Recipe for Success with Direct Mail

You can and should use direct mail as part of prospecting for new business in commercial real estate brokerage. 

It is a fact that letters create more engagement than emails, and letters are now seen as more professional in many respects.

If you are looking to structure a new business campaign in your brokerage business, then add direct mail pieces to the process, and roll out a campaign of letters for the entire year. 

Effective Mail Piece

Sending a series of letters to your prospects across the year is quite effective.  A letter to a targeted group of people every 6 to 8 weeks is a good approach.

So why do this?  Here are some good reasons:

• It is personal and direct, so that can help you build your brand as a property specialist.
• Simplicity in the letter is a way of engaging with people in a targeted way.
• You can build on the momentum of the correspondence quite easily using mail merge and creative word processing.
• Your targeted audience will remember your letters more easily than any email that you send.
• It doesn’t take much organization to send high-quality correspondence pieces to the right people and then do the follow-up.

There is a valuable marketing process here for you to consider and implement.  Ideally, you want to stand out as a ‘high-quality’ agent; the letters can help you do that.

How to Target Market with Your Direct Mail

Here are some rules for sending marketing letters in this way.  You can shape these strategies into your property types and location quite easily:

1. Select your target audience – there is no such thing as a ‘generic message’ that works for every market segment. The correspondence pieces should be specific to a theme and thereby a targeted audience of readers for a location.  The more specific that you can be, the easier it is to engage the attention of the reader.  So, who do you send these notes to?  Try property developers, investors, business owners, and tenants.  From those property ‘users’ you will find plenty of local activity and interest.   Ensure that each message sent is crafted accordingly.
2. Choose a clear message – the contents of the correspondence should be about the reader and not about you. Use local information and dot points to match your marketing approach to the reader.
3. Anchor the message locally – use a story about something local to build attention through your message. What would that be?  It could be a sale result, recent leasing, a project coming up, a redevelopment, or a change in a property precinct.  Think and talk locally in your marketing letter.
4. Keep it simple – use just three or four paragraphs to explain your approach, make a statement, and ask a question. That is the basic form of the letter.  Always keep the correspondence to a single A4 page of letterhead.
5. Invite action – if your message is clear and precise, then it is easy to invite the reader to call you or send an email. Ideally, you want to do one of two things from the correspondence; that is to have a conversation or create a meeting.  Keep your approaches simple and focus on just those two elements of engagement.  It takes the organization to achieve that, so do the target market research in your preparation for sending the correspondence and messages.

From these strategies of direct mail, you can build some real momentum in commercial real estate marketing. 

Keep the messages precise and encourage engagement using local information and stories that are interesting to the readers. 

That then is the recipe for success in sending direct mail pieces in commercial brokerage sales and leasing.  Start the process as a priority.