebook and a pen for these episodes and take some really good notes because there's some really valuable training on what you need to implement to grow your business. And. And if you want to get more deep dive training like this and be able to interact with me in this type of training, make sure you join our Moving Mastery Monthly training program. This is the program where I go live with our students every single month and I train on a new topic or I teach a new marketing strategy. This is our monthly subscription program where I do live Q and A and actual live coaching with our members every single month. It's called Moving Mastery Monthly and you can Access it at LewisMessaro.com or monthly. That's LewisMessaro.com monthly. L O U I S M A S s a r o.com monthly to get more Deep dive training similar to this. And I could tell you if you like this, you're going to love that training program. But I'll let you see for yourself. So let's go ahead and jump in to a Moving Mastery Podcast Best of training. Hey. Hey.

What's up guys? Welcome to Moving Mastery Monthly, January 2018. I am fired up today. We got some great stuff that we're gonna go over. I'm so happy that so many of you are here logged in. I see you guys here, for those of you this is your first time, you want to make sure that you go ahead and log in in the chat roll down below. All right, I'm gonna be answering questions live. I'm also gonna be giving away prizes to those people who are participating asking questions. And let's see who we got here. We got Paul. What? Kirsten, good to see you. Prunet. Hey, Brunette Ted. Nick. Paul. Jeremy, Lorne. What's up, everybody? You guys need to log in. Let us know where you're out, where you're from. Nick, what are you doing in Arizona? Nick? Nick's in Arizona. All right. Gotta come say hello. Awesome. Awesome. Log in. If you have questions, go ahead and start them off with a question mark. All right. Again, if this is your first time, you'll see that there's going to be a lot of questions here, a lot of comments, and I'm basically going to go through like this on my phone. Once we get to the end, look for your questions and answer them. It'll help me out a lot if you have question marks in the front. All right, so today's a big, big live cast. We're going to be going over some things to really set you off on the right path for 2018. We're going to be talking about direct mail postcards and how to crush it.

All right.

This secret of phase two that we're going to go over is something that not many people know about. And when start doing it, you're going to see your numbers skyrocket for direct mail. Okay. We're also going to talk about how to get more five star reviews in an automated fashion. I know a lot of you have been asking questions about that. A lot of you been struggling with that. We all know that customers don't just go and leave you a five star review. Even if you ask them, they might not leave you a five star review. So we're going to go over a strategy today that works that's going to allow you to start getting more recognition and five star reviews for the good job that you're out there doing. Right. Then we're going to talk about a management strategy and a way to, as a business owner, separate yourself and make sure that you're handling your role as the CEO of your company, you're handling your role as the manager of your company, and you're handling the role as an employee of your company and how to separate those out and get the most out of you and your staff. But let's go ahead and get into this month's live cast. I am pumped about this direct mail campaign campaign because.

It'S such a money maker and I know a lot of companies have tried direct mail and maybe they saw some okay results or maybe they didn't see great results. But I want to talk about, you know, the steps that you need to take to really crush it. All right? My job and my role here with you today is to give you how to get to that next level. All right? So I'm going to lay it out. I'm going to show you what's worked for me in the past and what I know works for my clients. So when we talk about direct mail postcards, here's a postcard that we were sending out. Okay? This is neighbors moving in storage. This is for the south Florida location. And basically what you have is a two sided.

Six by eleven postcard. Okay. So you know, most times, you know, you might find a company that'll mail these for you and they'll say that they have a list where they know people that are moving and you'll send out postcards. Okay? So we'll get back to the design of the postcard in a minute and like what you should have on both sides. But let's first talk about the actual mailing strategy. Let me just put this off to the side. All right, so phase one.

What you want to do is you want to send these cards.

To.

New listings, okay? This is what most postcard campaigns are doing right now.

Alright?

If you're running postcards, chances are you or the company that you've hired to do it is sending cards to new listings. Meaning when a house, you know, someone decides, hey, I want to put my house on the market, they hire a realtor, they go and do it for sale by owner. They put the house on the market, okay? That's a new listing. So you want to get a postcard to them as soon as possible. All right? So that's the first step. You want to get cards to the new listings. All right, These people are going to be moving, they're not going to be moving right away, right? There could be a little gap there. You're usually looking anywhere between 30 and 90, 120 days. That's where we're going to get to phase two in a minute. Okay? So you want to send cards to new listings and you want to do this with a pre sorted.

Standard.

Postage.

Okay? So when you look at this card here, basically if you ever see any direct mail pieces come and they don't have a stamp on them. But they have this little pre printed box here, okay. That says pre sorted US Postage paid permit number and then the permit number. What that is, is that space. This is called. Okay. And what you'll do is you'll open an account with the post office, right? And basically you'll. It's almost like a bank account, but you'll prepay for postage instead of having to put a stamp on every card. So for this first phase, you want to use pre sorted standard postage. Okay. Once we get through all these steps, I'm going to come back and tie it all together. If this is a little confusing, if it's your first time doing direct mail, I'm going to make sure that you get it by the end of this. Okay? So this card here has pre sorted standard mail.

Then what you want to do.

You.

Want to filter out the minimum listing price. Okay. Now you can mail to everyone. Okay. So what we're talking about mailing to is your market, okay? Your metropolitan area, the area that you service. That would be considered a local move. That's where you want to mail cards to. Now there's a lot of houses that might sell, okay? So for example, like in the South Florida market, there's homes that might sell for $100,000, but in the south Florida market, those aren't really homes that you to go move, okay. And they're not really homes that are going to pay for a mover. You want to be moving to big homes. The best part about direct mail is you're going to get higher average moves, bigger jobs, better jobs. It's amazing if you haven't done it so you can filter out the minimum listings. So basically what you want to do is take a look at your area where you live and say, okay, what price range typically would be, you know, a neighborhood or houses that we don't really want to market to. Okay. So in a lot of places in the country, $100,000 will buy you a really nice home. And other places you, you know, it's. You won't. Right? So I'll give you an example. Like south Florida, we were filtering out anywhere between 250 to 300,000 and up. Okay. Anything less than that, we weren't sending cards. All right? We just found that that was a good number there. All right. Other big cities, it'll be the same thing, but you have to determine that. And it's really as simple as saying, hey, you know, what does it cost? What do these houses over in this area cost? Do we want to Mail to this area, okay? And you adjust your minimum from there, all right?

You want to send.

A 6 by 11 postcard.

Okay? This card here is 6 by 11. So why do you want 6 by 11? You want 6 by 11? Because this card here.

Is going to perfectly fit in most mailboxes, okay? It's going to take up the whole mailbox, all right? You know, most cards, they'll come. They're about this big, right? That gets lost in all of those, all that junk mail, right? It gets lost in between. You don't want it to get lost. You want it not too big to where they. They have to bend it to get it in the mailbox. You want it just right to where it goes in. And when they pull it out, it's basically swallowing all the other cards. I mean, they're seeing your card first. All right? So you want to do 6 by 11 postcard. So let's just walk through phase one again. Basically, the concept is you're gonna get new listings. You're gonna get an account for pre sorted standard postage, which you'll get an indicia for, okay, With a permit number. And you get that at the post office. So you go down to the post office, you'll let them know you want to set up a bulk mail account, all right? They'll give you your permit number, and you'll prepay money into that account, all right? Now you're going to want to filter out your minimum listings. So let's talk about how you get these listings. You can hire a mailing company that will find you your list, but the ideal way to get your list is off the mls, okay? Off the multiple listing service, which basically is what realtors use to.

You know.

List houses for sale. And other realtors go on and find the houses that are for sale for their clients, all right? That's the source. So even the companies that might be doing direct mail or selling you a list, that's where they're getting it from. Now, I can't say how quick and real time their data is, okay? But that's where they're getting it from. So you want to get it from the mls. So if you have a realtor that, you know, talk to them and say, listen, am I able to get access to mls? Are you able to pull this list for me and send it to me every week? Right? Or can I get access to your mls? A lot of each metropolitan area really has their own mls, and, you know, it's its own software, essentially, right? So imagine a bunch of different software. So wherever you are, I can't tell you exactly where to go in the MLS to pull the list, but if you get in there, you could find where to pull that list, put it in an Excel spreadsheet, and now you have your list to send to. So in that list you'll be able to say, all right, let's filter out homes that are less than, you know, whatever your minimum is going to be. Right. If you don't have access to the mls.

You want to get it from a site called.

Redfin.

R e-fin.com okay? In almost every city, they're going to have access to the mls and you're going to be able to pull this information for free. There's other sites like Zillow and realtor.com, but that's not real time data from the MLS. All right, so Redfin, if you don't have access to the MLS through a Realtor, which is key, but if you can't get that, definitely use Redfin. Okay, so let's talk about phase two.

You might be watching this right now and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do that already. I know that. Right?

Direct mail works for me. It hasn't really, you know, been great, but it works for me. I'll give you an example, like this card, this campaign here, and I'm just using the South Florida market. We were in many cities doing this. We were spending probably 6,000 and change a month to send out postcards.

And just local moves, we were seeing 70 to 80,000 in return. Okay, just local moves. There was another. The long distance went to a different department. So I would say there was probably another 40,000 in long distance. But just local moves alone, you spend 6,000 to get 70, 80,000 all day long. All right? And these will be your largest moves. All right? The moves you're getting on pay per click online from lead providers, those are great. But I can tell you right now, your largest average move will come from your postcards. Now these postcards here, you could hear this, right? This is not a cheap, flimsy card. Full color, glossy, both sides, beautiful card.

I paid 3 cents apiece for these, but I ordered them 50,000 at a time. Okay, so that might sound like a lot, right? 50,000. They came in pallets. We had them in pallets in our warehouse, but it cost 1500 bucks to get 50,000 of them. Now, when you first get started and you're unsure, you know, maybe the copy on your card, you know, you might need to test a few things. We started ordering 50,000 at a time. Once I knew, hey, this works, we changed some of the wording, we changed some of the coupons on here. We have tracking numbers on there to make sure we know it's coming from the postcard. You know, we have a testimonial there, we have all the information that we tweaked to make sure it had everything that it needed and said, okay, let's get the best price we can. And we order 50,000 at a time. 1500 bucks, 3 cents a piece. Okay, so phase two.

This is really where it gets good.

Okay, so now you're going to send cards to under contract or pending listings. All right? So let's just talk about the MLS for a minute, all right, and then we can talk about where you get it, like Redfin and things like that. But let's just break this concept down, which I think, I think you'll get. But let's just understand the life cycle of when someone sells their home, okay, they have a realtor, they list the home for sale, okay? So that's a new listing. So you want to mail to them when that house first goes on the market. All right, so that's effective. But again, that house might not sell for, you know, I would look up, go online and look up your city and the average time to sell a home, 2017. Look at last year's stats. You know, some places, you know, are average 30 days, some places are 120 days. All right, so it's going to take some time for these to kick in. So now you're going to do this plus this. This isn't one or the other, right? So this is this.

Plus this. Okay? You're going to send cards to under contract pending listings. That's the same. Under contract and pending is the same thing. Different MLS services call it different things. And what that means is when you're looking at the MLS for a house, if you ever shop for a house, you'll see, you know, oh, it's a new listing, it's available, which basically means it's available. But then you might see one that says under contract or pending. And what that means is somebody put in an offer, somebody signed the contract, gave their earnest money, gave their deposit to buy the home. Alright, what does that mean? That means these people are moving quick, right? Typically within the next 30 days, they're going to be ready to move. All right? So yes, you sent this card and what will happen when you send that first card is some people will take the cards and they'll go, oh, movers, we're going to need them soon. Let's put these in a drawer and when we need them we'll give them a call, right? This one, they get your card and they're like, oh, we need a mover now. Okay.

Nobody'S doing this. If you start doing this, you're gonna see tremendous trip. This is like the turbo booster right here for your direct mail campaign. This is good. You can find services that will do this and you'll get some results from it. But you do this, it's on turbocharged, alright? So now the rest of this is very important to make sure it works, right?

Okay. So on the card.

We talked about this, this is the indicia, you have your permit number and this one says pre sorted standard US Postage. Okay? So that's here. Pre sorted standard US Postage. When you're sending to an under contract or pending home, you want to send pre sorted first class mail. Okay? First class mail is going to cost you more money to send, but it's going to get there much quicker. All right, you want to get that card as quick as possible because what happens, right? All of a sudden the realtor calls, says we have a contract on your home. They want to close in 30 days. What's the next step? They're like, oh, we got to call movers. Right? So now all of a sudden you're in their mailbox a day or two later, right? Yes. They may still have your card in a drawer along with a bunch of others, or they may have thrown them out. But when you now get in their mailbox, quick, when it's really time for them to make a decision, that's where it really starts. The magic starts happening. Alright? So with these, what you want to do, and I'm giving you what works, okay, you could decide.

What you want to take and what you want to leave.

You want to mail these out once a week, minimum. Minimum. Okay?

Because what happens.

These you can mail out, let's say you mail these out once a week, it's okay, because you know, they're not really ready to hire movers yet. Now these will pay off, but it's going to take some time. But now here you just got the listing, you just got the update that their house is now under contract.

You're going to pay extra because you want to mail it there and get it there quicker.

You need the if you only mail on Monday, right? All the new houses that go under contract and pending on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, you're not going to get to those till the following Monday, you want to get there as quick as possible. Okay, so we would mail three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Meaning take the cards, you bring them down to the post office, they already are. Have your indicia and your permit number off on it. Drop them off, they go out. Okay, that's huge. And now for this, you want to actually use a smaller card. Okay, So I would suggest a four and a half by six.

Postcard.

You might say, Louis, why would I, you know, that big card looks so nice. Why would I send a small card?

Because the pre sorted first class is much more expensive.

And when you have a card that's, let's say.

You know, for it's probably from like here up would be the size of that second card. It's much cheaper. Okay, so you've already sent this card. They either have it or they tossed it. But now you want to get there quick. If you send these first class, you can, right? But we're talking about all your marketing needs to be looked at as an investment. Okay? A good investment is not an easy investment, period. So this might, you might look at this and say, hey, this is a lot of work, then don't do it. That's fine. But those of you who do are going to see tremendous results from this. You may say, hey, you know what, I want to spend the extra money to make sure that the second card that goes there is also a big card. Because I like the way that looks. That's okay. But what really matters at the end of the day is how much did you spend versus how much did you actually bring in? Let me say that again. How much did you spend versus how much you brought in? So from, you know, at first we sent out the big card, first class, right? And then we said, you know what, let's test out the small card. And we didn't see any difference at all. So why spend more money if you don't need to spend more money? Okay.

This is one of the best strategies. Somebody asked me, I think, in the last live cast, like, if I had to start all over again with a moving company, you know, what form of advertising would I use? And it would be direct mail, and it would be this strategy right here that I'm talking to you about.

All right, my friend, what'd you think of that episode? Did you learn something new? Did it spark some ideas that you can implement in your business right away? Did it get the wheels turning? Did you love it? If so, do me a favor, share this episode Somewhere out there on social media where you know there's some people that'll get value from it. Make sure you hashtag the Moving Mastery podcast or the but we'll be able to look you up and find you on Instagram. Sometimes we just randomly pick a few people and send them gifts like free training T shirts, hats, swag, tickets to our three day seminars. So make sure you let us know you're listening and share what you thought about this episode out there on social media. I also want to invite you to join us in our Moving Mastery Monthly program. And you can do that by going to LewisMessaro.com monthly. That's. That's LouisMessaro.com monthly. That'S the program where I go live every single month and do an in depth tactical training like the one you just heard. But I do it live for our members every single month and it's where I do live Q and A and coaching and giveaways. We give all of our students of this program tickets to my live 3 day moving sales Academy seminar. We also give them extra training on leadership and productivity. Go check it out. It's louismassaro.com monthly. Thank you so much for being a part of this community of so many people dedicated to improving the quality of their lives, improving their business. I really appreciate you being here. You can take your life to the next level. You can take your business to the next level. Sometimes you just need a little bit more training, a little bit more inspiration, a little bit more complex consistency. And I hope that by listening to this podcast I'm able to provide that spark that you need to make it happen. I look forward to being here with you on the next episode of the Moving Mastery Podcast.