Here’s the big question everyone asks about … is it best do to regular postcard mailings or use EDDM (the post office’s “Every Door Direct Mail” program)? The answer may surprise you. There are pros and cons with each, and in this short video I walk you through when to use one versus the other. Watch it now.

Real estate postcards – which is best: EDDM or do it yourself?

So pricing postcards, EDDM and everything else. Let’s talk about that real quick. Obviously, we’re going to now be doing geographic farming using postcards to mail them. Which is the best real estate marketing strategy? How do you do it? It depends on what you’re trying to do.

EDDM, Every Door Direct Mail, is a function by the post office and is probably the least expensive way to get a lot of real estate mailers out, especially on an ongoing basis. It takes a little bit more time an effort. Basically, you’ve got to print the postcards and they come to you. Then you have to take your realtor postcards down to the post office and to and fill out the routes and stuff like that. It is not hard. That’s going to be the most cost effective way to do this type of marketing.

If you want something done quickly, like maybe you just sold a house and you want it to get out just sold postcards immediately, EDDM isn’t going to be quite the best option. Go online and type in “mail real estate postcards to your own list” or anything like that. You’ll find there are all kinds of companies where you can create your own realtor postcards. You can upload them and then they’ll mail your just sold postcards or just listed postcards out immediately for you.

Here are the advantages and disadvantages on these real estate marketing products. I know what we do with our realtor clients is that we don’t use EDDM because everything we do is really specific. Our agent postcards kind of change. In our marketing, we do what we call digital printing. Because a lot of what we do with our postcards is tied into tracking. When we send out postcards and we want sellers to respond, we’re actually tracking the response based on the unique URL. Now, most people watching this interview aren’t going to be doing that, not on their own anyway. So, you don’t have to worry about that.

This type of real estate marketing really boils down to convenience and turn around. Here is the way I would probably phrase it. As a real estate agent, you have only so much time in your day and you have to use it well. Do you want to take your time to go get postcards printed at this location and them shipped to you? You take them from your location to the post office and do all the work so they go out EDDM so you save a little bit of money? It depends on how much money you’re spending on your real estate marketing as to whether or not it’s really worth it or if you have an assistant.

Sometimes what I find that it’s better to spend more money and ensure your marketing gets done than to try to do it on a budget and it falls through the cracks. The more things that you personally have to do to get that job done, the less likely it’s going to get done because everything else crowds out of it.

Think about this. In EDDM, all you have to do is design your realtor postcards or use templates, upload them to a website where they print the postcards for you, then upload the mailing list where they do the postcards and mail for you. You spend a little bit more time, but you can do that at twelve o’clock at night and just get it done and it’s over with.

That’s probably the difference between EDDM and mailing postcards the regular way. If I had a choice and I could consistently execute on it, I’d do EDDM postcards because it’s a great cost savings. It’s all about how much money do you spend in your real estate marketing and how much return do you get. If I can get that much return off of half the cost, then I’ve just made that much more money.

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