When you send a marketing message you hope that it will arrive at its destination at a time when the recipient is open to hearing it.
That could mean a time when their postal mail box or their inbox isn’t so full that they toss everything possible without looking.
That could also mean a time when they actually want to take the time to read what you sent. You can’t predict that, but it’s one reason that email marketers tend to avoid first thing Monday morning or late on Friday afternoon.
If you’re prospecting to a niche and you’ve chosen your list well, your message should arrive when they’ve already been thinking about what you have to offer.
But even with a well-sorted list, you have no way to predict that that they won’t be distracted by other things at that moment.
On the day your letter arrives, they might be:
- Swamped with work, with no time to read your message
- Swamped with email messages, so yours gets deleted unread
- Ill – or awaiting medical test results that have them worried
- Caring for a sick child
- In the middle of a personal crisis of some other kind
- In the middle of planning some kind of event
- Entertaining house guests
- Packing for a trip
- Out of town
- Depressed and discouraged about the chance of selling
- Inundated with similar letters (But that’s unlikely. Most agents don’t really prospect.)
In other words, they might be interested, but today is not the day. So your message goes unread.
That’s why sending multiple messages to the same list is the recommended method of reaching new clients.
Statistics show that:
- 2% of responses come from the first contact with a prospect.
- 3% of responses come from the second contact with a prospect.
- 5% of responses come from the third contact with a prospect.
- 10% of responses come from the fourth contact with a prospect.
- 80% of responses come from the fifth to twelfth contact with a prospect
That’s why most of my prospecting letter sets contain anywhere from 5 to 10 letters, designed to be sent over weeks or even months.
Remember that it will always be more profitable to send 10 letters to a list of 100 than to send one letter to a list of 1,000.
Note the word “contact” in the above list.
A contact could be a letter, an email, a phone call, a direct message on social media, or an in-person visit. Mix things up, and remember that unless you go overboard, the more contacts the better.
What is overboard? Just take a look at your own junk folder. I hadn’t emptied mine for a 3 or 4 days, so today it had as many as a dozen emails from several different marketers. Many have no reason to contact me other than that they probably purchased a list and my name was on it – and how I got in some of the list categories is beyond me.
I sort the junk mail by sender and do scroll through before deleting, because every once in a while an email from a client lands there.
Your messages also need to have substance.
Your very first sentence needs to show that your message is about the reader – not about you. Then it needs to give promise of something good to come.
Those old “Here I am, I’m wonderful, hire me” messages just don’t cut it any more. (Actually, I’m not sure they ever did, but real estate agents have certainly spent tons of money on them.)
The second part of this equation: familiarity
When you send the first letter, the recipients don’t know you. They have no reason to be interested in you or what you have to share with them. And, if they go by past experience, they assume that they’ll never hear from you again.
By the time they’ve seen 2 or 3 messages from you – even if they don’t take time to really read them, they’ll start to feel like they know you. They’ll also realize that you’re for real – not just some agent who tried trolling through their neighborhood. They might even start to feel like they can trust you.
If you’re farming your own community and if you include your photo on your letters, something fun is apt to happen. When you shop at the local stores, people will start to recognize you and they may approach you.
I was a Realtor in a small town, and I did do a lot to promote myself and my brokerage. As a result, people would come up to me in the grocery store and say “You’re Marte!” I already knew that, but they’d tell me anyway.
Consistency matters in marketing…
So choose your marketing activities and stick with them! Hopping from one thing to another is a waste of time and money.
