Building Target Audience for Direct Mail Marketing: A Real Estate Agent’s Tool Kit
Published on June 23, 2023by Botster
Despite being one of the oldest marketing strategies around, direct mail marketing remains one of the most successful. However, you will agree with me that finding quality leads for your real estate direct mail marketing campaigns can be challenging. But if you have a few minutes, I will show you a step-by-step guide on:
- How to find companies for the best real estate direct mail campaigns
- How to get the correct addresses for those companies; and
- How to get ZIP codes for each address to ensure the delivery of your mail
As a result, you’ll get a full list of companies including their names, coordinates, physical addresses and ZIP codes, ready for being printed out and sent to your potential clients!
Direct mail marketing for real estate agents
Direct mailing, also known as direct mail marketing, is a form of advertising or marketing strategy that involves sending physical promotional materials directly to potential customers or a target audience through the mail.
These physical promotional materials typically include items such as brochures, catalogs, postcards, letters, or samples.
So, how useful is direct mail for real estate agents?
Direct mail real estate advertising can help estate agents reach a large number of targeted potential clients, generate high-quality leads, and find collaboration opportunities with other agents.
- A typical situation where direct mail marketing for real estate works is if you're trying to sell a house in a specific neighborhood. You can send out direct mail postcards to homes in that neighborhood, highlighting the features of the house and inviting people to contact you for more information. This can help to generate interest in the house and lead to more showings and ultimately a sale.
- Another situation where you can try direct mail for real estate marketing is if you're trying to expand your client base by attracting new clients. You can send out direct mails to homes in the neighborhoods you're interested in, introducing yourself and your services so as to build awareness and generate leads.
So if you're looking to learn how to do direct mail marketing for real estate, this guide will cover the most crucial thing: generating quality leads for maximum success.
The best part is that it will only take some minutes as we'll be using a step-by-step combination of 3 bots to help automate the whole process.
By the time you make it to the end of this guide, you'd have had hundreds of prospects you can send your real estate direct mailing!
Let's get started.
Step 1 - Finding companies for your real estate direct mail campaign
The first bot I'll be introducing to you is called Google Maps by Radius Finder. This bot can perform a Google Maps search by radius, based on a keyword you provide. This means that it will gather results for the keywords you provide, only within the radius you specified.
Its ability to not go beyond the radius you set ensures that you don't have anyone beyond your target area tainting the direct mail lists for real estate you’ve carefully curated.
If you want to break into the real estate market in Oregon, for instance, you probably don't want a New York address on that mailing list.
So to get targeted prospects for your direct mail real estate marketing list, you'll need the Google Maps by Radius Finder.
To gain access to this bot, you first need to create a free account on Botster. It only takes a minute, and your card details are not required:
Once you've fully registered, search for Google Maps by Radius Finder using the search form and open it.
- Click on the "Start bot" button on the right-hand side of this page to open the spider's form:
- Name your job.
This serves as the project name.
- Enter your keywords.
⚠️ Each query must go on a new line:
- Set the radius (in meters).
The Google Maps by Radius Finder will look for matches within this distance from the starting point:
- Set a location.
This is the starting point. It could be a landmark, business, or street (e.g. The National WWII Museum). Select a location and press 'Enter':
- Set how you'd like to receive your results:
- Click the "Start this bot" button on the right-hand side of the page:
That's it! The first step in an automated real estate direct mail campaign.
You will now be taken to your "My Jobs" page where you can see the bot working to gather your results. It takes just about a minute or less, so you can wait a few moments for it.
Video tutorial
Here's a short video on how to launch the Google Maps by Radius Finder:
Results
Once the bot is done, you can view the results by clicking on the job title. Here, you will see details like coordinates, business status, geometry location latitude, geometry location longitude, name, place ID, plus code compound code, rating, type (e.g. bar/restaurant, food/point of interest/establishment, etc.), and more:
Real estate direct mail campaign ideas
- Use coordinates to fine-tune targeting in digital marketing such as Facebook advertising.
- Keep the results file sent to your email address safe for future use, in case you lose the one downloaded on your computer.
- Use another bot to turn the coordinates into actual addresses.
- If you run a website, make sure to inform youself on how to find the most effective real estate keywords for search engine optimization.
Step 2 - Extracting addresses for your real estate direct mail campaign
For the next step, we'll be using another bot called Coordinates to Address Converter.
Remember that our goal is to send direct mail for commercial real estate to the target audience we're building. But we can't do that without having their addresses first.
This is where the Coordinates to Address Converter comes in.
If you look closely at the results from Step 1 above, you'd see coordinates for each entry on the list. However, there are no addresses.
The Coordinates to Address Converter can take those coordinates and change them to actual addresses we can send direct mail marketing campaigns for real estate.
Follow me closely as I take you through the steps required to change coordinates to real addresses.
- Open the result you got from Step 1 above, either by downloading the file sent to your email address or by opening it from the "My Jobs" page:
- In the result, look for "geometry_location_lat" and "geometry _location_lng":
- Launch the Coordinates to Address Converter and look for “Coordinates”.
- For each entry, copy the geometry_location_lat and geometry _location_lng and paste them into the box as shown below. The Coordinates to Address Converter accepts the following formats:
xx.xx, xx.xx
xx.xx,xx.xx
xx.xx xx.xx
I.e., the lat and long may be separated by a comma and a space, by a comma alone, or by a space alone. Note that each latitude and longitude pair must be on a single line as shown below:
- Once you've filled all your coordinates into the address box, click on “Start Bot” at the right-hand side of the screen.
Voila! Now wait while the bot does its magic, turning your coordinates into actual addresses.
Video tutorial
Watch a short video guide on how to launch the Coordinates to Address Finder:
Results
After a few moments, your results would be ready and you can access them from your "My Jobs" page or download the file sent to your email address.
In the result, you will find two columns: one for the coordinates you entered, and the other for the corresponding addresses:
Direct mail marketing ideas for real estate
- You can send direct mail to addresses you’ve generated, introducing yourself and your services.
- You can send catalogs, brochures, or promotional offers to get prospects more interested.
- Use the addresses to generate ZIP codes, the last piece we need to complete our real estate agent direct mail list.
Read on below for the final step in this guide.
Step 3 - Adding zip codes to your direct mail lists for real estate
If you're following me closely, by now you should have two things necessary for a successful direct mail marketing for real estate: a target location and addresses.
However, we don't yet have the ZIP codes for those addresses. In case you didn't know:
- The United States Postal Service (USPS) uses ZIP codes to sort and deliver mail, so using the correct ZIP code is essential for ensuring that your mail arrives on time and in the right place.
- You can use ZIP codes to target your direct mail campaigns to specific geographic areas, which we're working on right now.
- ZIP codes can help you track which areas are most responsive to your mailings, useful if you store real estate direct mail statistics.
So for this final step, I will be introducing the Address to ZIP Finder bot. It can help you extract the zip code for any address(es) you plug into it.
You can probably get the ZIP codes for some of these addresses by pasting them in Google one after the other and seeing what Google says. For that though, you must be ready to spend the whole day and also risk getting the wrong info.
But if you'd rather have it done for you in seconds, then use the Address to ZIP Finder to automate the process.
- Once you're on the bot page, look for "Country name". In the text box below it, enter the country of the addresses. In our case, the United States:
- Look for "Addresses". To easily select and copy the addresses, use the sheet file sent to your email:
- Copy and paste the addresses you got from Step 2 above, making sure each one is on a new line:
- Start the bot and wait patiently for your results.
VIdeo tutorial
If you'd rather watch an engaging video than read, my tutorial is for you:
Results
The Address to ZIP Finder bot will crawl the address archives and fetch you the exact ZIP codes attached to each of the addresses you provided. The resulting document will contain information such as:
- Input address
- Country
- Borough
- Address
- City
- Zip
- Region
- Country code
Now comes the final step - bringing all the extracted data together in one table:
Print out the addresses with ZIP codes on the envelopes and send them to your potential clients!
Real estate direct mail tips
- Tailor your direct mails going to similar ZIP codes based on what's relevant to them.
- Leverage the ZIP codes to track your performance in different locations.
- If you would like to combine email marketing and cold calling with direct mail marketing, my guide on how to make up a list of company emails and phone numbers in 5 minutes is a must-read for you.
Direct mail marketing budget for real estate agents
So far I've shown you how to build a mailing list containing addresses and ZIP codes of homes in your target area using bots.
Potentially, these bots can save you hours and a lot of mental stress that goes with compiling this much data manually.
But the best thing about these bots is just how affordable they are! Despite being able to help so much with direct mailing for real estate agents, it costs just a token to gain access to them.
Typically, how much you pay depends on how much data you fetch. So you’re only paying for what you use.
For instance:
- Exporting coordinates with the help of Google Maps by Radius Finder will cost you only 9 cents per keyword you enter.
- Extracting addresses from coordinates using the Coordinates to Address Converter will cost you a meager 7 cents for every 10 coordinates you enter. A hundred coordinates-to-addresses will cost you just 70 cents.
- Adding ZIP codes to addresses using the Address to ZIP Finder bot will cost you 8 cents for 10 addresses. Finding ZIP codes for 100 addresses then will cost you just 80 cents.
So consider this:
Using four keywords in the Google Maps by Radius Finder will cost 36 cents, irrespective of how many coordinates you get from it. If you got a hundred, extracting addresses from 100 coordinates is only 70 cents, and adding ZIP codes to those 100 addresses will cost 80 cents.
36 + 70 + 80 = 186
That’s $1.86 for 100 real estate prospects and in just a few minutes. This is what you get when you automate tasks!
So if you’re interested in running an automated real estate direct mail campaign, partner with Botster, and you won’t regret it!
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