There are lots of ways to find motivated sellers: putting up bandit signs, placing ads in the classified section, driving for dollars, and more.
But one method that has gotten investors great results for some time has been arranging direct mail campaigns.
In this course, we will go over each phase of a direct mail campaign so that you can shorten your learning curve and start doing deals as soon as possible!
Well, hello everyone. This is Jack Bosch speaking with www.myOpenPath. And today, we’re going to talk about the fourth course, the fourth part of the course, of the Wholesaling Houses Course: How To Do Deals With No Money. Today’s subject is going to be…this module, this session’s subject is going to be processing and preparing your direct mail campaigns.
Okay, good. Again, my name is Jack Bosch. I am the CEO and founder, co-founder of My Open Path. I was also a contributor to My Open Path in a multitude of courses. All right, so the modules that we go, we’re going to through in today’s session are the following. Number one, we’re going to talk about outsourcing a little bit or basically just don’t be afraid to outsource. We’re going to show you a few resources about that, but don’t be afraid to outsource because at the end of the day you want to do more deals with less effort and building a team around you is very beneficial for that.
Number two. Then, we’re going to talk about the tools that you will going to need in order to actually do this for a process, your direct mails campaigns yourself or outsource them. Number three, we’re going to talk about the data and make sure you understand the data and how it looks and what’s inside of that data. Number four, we’re going to talk about applying the filters so that you’re filtering down your lists. And just as a side note, today, we are again talking about what our specialty is which is the text delinquent properties. But much of what we are talking about also applies to non-delinquent properties.
It really doesn’t matter what you are, what list you have. You’re still going to understand your data. You’re still going to apply filters. You’re still going to ideally want to outsource some of the stuff. You still want to have some tools and so on. And you still want to remove duplicates off the letters, off the records because you don’t want to send one guy that owns 10 properties. You don’t want to send them 10 letters because that looks really unprofessional as if you didn’t notice that he owns 10 different properties.
But instead, you want to send him one letter about his multiple properties. You want to do that, and then how to prepare your mailing list, how to organize and schedule your mailings, how to track your respondents, and also how to mail out your letters. Right, so those are the things we’re going to talk about today. Right. Now, each of those is an individual video that you can go to. Just watch one at a time inside the myOpenPath.com membership area. The first two modules are available for free if you are a free member and a demo member, and the rest of it is available. All nine modules are available if you are a subscriber to myOpenPath.com.
Okay, so let’s get started with the module number 1. Module number 1 is “Don’t be afraid to outsource.” So here’s what I mean. I will cover a lot of things in detail, including actually some technical stuff in this session. So after all, this is not a fluff kind of thing. This is really a step by step by step. A program that goes in a lot of details and exactly how you do the steps to get the…from the moment that you got the list from a list broker, from the county, from the foreclosure daily, from the different places from that you can get lists. From the county, yeah, from online, from websites, from the court records, wherever you get those lists from, you will still need to do a little massaging of these records. And we are going to go in detail on going about this including a little bit of technical stuff.
We’re going to simplify. I am going to simplify the process as much as possible but still keep that in mind that. If you and technology don’t work very together, then consider outsourcing this step, this what we’re talking about in this process here, in this session today to a professional data processor. Because at the end of the day, we don’t want you to be frustrated, we want you to be successful.
If what we are covering today sounds easy to you, great. You can do it yourself at least a few times. But either way, even if you whether your outsource it or not, go through this entire course and take good notes because you will need to understand the entire process. Because even if you outsource it, you got to tell the person that outsource it what they need to do and you will be only be able to do that if you understand it yourself. So, even if you don’t fully understand the technical steps, you will want to at least understand “the what needs to be done” so that the how can be taken. So that you can portray that to somebody who knows the “how” and then they can do it for you.
It’s very really easy by the way to find really good, quick, and professional person or services to forward your mailing list, to even do your mail merge, print your letters, and even mail these letters for you. I want to make sure I cover that. So what are some of the places that you can outsource this? The number one place that we use is called Upwork. So again, it used to be called a combination. They were several services that were all bought by one company. They were under some umbrella Upwork. It used to be Elance. So if you’ve heard of Elance which is like freelance with the free, well, they were all bought up by Upwork. If you heard of Odesk where you could find virtual assistants and place, pieces like that, guess what, they were all bought up by Upwork.
So Upwork is now the central hub for a lot of outsourcing work. There’s a lot of graphic designers, technology people, data geeks, computer science guys, coders hanging out there, but even writers all kinds of different professionals hanging out there, offering their services to you. All you need to do is you need to go on there, post your project and sell the property. And now, by the way, inside myOpenPath.com member’s area, we have an extra session about how to work with Elance, how to work with Upwork.
It’s about the Elance still because the Upwork piece happened fairly really recently. But the process in Upwork works the same as it used to work. So go check those things out and if you want to go work with Upwork, there’s a separate detailed course that works that Joe talks just about how to work with these different pages. All right. So, another one is fiverr.com. Fiverr.com is great. Fiverr.com contrary to the name, it no longer restricts the orders to $5. Used to be that everything on their website was just five bucks. And again there is thousands of service providers out there that will do stuff for five bucks for you.
Now they allow it also for it to cost more. You can hire somebody for 20 bucks, for 50 bucks, for 100 bucks, and so on. So they have expanded a little bit but kept the name off Fiverr. For example on Upwork, how it works. You write out the detail job description and post it there, which is free. Then you invite professionals to bid on your job, to speed up the process. Interested professionals will bid on your job leaving you and they will tell you what they charge for it. So you might get somebody to do it for five bucks, and you might get somebody else offer you the same exact job for $300.
That is unusual. That is such a discrepancy, but I’ve seen difference one from $10 to $100. Now, the $10 one is not necessarily worse than $100 one, and $100 one is not necessarily better than the $10 ones. So you want to really look at some of the feedback, and you want to filter the applications out for example by asking for sample work, or having them do a sample task, and then you select the winning bid. You can also review their feedback that they’ve gotten from other people.
So often it is the case that if somebody wants to break into the Upwork experience people’s experience, yeah, if they want to build up some job experience there and get some good feedback, they might sometimes offer their work for much less than other one and then so you might get excellent work done for somebody with little or no feedback but it’s always a little bit of a risk because if there have little or no feedback, it might be because they’re really doing a bad job, and they got their account shut down, and now they’re opening another account under their sister’s name, and they’re trying it that way.
But if truly find somebody who’s just getting started and has no feedback, they can do a great job for you for a little money. You might also find somebody like in Bangladesh who has 300 or 85-star reviews and also does it for 10 bucks, the job for you. It is just that because in Bangladesh, in India, in the Philippines, in different countries in South America, in Russia and so on, a $10 payment could be equivalent to a day’s worth of work. These countries in Africa and so on where the average income per person is $30 a month.
You give somebody a nice job for 50 bucks, they are going to be…if they live in that environment, in that area, they do 10 jobs like that, they make more than their college professor, and they make more than probably an executive in certain businesses. So again, for us, it doesn’t sound like a lot of money but depending on where they are in the world, it could be. You fund the project and give it to somebody, fund the project and then once they delivered the work, and you’re satisfied with the work, you release the funds to them.
Fiverr works, in a sense, very much similarly professionals, it’s just there. It works a little bit the other way around. Professionals post what they are good at. They say, “I will process a list for you. I will take any data, job, and so on.” You can contact these guys. So you search, for example for data processing, you get a bunch of people who are willing to do that. And then you reach what they do, and the one that bids bests with what you offer, you do. Now they cost five bucks or more, in this case, you start upfront.
Since you start upfront, since you want to pay out upfront, you want to basically start with a small project so that they don’t run away with your money. Don’t start with something for $1,000 and then you might never hear from that person again. But for five bucks, they have very little incentive to run away from you. They do their work great, and then you get something for 10 or 20 bucks done and so on. In this case you have a little less control to resolve if you do not like the work submitted, because you already paid them.
In Spanish there’s a saying that basically, “A paid musician doesn’t play a good song.” Not saying that this is the worst way to go; we have had some amazing things on Fiverr. Again, the Fiverr works with the feedback mechanism. Again, you want to pick the person that have already gotten a whole bunch of five-star reviews and five stars of feedback because they got something to lose. They have got a reputation to lose on that. Usually, they do excellent work.
We just had somebody do a whole bunch of business tools. They did 10 or 15 business tools for $300. We did that to Upwork, by the way. They went through five-six iterations, back and forth, and changing these things, and making it better. They look awesome now. I got it right in front of me. They’re multicolor professional business tools that you can work through. Worksheets and things that looks absolutely amazing.
All right. So what else do we have? Module 2, even when you get to the step of actually mailing out the letters based on the list, you can outsource that to a printing service. There is, for example, click2mail.com that you can use. We love these days. We used to Click2Mail a lot. Now we’re using letterprinting.net which it is a great service. They offer everything you want to do. They’re really an expensive rate, and the best part is they do not force you to spend like…to mail out the minimum amount of like thousands of letters. They have a very, very low minimum amount, of I believe only around 500 letters to send out.
Many other ones require you to send out 10,000 or so at one time which obviously is a big budget hit and it requires you to have systems setup and so on. These guys, 500 is a great number. They are one sort of like letterprinting.net. All right. So when you outsource the work, you become the project manager. These are the things you want to keep in mind. You are no longer the position player. You are no longer the person getting told what to do. You are the one telling others what to do, and that’s really cool. So as a result, you’ve got to understand the big picture and be able to explain it to others. That’s why it is important that you go through this entire session of nine modules here so that you’ll, at the end, have a really good understanding of what you need to do.
Outsourcing can actually be cheaper than doing the work yourself. In the case of a mailing, literally, a company like letterprinting.net can mail out letters. If you choose the bulk mail method, they can get it done for cheaper than you can even buy the paper. That’s very logical because they buy millions of rims of paper, millions of pages of paper from wholesalers every week. Therefore, if you pay $5 for a rim of 500 pages, that’s basically what? That comes down to 10 cents, comes down to what’s that? $5 divided by 500 is how much?
You can probably give me a number in that. It is like a penny or so per page. So they can get it down to a quarter for a penny per page. Now, if you have a penny and an envelope, so it starts adding up if you have these things. The envelop might cost some extra money later on because of the stamp. They get the cheapest prices for very good quality stuff. They can send out the letter for probably around 50 to 60 cents, an entire letter with postage. When you are already paying 47-48 cents per postage just for the letter, just for postage you won’t ever get that close.
Sometimes that helps so they could actually go cheaper and you can. But you’ve got to be a good communicator because when you work with somebody to analyze and focus on your data, and now to buy perhaps does your mail merge, the next guy, sends out letters for you. You’re dealing with different people. When you’re really dealing with different people, they do not necessarily always know what you want to do, and they make mistakes and so on. So you’ve got to be a good communicator that’s why it is again important that you go through this entire process. All right, so that concludes the first module. And so, let’s move on right away to the next video and the next module in this nine-part session on how to process and prepare your direct mail campaigns.
