EP 505 – Building & Growing An Investor Database

Foreign this is the no Closers show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host, CEO of We Close Notes, Scott Carson. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Nook Show. As always, Scott Carson here. Excited to be with you today. Today's topic is something I think is a very critical aspect to every type of real estate investor out there. What do I mean by that? Well, whether you're a wholesaler, a fix and flipper, a landlord, apartment investor, private lender, a note investor, no matter what type of real estate investing, or really kind of any type of sales for the most part. And we're all in sales. Okay. The biggest thing I can tell you is that we all have databases. We all are growing our database in a variety of way. The thing you got to keep in mind out there is you can get all the learning you want, you can get all the knowledge that you want out there. But the thing that you keep in mind is that most people when they're doing something, they're like, I don't want to reach out. I don't want to talk to anybody. And that's one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a note investor. It's actually one of the three biggest mistakes I see note and real estate investors make out there is they don't immediately start building their list. Now what I mean by list do I mean that you're going to make a list of everybody that you know, like you are in a multilevel marketing thing where you're going to reach out to everybody and have them buy soap on a rope or vitamins or shakes or things like that? No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about building. The list is as important to realize that as you're out networking, as you're out going to events, every person you come in contact with is falls into one of three categories. Everybody's a buyer, seller or a funding source for you. Now, one of the things that you have to do is you can't be a wallflower. If you're going to an expo or you're going to a summit or you're going to a class, you're just going to your local real estate club or you're out at a closing or whatever as you're out doing things, the most important thing you can do is get that person's contact. Everybody has value to you of some sort. Even those that aren't in your neck of the woods or in your niche are still valuable of some sort. What do I mean by that? Well, oftentimes we'll go to an event and there'll be local investors here, let's say in Austin, that are in real estate. Well, we don't buy a lot of notes in Austin, don't buy a lot of notes in Texas, period. But does it mean that person at some point is gonna be looking for a deal maybe outside of often, maybe a funding source, maybe a referral source for you? All right, so that's a very important thing, is that people they come in contact with, no matter who they are, I would put them in your database. You know, if you collect a business card or your sponsoring event, you get a list of contacts, stuff like that, put them in your database. But the most important thing you do is a, besides A putting in your databases, B actually setting up a follow up email just to say, hey, thanks, it was nice meeting at the Alaska event this last night or the last week. Just follow up, tell them a little about what you do. One of the things that we have already pre written that I only have to tweak a little bit so it makes it easier for us, is a pre written kind of email that goes out, hey, here. It was great meeting at this last event, such and such. Whoever the event was did a great job or a little nugget there. But it basically talks about, hey, here's what I do here. I'm a real estate investor focused on notes. Here's a little bit about some of the things that we do. Here's my ebook if you'd like to get a copy of. You can click here on the link to download it also hears about the podcast. So it's three or four things and it's got all the social media links at the bottom of the email. But then all I have to do is basically, if I add them into my database, boom, they get that email out to them. Okay, now are people going to unsubscribe? Of course they're going to unsubscribe. That actually does me a big favor. If they don't want to be a part of anything that we're doing, by all means, that is totally okay. All right. Totally fine to do that. Totally fine to just say, okay, I don't want to be part of it. I don't get an email. That's fine. Thank you. Have a great day. Now, one of the most important things you can do with your database, though, as you're adding these people, is understand where they're looking at, pay attention. You know, where are they investing? What state are they in? Especially if you're going to an event like a conference, they're out of state. You know, what are their three favorite states? So one of the things I like to do is when I get a business card is actually right initial on the back of the card. Hey, something I've known about them, something with, you know, the three states they're in. And I really like it when people put a face on the card, their actual picture in a card. So I actually. Because at the end of an event, you get all these business cards and you're like, who is this person? I had too many Manhattans or I had too many beers or too many crowns. And so having a face with a name helps you recognize. Because one of the things that I like to do, and this is a very easy thing for you do. You can use Evernote on your cell phone. Okay, take a quick screenshot. That's one of the things I like to do. I'll take a picture of the card, and then I upload it to my CRM, which I use infusionsoft. I've also used mailchimp in the past, and it automatically upload their information, takes a picture, and actually saves it in the profile. So when I go back into an email out or somebody sends me an email, like, who is this person? Who is this guy? I can pull up a photo and see who they are. But the most valuable thing is knowing where they're at. So they give you three states that are not in their home state. You now know what they probably invest in. Four states, their home state plus three other states, which is common in the note business, where people invest in out of state. Then you have basically four states. And it's important to have those states leveraged in their profile with different. And mailchimp. Infusionsoft has done this for years. They use a thing called tags. You can tag them specifically. So if somebody tells me that they're investing in Alabama, I will tag them in my system. As an Alabama investor, I literally have a tag for all basically 40 states that we see deals in. And so he tells them they invest in Illinois. Great. They get tagged Illinois investor. And they may be. May have three or four of these different tags depending on how they register. And that's one of the things that's really valuable to me is that as I get deals in and as you guys are starting off, as you're reaching out to banks and asset managers and doing those things, you're going to get lists sent to you that maybe just aren't what you want to buy for yourself. And as you're diving into due diligence, but you may know, like, oh my God, I just got a list of Alabama assets in. Who do I know that buys in Alabama? And if you've got a list of people, you can go to Alabama, send an email, hey, are you looking for deals? Here's kind of what I got. Now, one thing you gotta be careful about that is you don't wanna be a daisy chain or joker broker. One of the things that you wanna do, it's easier if you've got the list yourself. Like, hey, I've got a list of assets all across the country. You know, we're sending some emails out to the, hey, we got some stuff in Illinois, we got some stuff in Indiana. You know, yada, yada, yada, those things, you know, I think you can kind of paint the picture like, hey, I've got a deal. You buy those days. Do you want to look at it? And that speeds up the sales process, speeds up the closing process. But many people don't do that. A lot of people haven't even built a list. All right, now, it used to be easier to build a list if you use LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is a great resource for everybody to use. It used to allow you to export your contacts. In Thanksgiving of 2018, they did away with that aspect where you can export your contacts and the emails will be showing now what happens. They changed one little button that basically, if you didn't approve for your email to post, it won't export it for you. And that's hurt a lot of people, especially those that were just starting off. I haven't grown on LinkedIn, luckily for me, we had over 16,000 contacts on LinkedIn and we would export that list, upload it into our infusionsoft or mailchimp, and then we would basically send an email out to folks. Now, one of the things too, if you've got a database and you don't know what states they want invested, don't freak out. It's still really easy to kind of help your audience make the decision. You can create. It's one thing that I like. You can create with both infusionsoft or mailchimp or to the bigger ones Ain't really any CRM. You can actually create a custom list where it's a form that they click on specific link. You can ask specific questions, like what we've done with our website. If you go to weclose notes.com, you'll see three tabs. The very first part of it once is about buying notes, one about classes, and one by the mastermind. Well, if you click on buy Notes, that takes you to auto form where I ask you to fill out your information and then your top three states, you know, what three states are you looking for? That way when we get deals in the states, then I can say, okay, pull up a list of those that have their market one, market two, or market three as, say, Alabama. And I can see the list out there. And I also have a big list to my contacts that have gone through different workshops. So this is one of the things that if you've ever attended, like one of our note conventions that we've done online or online note or commercial note, we always ask people to fill out a survey, if they don't mind. We usually get about 30 to 40% of people to fill out a survey. But one of the things I ask are, what are their top three states? So tells me their email, their name, their address, they will fill that out in their top three states. Well, then what I do is at the end of the event or when I close down the survey a couple days afterwards, one of the things that I do then is I'll take that full master list and then I'll combine, okay, one master list emails. You'll have duplicate emails because people register in different three different states. So I take list one market, one market, two market three, huge master list. And then I can, you know, I can break that out by states. So if they have 30 people in Alabama, five people in Arkansas, I can then upload those lists individually and tag them or add the tag, as we've done in either mailchimp or infusionsoft, whichever one you want to use, and say, oh, here's the Arkansas investors, here's the Alabama, here's the Illinois, here's the Florida investors to add that list. And of course, the beautiful thing is that with a button or two, you can clean it up and it'll merge people. So you don't have, if somebody registered four times for four different states, you don't have four contacts. You can hit a button to merge data. So it takes that same email and now they've, instead of four contacts, they have four tags. So if somebody's invested in Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, they're tagged in my system four times. So if I'm going to send a list out, yeah, they may get the email four times. But hey, are you investing in Alabama? Have you registered? You're an Alabama buyer? Here, take a look at these. Now this comes in really, really handy. Like I said, when you get lists in from other funds, other asset managers, things like that, or as you're reaching out to banks and they send you a list of something that maybe you're not be interested, I would ask them because we did a lot of this early on in our note business. Like, hey, I'm not interested in a specific asset, but I know somebody who might be interested. Do you mind if I email it to them or email the details and they respond back? We'll have them sign a non disclosure agreement. So that's a good thing that you can be doing. You can have an, you know, an automatic non disclosure agreement with a link they can click on, they can download, sign an email to you, make it really kind of an automated system for you for the most part. All right, so that comes in really, really handy with your list. Now here's a thing. You're like, well, Scott, I'm starting off. I don't have a list. I don't just want to email my friends and families and co workers that I'm still working at and I'm trying to hide my side gig. I understand that. I think the last thing you want to do if you're working full time is have your boss get an email from you and wonder what the heck you're doing and have that long walk with a box. Okay, totally understand that. So what can you do? Well, you can still utilize LinkedIn. Okay. LinkedIn is still a great source to connect, make connections, but you're going to have to do something a little bit different. Either a going to have to jump and look at people's profiles and see if they got their email listed there someone in message or I like to use Lead Fuse is a really good source. Now one of the things that I've done over the years is I'll literally go on to LinkedIn and type in a real estate investor or note investor and it'll pull up, you'll search for that and pull up a bunch of people. You can actually add and narrow down by states if you'd like to do that too. Now what I also like using is lead fuse, like 97 bucks a month. It's a service that will help you scrub LinkedIn for people and their contacting people, their social media profiles, or they have their email. If I did the same thing of running a list using Leap, I would ask and say, okay, run a list for real estate investors and make sure that their email is visible. Okay, I can download 500 to 1,000 new contacts each month for you. What is it? I think $97 on my phone. But it really is valuable because now you've got an email. Sometimes you'll have a social media like a Twitter or Facebook handle or a website and that comes in really, really handy now. And then what you would do is say, hey, when you download the list, it's the same thing. Hey, I just wanted to reach out, I sent you. I would go to connect with all those people. And that's the thing is you can then re upload that email list into LinkedIn and it'll go out and try to connect with those people. And then I would just send an email. I'd say, hey, just want to touch base with you. I just shot you a LinkedIn invite. I'm a local investor looking for deals. You say it looks on your profile that you're a real estate investor. I don't want to bother you if you're looking for deals. I would love to find out what your top three states are. If you're interested, click on this link to just fill out your three states and as we have stuff available, we'll go from there. Now, with email, what's going to happen? Well, you probably get about a 20% so you're going to want to follow up with that list too. You're going to have some people that opt out. So people that unsubscribe, that's okay, just move on and realize next, next, next. But the most valuable thing you can do with your list is grow it on a daily basis, grow it on a weekly basis, grow on a monthly basis. I know some things we've done in the past that some people are doing is they create a different list for every different social media account. So they have a different opt in list, at least that they will send a link to for Twitter, for Facebook, for the different social media groups out there, okay, For Instagram. So that way if somebody opts in a list, they know exactly where it came from, whether it was posted on Instagram, they opted in off their homepage, whether it was a Twitter following, stuff like that, go from there. I mean, so Twitter, while it's one of the things that is probably slowing down a little Bit it's still a great place to build a list of contacts. Still a great place to make a connect with people on there on an individual basis because you still doing a search, doing keyword search. You can jump into conversations that people are doing either real estate investing or fix and flipping or Lean Lord or notes, whatever. You can look to see what people are saying, what kind of conversations are going and reach out to people. I mean it's really easy to see that. Okay, now one thing you want to make sure you do is don't post a fake profile. They don't put a fisher up, they put some generic name. But you can see they have no followers, no friends. Those are people you're not going to want to follow because they're usually fake profiles. Okay. So the important thing to do is reach out to people, talk with people, some things too. If you don't have a list you may want to look at maybe and you've got some deals you might want to reach out to a magazine like or a group like Realty411 or other periodicals or websites and you may offer up an email service where they'll do an email blast out to their database for you for 1,000 bucks or 2,000 bucks. And that can come in really handy as well because now you are not marketing just to your list, you're marketing to their list and you just want to make sure it's a well written email, make sure you've got your links in there that work and that goes out to list and that's a great way to find buyers. You may want to pay a wholesale fee if you're selling an asset, whereas they send you a buyer. Somebody from their list becomes a buyer, you're paying them a referral fee. Bird dog fee is what we call it. But that's still a great way to do that out there. Other things you may join memberships. I'll give you an example. One of the things that we did recently that's worked out pretty well is you'll often like we had our note camp convention recently on the commercial side. Scott Myers, who's a legend in the self storage industry got on there, talked about that. So I jumped on the Texas Self Storage Owners association and it's got a searchable thing by name on there. If you search by name on their website it'll pull up literally a couple thousand owners. So storage units. So what we do we jumped on there and copy pasted, copy pasted, copied it over, dropped a list and we have the name of the unit, name of the company, their address, their phone number and an email address about 90% of the time, whoever the owner was or the general email. And what do we do that list? Well, we upload the list into Infusionsoft, 2700 names just in Texas alone. And we sent an email blast out and said, hey, I'm looking to buy self storage units, looking to buy interest, looking to sell their self storage business. And we just sent one email, just one email out and we end up getting five phone calls, five emails back. Now that's a pretty low rate of return. All right, 1% on 2500 would have been 25 phone calls. So we got 2/10 of 1%. But the five that responded were motivated and were in phone calls and discussions back and forth on what they've got available and what they're trying to move. And so it was for basically free for about an hour, hour and a half of taking the time to pull that information, doing searches A through Z and then exporting the list and then writing an email, send it out. It can be very effective. But now I've got a list of 2700 self storage owners and three people responded to, hey, we're looking to buy as well. So if you come across something you don't want, we would love to take a look at it. Bingo. Okay, cha ching, cha ching. On that marketing aspect and that's the thing, just keep track of that. Your list is one of the most valuable things you can work at on a daily basis. Kind of laughing, thinking about a story here. When I was a younger kid and I think everybody younger entrepreneur, a lot of people have gone through multi level things and things like that where they're always going, oh, you need 20 new people a day or 50 new people a day to get you where you need to be. I would not necessarily say that, but with the use of LinkedIn and other social media websites, you can pull a list pretty easily and create a new list. There's some big groups on Facebook that you can go on and say, hey, anybody interested in buying in this neck of the woods? I have deals and would love to Visit with you. LinkedIn is a great place to see that as well. People will post, hey, I got deals and you'll have like 50 to 100 to 200 people go on there and comment, oh, I'm in their name, email and phone number. Now some of these people say, well aren't you spamming them? Aren't you violating the spam can act? Yes and no. I big Advocate of like, I'll send an email out once to them for the most part, and if they don't respond, then we just don't usually send out that list. So they'll be tagged. A couple of things. They may get an email once in a blue moon, but for the most part, I'm fine with them unsubscribing. I don't send a million emails a day. I may send one a week or one a month to different lists out there. But that's what everybody has to do. If you're going to provide something valuable where it's a I do have deals or I'm not just going to be a joker broker, I do have something of value to give you, then that's a good thing that you can be doing on a regular basis. If you run a group, you can invite people to your group. That's a good thing too. If you're building a group online, you can do that, but you still don't end up with their emails. Some people will start meetup groups online with a great place for organically building your list. If you're going to be doing like a local meetup, one of the things that you want to do is they'll go in to that meetup group and set the settings that you're part of. You have to own the group. You can't go on to somebody else's group and do it, but change the settings. So you require them to answer a couple of questions like, hey, what's the best cell phone number? What's the best email address for you? And make those questions required. They don't fill them out, they don't join the group because you're, you're doing a favor. If you're really running a group and bringing content in each week or really trying to drive engagement, it's worth them giving up their email address. One of the things that we have done for years, did and still continue to do is webinars, where we'll do a webinar, you know, night in America, or we'll do different note funding league or we have different deals available for sale as we'll advertise. Hey, we got a webinar we're doing on this week and that's really helped us build the list over the last couple of years. I mean, when you get 6,000 plus registrants, think about that over 50 weeks, that's getting 120 new people on average. That's a lot of valuable thing. Now the first webinar we did years ago when I first started doing 2011, I think I had 25 people show up out of 50 people that are CP. But 50 people RSVP, okay, that was a valuable thing. I added 50 people to my database and they opted into my webinar so they wanted more information. So I sent them a replay. Repost the email or do redo the webinar the next week for the following information. Some people like, we'll do a webinar once and then they'll have it Evergreen where they're advertising it and people have to opt into it. That's a great list building source. It's going to cost you a little bit of funds for people to register. And having that auto play on either Facebook or other places your website that you lead to, you still got to drive traffic to get people to opt in. Okay. So I think webinars is a great way to build lists because then you can depend on what they registered for. You can identify kind of their hot points. This is one of the things that we've done over the years is always, okay, what was the topic? How many people registered, how many people showed up? How many people watched the Facebook Live or how many people watched on YouTube and then how many people watched the replay the week after? And we just, we do that boom, boom, boom, boom. So I know how many people are listening. Okay, how many people have showed up to a webinar? All right, and how many people opt in and those that on the webinars that there's a lower attendance ratio or lower rsvp. It tells me that's not a hot topic. The ones that are hotter topics are this, this, and this. We need to focus more on that content and that'll help you out tremendously as well. Now another thing you can do I'm a big fan of is the Mobit or your text message marketing. And FusionSoft offers one called fix your funnel. Mobit is a separate entity, but it does link in with infusionsoft. So anybody that likes if you text the word notes to 72,000 or text the word deals to 72,000, it'll send you back a text message. But the minute you sent that text, it captures your phone number. Great, I should opt in. Great. I'll send you a link to 80 hours of videos or here's a link to my PowerPoint slides or you text DEALS to 72,000. Here's a link for you to register your top three states. And now I've got valuable information. It cost me, oh, what do I Buy, I think I buy four to five thousand texts at a time for like, for messages out for like for 195. So it cost me about 5 cents a text credit or less. But it's a valuable thing because now that somebody's opted into it, as long as they stay opted in, I can send them a text message back out to them. I think in the last year we've built about a thousand people have opted in the last year from either me mentioned here or me out speaking. And it's a really good high open rate. Some like 75 to 85, sometimes 90% open rate. When we send a text message out with a link, we can see that people go to the link and click on the link and that's a valuable thing. Now I know that they're very active versus sending an email out to that database would maybe only see a 20% open rate. When I get 70 to 80% I will take 400% increase in ops, opt ins or opens and including that conversation, getting that conversation to grow, getting that conversation for them to respond. Now if they unsubscribe, by all means, that's great. It saves me money in the long run. I'm fine to do that, but it's all about continuing the conversation and the list. If you're building a list, I'm going to reiterate this again. You need to communicate. Taking a box of business cards that you never give out or that you take them a bunch back to your house, your office and you're sitting in a shoebox you never reach out to. It's just a waste of time and waste of money and waste of energy because a lot of people's emails will change every six to eight months. And the value of an email address decreases dramatically after 30 to 60 days if you don't respond to them almost immediately, immediately, first day or two, but then also on a regular basis. We've run different polls and see that over, I think 50, 60% of our audience doesn't email up on a weekly or even bi monthly basis or even on monthly basis to their database. And that's an unfortunate thing. And that's where you see a lot of the lack of success, is they're not doing the marketing aspect. Yes, everybody gets excited about looking at real estate, looking at deals, but when it comes out, send an email blast out to the database. They often get intimidated and won't send the damn emails, we like to say, because that's just the way of getting out. Get the word I tell share what you're doing, share what's going on, share the deals that you're working through. And that's the thing about growing any email database you've got. Not only does it have make sense to have a huge database, it only makes sense though is if you're going to communicate on a regular basis, you have a list and you're not communicating, you're only hurting your own business, you're only hurting yourself. And that's an unfortunate thing is you don't want to do that. Take the time, build your database, do it organically, meetups, real estate, clubs, collecting cards yourself. But over time, as you grow a database, you realize, hey, one at a time is great and we still see that. But if you can do it in bunches and be smart about your time so you're not traveling and going there. That's one of the things that we have really valued ourselves quite a bit here, is that we don't have to travel as much. We use the smart tools that are available out there. We don't have to travel a lot. We can stay relatively close to home for most of our marketing and still be able to grow a large database, grow a new, add new people to our database on a regular basis and continue to market and work it so that we constantly get people off. Tonight over the weekend I had five or six people opt into the note funding lane or they opted into buying notes or they signed up for something. Well, there's free or class things like that. And we weren't out of Austin. We were basically here enjoying itself. And so if you guys are interested in talking about that, feel free. Shoot me a text message. 512-585-3810 it's 512-58-5310 or should be an email@scottclosenotes.com and love to visit with you one on one. Talk about some of the different ways that you can market, get things rock and rollin for you. But other than that guys, go out, take some action today. Make something, let's make something happen and we'll see you all at the top. Sa.