How Much Direct Mail Offering is too much? (CFFL 511)
Transcript:
Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWitt.
Jill DeWitt: Hi.
Jack Butala: Welcome to the show. In this episode Jill and I talk about how much direct mail is too much. Can you send too much mail? I don't think so. let'S take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvesters.com online community first. It's free.
Jill DeWitt: Marrid asks, "Hi all. I'm new to the group and I'm going through the steps to get out my first mailer. I plan on scheduling a call with Jack beforehand to get it right, but I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with pricing a mailer too low and what they did to rectify it."
Jack Butala: I have.
Jill DeWitt: Yeah right. We all have.
Jack Butala: Marrid is a cool name, isn't it?
Jill DeWitt: It is a cool name. Thank you. Suppose I send out a 3,000 piece mailer to a more expensive area and get zero deals because I only offered $300 an acre. Turns out I should've offered three to four times as much. Would you immediately resend the same mailer with a higher offer with or without some explanation as to why you low balled it the first time?
Jack Butala: Yes.
Jill DeWitt: Or send a right price mailer to different acreage range in the same county?
Jack Butala: Yes to that too.
Jill DeWitt: Or would you wait six to 12 months and repeat at the higher offer price?
Jack Butala: No.
Jill DeWitt: Or would you just drop the whole thing, change your name to lookingformethlablandinyourniceneighborhood.com This is so good.
Jack Butala: Who the heck is this person? This is hilarious.
Jill DeWitt: Knowing that you're forever branded yourself as a crooked kingpin of land flipping. Thanks for your thoughts.
Jack Butala: First of all ...
Jill DeWitt: I want to see if that name's available, number one. Lookingformethlablandinyourniceneighborhood.com. I love that.
Jack Butala: Marrid, whoever you are, I can tell ...
Jill DeWitt: Awesome.
Jack Butala: You're going to be really good at this.
Jill DeWitt: Totally.
Jack Butala: You have a sense of humor about it, which is important.
Jill DeWitt: Exactly.
Jack Butala: To honestly and sincerely answer your question, sometimes these things happen. Sometimes you send a mailer out and it wasn't priced right. I talk to people every week who say some version of this and then they follow it up by, "Turns out I bought a piece of property anyway."
Jill DeWitt: Exactly. I did it all wrong. What'd you do? I bought five.
Jack Butala: I sent out, this is a true story, I sent out an incorrect mailer in a northern county of Arizona a lot of years ago. It went to really high priced property for next to nothing. I ended up buying a piece of property across from the county building that we sold for $240,000.
Jill DeWitt: I know, I remember, exactly.
Jack Butala: I bought it for like 10 grand. I don't remember the exact numbers. It's actually very conceivable that you're going to misprice a mailer and then potentially get stumped. I personally have never been stumped, and I don't think ... I talk to people once in a while who say they're stumped but then they let me know a week later that, oh wait,