Listen via YouTube video if desired

Learn more about our services!

Transcription (was completed by automated process.  Please ignore any speech-to-text errors)

Well, hey there, this is Beatty Carmichael with Get Sellers Calling You podcast, and I’m going to do a little bit different podcast today for those of you who are listening. By the way, if you are listening, this is actually going to be a video podcast, going to walk you through some of the things I’ve kept really close to the vest all these years, some of the things that have been the secrets behind a lot of our clients success, and that is the split marketing test that we did. So just real quick background we did as we started to move into the real estate world about eight years ago, we realized that every market operates a little bit differently and the people respond differently. So we did a series of 21 split marketing tests and then we tested another 37 message variations. In addition to that, over about two million postcards mailed to identify what really drives results within the consumer market as specifically as relates to real estate and getting sellers. And so I’m going to walk you through what we actually tested.

[00:01:22.22] And we show you the test, the A and the B and what type of results they produce is going to blow your mind. OK, and if you are a marketer in any sense of the word, then this is going to help you really understand some things that you can do within your own marketing that will increase your results. And I’m not talking about increasing results as much as 20 or 30 percent. I’m talking about doubling and tripling and quadrupling results once you understand it. And I have to tell you a short story. So one of my clients and good friend is a real estate agent named Stewart Sutton, and he used to mail years ago lots and lots of postcards and just got mediocre results. And then he started to understand what marketing was. He started to understand what I want to show you some things on this call, and that is how to write marketing copy. That creates a lot of excitement. And what was really interesting is on his very next mailing, he changed the mailing to incorporate marketing principles and he said he was overwhelmed with responses. I think it was like within three or four weeks he had to hire an assistant and then he did another mailing and another three or four or five weeks after that, he had to hire another assistant and it literally shot his business through the roof. The same activity now producing dramatically different results.

[00:02:40.52] And that’s what I want to show you on this call today. So with no further ado, I’m going to pull up my screen. And for those of you who are listening by audio, I’m going to explain what we’re looking at on the screen so that if you can actually take a moment to come and watch the video, you can at least get as much out of this as possible. So I’m going to really share from the heart of what we’ve learned, and I hope you enjoy this. And it’s going to be really fascinating for those of you who are looking to get more sellers. So the if you’re not seeing the screen, the title is the top post card secrets that get sellers calling you. Hence the name of our podcast, Get Sellers calling you. So real quickly, I do want to promote this. So you’re listening to our podcast. But if you have not subscribe to it, let me encourage you to subscribe. You can either subscribe by YouTube or you can subscribe on Apple podcast or Stitcher or whatever medium you use to listen podcasts. That way you’ll get all of our podcasts as we bring them out. The second thing is we actually sell services. Most of you guys know that at Agent Dominator Dotcom, and I encourage you to check us out there. So let me share a little quick background and backstory.

[00:03:53.39] So I was in business for myself doing my own marketing driving results. And then in 1997, for some younger folks, I guess over two decades ago, I started a business to supply those marketing services directly into selling for other clients. And everything we’ve done has been professional to consumer marketing. For the first 15 years, we served over 10000 agents in 15 different industries, and it was not uncommon for me to get a phone call that says Beatty. We just quadrupled our sales results in the last four months. This is amazing. And it’s all about applying good best practices and marketing. Then for the last eight years, we focused exclusively and the real estate agent world and primarily for listings and sellers. OK, so the question that I want to pose real quickly is, does postcard marketing really work? Because we see this a lot of times where people say, oh, yeah, that’s old school, OK? And I want to show you a couple of things and just kind of walk you through just a few stories. So does postcard marketing really work? This is a client, some clients of ours out in California. They said by our second mailing we had listed three homes and have six more listings coming on the market. So that’s nine listings out of two mailings. OK, at the end of the first year, they earn just shy of one hundred thousand dollars.

[00:05:09.53] And after 18 months doing this, they were in a fifteen hundred home form. After 18 months, they were not only the number one selling agent, but they outsold the number two agent by by over seven times. And actually, in those 18 months, they went from almost no market share to controlling 22 percent of the market, another agent over in Georgia. He said that since they implemented what we are doing two or three months ago, we have already reached three million dollars in sales. And in three months, we have another three to five million dollars of inventory coming in. All post card marketing. Another client of ours over in Texas was using targeting his personal database of past clients sphere of influence, using a well-known brand name in the industry. If I were to mention it, you would instantly recognize it. And he said he was doing that for over a year, trying to know, driving on referrals and with no noticeable results. And he switched to what we do. And he said in seven months I’ve already received 18 new clients. So just dramatic turnaround. One of the reasons this is working is real interesting. So you in marketing, you have what we call a shelf life. How long does someone keep your marketing piece? In other words, when you make an impression, how long does that impression last? And in digital ads, it’s typically three to five seconds, right? If it’s email marketing, you’re actually emailing them something.

[00:06:31.93] You’re looking at probably 30 to 45 seconds or maybe a little bit longer. They actually open your email and read it all the way through and actually ponder on it. But what’s interesting is with postcard marketing, anything through the mail, because it’s tangible, you’ve got about a 17 day shelf life. OK, and what will happen is people who are thinking about selling will hold on to your post card. And and because they intend to probably call you, especially if that postcard has content that is of interest to them and how to get more money. So they actually hold on to it. So that marketing piece shelf life becomes really huge. And I want to talk about one last thing before I get into the split testing and showing you what we actually did. So there’s another thing called persuasion effectiveness. And there’s a name out there named Gary Halbert. He was a marketing genius. And within all the marketing realms, especially direct response marketing, he is kind of like the guru of it. And some of his students, you might recognize some of these names, Dan Kennedy or Dean Jackson or Craig Proctor. You know, the I’ll sell your house or I’ll buy it guy or Beatty Carmichael. We all kind of studied under Gary Helbert and some of the greats there. And Gary did a test to understand what’s the effectiveness of a digital marketing versus a postal marketing.

[00:07:48.64] So what he did is he took his customer database and he created an offer to sell some of his products to that. And he did a pure split, a Beatty. So he took half the list and he emailed that offer and he took the other half and he snail mail the same offer. So the only difference was how they received the offer, the snail mail and the post office, you know, in the Postal Service produced 20 times more sales, 20 times. And a lot of this has to do with the shelf life. A lot of it has to do with one’s ability to focus only on that one piece rather than having everything else on their computer screen that’s grabbing their attention. For whatever reason. The mailbox is the new inbox of today. OK, and so that’s why postcard marketing is really so effective, is it’s tangible, it’s tactile. And all the studies show that it consistently drives higher responses per impression. OK, so what’s going on with this is this thing called positioning and positioning is how effective you are getting your name at the top of that prospect’s mind. Because what really happens is your prospect only remembers two or maybe three brand names. If I were to do a little test with you right now, and I’m going to ask you to think about toothpaste brands and just take a little pen and paper if you’re driving, just make a mental note.

[00:09:05.35] I want you to list all the brands that you can list right now. OK, stop. Most people will get to brands maybe three out of a market, a probably hundreds and hundreds of brands. OK, and what this shows you is that the average consumer only remembers two brands. This is the same thing that happens in real estate. There’s probably 100 agents that sell in my little real estate community where I live. But if you were to ask me who are the agents, I’ll probably think of to right. Because that’s all my brain thinks of. And so if I’m going to be a seller and I’m thinking about who do I choose to sell my house, if you’re not one of those two or maybe three agents that they think of, you’re not going to get the listing. That’s the that’s the importance of positioning. And so the goal in marketing is how do you get your name position at the top of their mind and stay there? And once you do that, it’s worth a million dollars or more. I can promise you that. OK, so the first step is you have to understand how how how homeowners respond. So this is some stuff when you say in marketing, I’ve understood how people respond and consumers respond and this is what I’ve been doing for years.

[00:10:15.05] But when you start to focus specifically in one industry, what like what we did in 2012, 2013. So, OK, we’re going to focus only and generating listings for real estate agents. Then the first step you have to do is really understand how homeowners respond. OK, and so this is where we started going through a bunch of split marketing tests and tracking everything and really getting a foundation of what drives the responses. So the first thing we did on the split marketing test is we started to look at what’s called a positive offer in a negative offer. For those of you who are listening and not watching, I’ve got two postcards out, the actual postcards that we tested. OK, and so let me walk you through what a positive offer is and what a negative offer is. So the positive offer is when you state your offer in a way that is positive. OK, in this case, the headline we use how to get up to 18 percent more for your home if you’re planning to sell it soon. OK, and then we took the same concept and we flipped it around into a negative offer in the negative offer is the seven most shocking and expensive mistakes homeowners make when selling their home and what you can do to avoid them. What we want to understand is which response, which offer does a homeowner respond more to? OK, because you see this yourself, I’m sure if you get any sort of real estate marketing from other real estate agents, you’ll see some things in the top ten things not to do, or you’ll lose a lot of money or you’ll save some, you know, the top 10 things to do to make you more money.

[00:11:42.50] The question is, does one create a higher response rate than the other? And what do you think? OK, if this was you? Which one are you going to respond to? So here’s what the study said, not the survey, but the actual statistical analysis. That positive offer outperforms a negative offer by 800 percent. That’s eight times increase. So if you’re doing marketing and you want to drive the highest response rate, you want to tilt it in the positive and stay away from the negative. OK, that’s what that split marketing test showed. Then the next thing we studied was this thing called the ugly card versus a pretty card. OK, now for you audio listeners, the ugly card is just an ugly yellow card with black print. Think of the I don’t want to call this the Craig Proctor approach, but I think he in the real estate world, he’s kind of pioneered a lot of the ugly card. This was actually pioneered earlier with Gary Helbert. We started using the ugly card approach two decades ago with a tremendous result. A lot of times you’ll see the little post those signs in the yard at an intersection saying we buy ugly houses or sorry, that Petralia copyrighted brand name.

[00:12:48.29] But, you know, we buy we pay cash for four houses. Those things are done for a reason because ugly yellow with black print grabs attention and it gets people to read. And so that’s how we actually started. And then our our clients would say, we want something prettier because we’re professional. So we said, well, let’s test it. OK, so we developed a we took our ugly yellow card and then we also took what we call our pretty card, a more graphically pleasing design. And we tested it and surveyed statistical analysis says that the pretty card outperforms the ugly card by two hundred and fifty percent. So we increased responses for our clients by two and a half times by adding a pretty element. Now, I want to pause for a moment and talk about so this is called design. OK, so when you move into the design world and you have a design, increasing the impact of that design doesn’t necessarily increase results. So what we what we showed here is that by having a pretty design, a professional design, it outperformed the ugly. But at some point you lose, you get to diminishing returns. In fact, you may even lose returns if you overdesign something. So I don’t want you to get caught up in I’ve got to get a graphic designer and make this thing look like a million bucks.

[00:14:03.08] OK, if you’re selling a two hundred thousand dollar home making it look like a million bucks, you’ll probably lose responses. But if you’re selling a 10 million dollar home, making it look like a million bucks, you’re probably on the right track. So there is an element to overdo that. The next thing we did is then we started to work on lots of pretty graphically pleasing designs and we started to notice a problem that some cards would outperform other cards by a significant factor. So we did another split test and this is what we call regular font versus reverse font. And most of you either watching or listening to this podcast you will have received and probably do yourself a lot of what we call regular font, which is a dark print on a light colored background. And you’ll probably also do a reverse font, which is a white print on a dark colored background. So it’s you just kind of reverse it. The font is white and and it sits on top of some sort of a background. And I wish we could open up the call and actually get some responses from you guys, because this is one of the most amazing tests that most people are floored by the results, which produces more results, if any regular font versus reverse font. And the study says regular font outperforms reverse pompon.

[00:15:20.10] Eight hundred and fifty percent. This is by far the single highest difference in a split marketing test that we’ve ever done. OK, and so here’s what this is saying. If you want your prospect to actually read your copy, internalize it and do something with it, like position you in their mind a little bit higher, stay away from reverse five because reverse phone is hard to read. That’s really what’s going on. And now this may be changing a little bit with millennials who like to read on their phone with a dark background and everything in white, but especially for the what I’ll call the late 30s and definitely into the 40s and above. We all were raised with reading things on a white piece of paper with dark font that’s regular font. And so when you try to get us to reverse it, to reverse font, we just can’t read it. We can’t our brain doesn’t doesn’t grasp it because it’s so foreign to everything we’ve done all of our lives. And so what you’ll find is all of this marketing falls into a simple category. How are people wired to receive information and respond to it? And what this shows is they’re wired to receive information in regular font versus reverse font. Then we did another test. OK, so people will tell tell me, you know, experts obviously in marketing being a little bit facetious, they’ll tell me, well, that’s too much.

[00:16:43.50] Copy that headlines too long. People won’t read that. Well, I’ve been there and done that and I know the answers. So we did decide, though, to do some headline testing. So we did what a short headline versus a long headline. Now, it’s important that you understand that the short headline is not simply a short headline, it is a short headline with a very well proven headline that grabs the attention of sellers. Say one of the things in marketing. I’ll digress. But just kind of give you there’s a formula in marketing and it’s interrupt, engage, educate and offer. And that’s what you see on all these marketing pieces that I’m showing you. They interrupt as a headline in the headline, doesn’t interrupt your right prospect. Then everything else of your marketing is just lost. OK, so the headline is the most important part, in fact, is probably in direct response. The headline is 80 to 85 percent of all your results. If you lost them on the headline, everything else is lost. And so we worked really hard in the early stages of finding those headlines that identified our ideal prospect, which is Sulin thinking about selling their home. And so the short headline, Are You Interested In Selling Your Home? Is a dead on headline that grabs the attention of the prospects we want to talk to. But then we said, can we improve on that? And so then we did.

[00:17:56.31] This second headline is no longer headline and it reads like this. If you’re thinking about selling your home, I may get it sold immediately because of the buyers I work with. And so what we did with a longer headline is we articulated the value more completely. OK, and then the body copy is essentially the same. We had to change the wording in the layout just a little bit to match the headline, but the content is essentially the same. So which wins short headline or long headline and long headline won the lowest percentage increases in our split marketing test. The long headline outperforms the short headline by one hundred and twenty five percent. This is not an apples to apples with your short headline versus our long headline. This is an apples to apples with a really good well performing headline. And can you make it better? OK, and so what this shows you is if you’ve got a good headline already and you can articulate the value more completely within the headline, even though it makes the headline longer, you’ll actually incrementally increase your results. And I’ve seen some studies were just changing the headline outperformed by over twenty times by doing a better job at articulating your actual unique selling proposition. And then there is another test we did. This test is actually an accidental test that, you know, you just kind of happened upon, it was technically a split test because we targeted the western part of the United States and we targeted the south and the eastern part of the United States and what we started to see on this test.

[00:19:25.23] Really baffled us, and it was concerning because it showed that the south in the eastern part of the United States outperformed all else being equal the western part of the United States by 800 percent, plus or minus net, plus or minus was it was all over the board. But generally speaking, almost eight times the results dealing in the south and the eastern part of the U.S. than the western part. Now, that doesn’t mean if you’re in the western part of the U.S., you’re sunk. All that means is at this time, we did not understand what was going on and it showed us that there something at play. And and so what we did is we did a lot of studies, a lot of tests, got a marketing research group to actually do a statistical analysis, do some interviews, and we pinpointed it exactly. And once we figured it out, then we found that East and West got roughly identical results. So let me show you one last thing. In case this holds interest, you don’t know. A lot of people say I don’t want to go through childbirth. I just want the baby, OK? And so if you just want a baby, you want someone else to do all the work for you, then let me encourage you to visit our site at Agent Dominated.

[00:20:33.06] But we have several things. Let me show you a couple of really unique things. One of the things is circle marketing. This is now we’ve all been told when you make a sell, send a postcard out and you’ll pick up another listing typically. And most of you guys probably try that and it didn’t really work. OK, the reason I know it doesn’t work is their homes are being sold all around my house and I almost never get a postcard. If it was consistent, people would be doing it all the time. It’s not consistent for a simple reason. They don’t understand how to do it right. So what we did was circle marketing. We we started to implement all these things that we’ve done for our clients for years. It’s totally automated, which means you make a sale, you simply email us. Here’s a photo. Here’s the address. Send out one hundred postcards to the closest hundred homes, OK? And we’ll actually do it all for you and send it out. So it’s a done for you and we actually guarantee you listings or one hundred percent of your money back. So you can see a little video on that on a site if you want turbo go farming. This is where you can take a geographic farm and start to dominate it.

[00:21:41.69] We actually guarantee your listings and that as well. Or your money back is using everything I’ve shown you here, plus a little bit more there. Some other technologies that we use that keep you constantly top of mind. That’s not just postcards. We we actually do use digital marketing in conjunction with everything, but we use it for in a different way than most people. Turbow referrals. This is where we help you focus on your personal contacts. This is actually the number one highest producing list you can ever go to your past clients in your sphere of influence. And if you stay close to them, you will drive business. But most people don’t. Let me give you statistically, these are not just pulling out numbers statistically based on large group studies that have been done when marketed to properly. That personal database of yours should be producing seventeen sales every year for every 100 people on your list. That’s what’s going on. So if you know a hundred people, a mixture of past clients and sphere of influence and you look at how many sales you got from that list and you got three sales last year from it. You’re losing 14 sales a year, statistically. OK, that’s the magnitude of the increase that you can get simply by doing it right and doing it right is what we do with turbo referrals.

[00:23:05.75] This is where we bring another piece of new technology that we’ve created. I haven’t shown you. It’s not a postcard. That’s why I’m not showing you on this thing. But by implementing all of this, we actually start to guarantee you those numbers or obviously your money back. And then on the commercial dominator, this is if you are in the commercial sector with investment property, multifamily, small retail, small, little shopping centers, those type of properties that are typically owned by an individual, not by some big corporation. Those individuals make buying decisions as a home consumer, a homeowner consumer. And so we have a process there and also we guarantee those results. So let me encourage you. I’m going to in fact, I want to share there was a couple of questions people asked on this. And I want to pull those up real quick because I thought this was real insightful and will also help because these may be some of the same type of questions that might be going on out there. Again, let me just remind you to subscribe to our podcast to get more of this type of stuff, if you like this. So I was doing a call like this recently, and these are some the questions and I thought they were just really good questions. Number one is what type of budget do you need to put towards this? The simple answer is the budget that you put towards this is the budget that you can easily and comfortably afford.

[00:24:29.46] OK, there is no reason to go out and and, you know, mortgage your home to market with this type of stuff. You know, there are people with a budget of two hundred a month. We got clients with budgets of two and three thousand dollars a month. You know, it is what it is, but it’s all proportional. That’s the main thing. The most important thing is to do something, have a budget, structure it, you know, make it a part of your business plan and then execute on it. So if you’re going to do anything, especially with postcard marketing, because it is more expensive than other marketing. But keep in mind the results like what Gary Helbert found 20 times, the number of sales, then doing something by email. OK, then the results are there. The thing you want to do is take a budget. I typically tell people budget, something that you can comfortably handle for six months without making a sale, without making a transaction from that, because it may take that long to get a transaction out of it. OK, if you do it right, you should get a lot shorter. The other thing, we have a lot of clients that have generated six figure incomes from their very first year and doing postcard marketing like my friend Stuart. A lot of those stories have told you in the past with some others.

[00:25:48.20] And there’s one thing that they all have in common, and that is they targeted enough homes, typically about the nine hundred to a thousand homes in like geographic farming is if you’re just getting started, that’s kind of what it takes to get a six figure income your first year. So that takes a little bit larger budget. OK, so if you have the budget to do something like that, then basically what this means is this. The more homes you target, the faster you’re going to get a sale that’s going to fund for every fund, everything else. So sometimes the key is maybe to get it cash flowing quicker than not. And so you go with go after more homes. The, by the way, six figure income. We have other people generating six figures on much smaller lists, especially if their personal database lists, then someone else has. How frequently should you be mailing these postcards? And that really depends on kind of what you’re doing. OK, so let’s say it’s your personal contacts, your past clients, your sphere of influence, and you’ve been in touch with them, not through automatic email. OK, most people rely on that because it’s cheap and it’s easy, but it’s maybe not all that effective. But if you’ve been actively engaging with your past clients and and sphere of influence, you’re meeting with them. You’re calling them periodically throughout the year, then maybe one mailing a month is all it takes.

[00:27:12.65] If you really haven’t worked your past clients and sphere of influence, I’d probably do a mailing every three weeks. OK, now, if you’re doing geographic farming and you’re just opening up a farm, you got the budget. I highly recommend for probably the first three or four, maybe even five months due to mailings a month every two weeks so that you can kind of saturate your brand, saturate in their mind who you are, start to educate them. That gets your your your brand positioning quicker because you have to fight through a lot of garbage of they’ve never seen you before. But once you get it started, then you can pull back to about every three weeks if it’s if you’ve been. While you can pull back to every four weeks, OK, um, let’s say Circle Marketing Jessell, that’s a one time Mei-Ling, so that’s easy. Another question was asked is, what if you don’t have many sales? OK, and the root of that question is, if I’m going to start marketing to my list or a geo farm or something like that, I just don’t have enough sales. Maybe I do five sales a year. What do I do? Well, you refurbish those sales. You you reposition them essentially so you can take a sale that you made four months ago and send it back out again if you need to.

[00:28:34.80] OK, you can take a cell from last year because all these aren’t just sold. If you’re if you’re struggling on sales, these are sold as opposed to just sold. OK, and and what’s great with that is you don’t have to show the front of the house. Maybe someone realizes that that house. So they remember it because it’s in their neighborhood a year ago. But you can show an internal photo like the den or the master bedroom or the kitchen. And now they have no reference point to point it to. And you can just put the street name you like, like West West Elm Street as opposed to the actual street number. OK, so now that kind of it, it’s full disclosure, but they don’t really connect the dots. And this is a home that sold six months ago or eight months ago. And because of that, you can then get very consistent because the consistency in your mailing is real important. You can get very consistent in and dropping another postcard in the mail every few weeks or even just once a month. And it’s always another sell. Let’s say a couple other questions. Uh, what if you’re a new agent or a buyer’s agent? OK, well, same thing. These don’t have to be seller site sales. If you’re a buyer’s agent, you can still use it. My personal recommendation. This has not tested. This is just kind of gut feel from doing years of marketing.

[00:30:02.65] My personal recommendation is don’t be saying I was the buyer’s agent on this home, because if I’m wanting to sell my home, I’m looking for someone who’s good at selling a home and not helping out buyer purchase a home. It may not be a big distinguishing factor, but keep in mind the mindset of the seller. Who do I choose to sell my home? There are going to be more likely to choose someone that they’re perceiving as listing and selling homes so you can use, buy or sell simply by saying another one sold only 14 days on the market, which is all true. OK, just leave the buyer representation side out. If you’re comfortable doing. If you’re not comfortable, then put it by all means. Put it there. You know, another one sold, sold quickly. My aggressive marketing sold this home after only three days on the market. Because you’re aggressive, marketing is getting your buyer there fast. OK, so you can do things like that and make it really easy. Let’s say other things. If like you’re going to do go farming, you don’t have many cells, that’s one way to start starting to do it. There are also some great content cards that we can help you create, but we’ve actually created that or kind of generic in nature, really geared for that beginner agent to kind of get their foothold and doing stuff.

[00:31:22.21] So you can do that also. But anyway, bottom line is, don’t be afraid of doing any of this simply because you don’t think you have enough sales or you don’t have enough good sales. The key is get started where you are and then as things improve, you can always improve the marketing. So anyway, I hope this helps. If you have questions, just go to our website. Agent Dominator Dotcom. You’ll see a form you can fill out. We can reach out to you if you love this type of marketing again, please subscribe. Get Sellers calling you. And we’ve got a great website to get sellers calling you dotcom. Lot of free content on almost anything you ever want to know about just sold marketing, personal database marketing, geographic marketing and just marketing truisms as a whole. So thanks for allowing me to share this and I hope you have a very blessed day. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, be sure to subscribe to it so you never miss another episode. Also, if you want an easy way to grow your business, check out Agent Dominator. We’ve guaranteed listings and sales from past clients and sphere of influence, geographic farming and commercial investment properties. If you don’t get the sales, we promise we’ll give your money back, learn more on our website and get sellers calling you dot com and select Agent Dominator from the menu. Thanks for listening to the sellers calling you podcast and have a great day.

P085