5 Reasons to Outsource Bulk Mail Offers (CFFL 340)
5 Reasons to Outsource Bulk Mail Offers
Jack Butala: 5 Reasons to Outsource Bulk Mail Offers. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don’t even have to read it. Thanks for listening.
Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.
Jill DeWit: Hello everyone.
Jack Butala: Happy Friday. Welcome to the show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about five reasons to outsource bulk mail offers and not do them yourself. It’s more like 50 reasons, but we’re going to try to stick to five. Knowing me …
Jill DeWit: It’s going to be 50.
Jack Butala: … we’ll end up with 50. Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on LandAcademy.com, our online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Cool. All right. Josh asks, “I now own two 10-acre plots that are adjacent in a wooded area in California …” Yay! Congratulations! “Paid up to $8,000 total. I would like to sell for cash since I really need an infusion for more mailings and acquisitions.”
Jack Butala: You’ve got the concept, man.
Jill DeWit: Smart. “Should I split them up or try to sell it together? My starting cash sales price for both together would be around $24,000 based on LandWatch and other comps. Would it be smart to break them up so it’s a lower price for a cash buyer?”
Jack Butala: I know what I would do.
Jill DeWit: Me, too. You want to go first and I’ll go second?
Jack Butala: I bet it’s the same thing.
Jill DeWit: I bet it is the same thing.
Jack Butala: I would post them everywhere you possibly can on the Internet. Don’t just focus on LandWatch. I would list them as separate postings, but right one after another. You would say in each posting, “Hey, I own the adjacent property. I’ll cut you a great deal for a certain amount off if you want both of them, but it’s first come first serve.”
Jill DeWit: That’s exactly what I would do.
Jack Butala: Chances are the person’s going to buy both.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: They’ll bring their brother-in-law in or something like that.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I’ve had that.
Jack Butala: Me, too. [crosstalk 00:01:45].
Jill DeWit: Where they buy both and then they can go out there and pick the one they like the best. Because they’ve told me that they did this later on. I’m like, “Congrat, babe.” They’re just so happy, you know, happy buyers. They buy both. They pick the one they want. They sell the other one, and it pays for the first one.
Jack Butala: Yeah, you know, what I love about this, Josh, is not so much even the two property thing, but, you know, yeah, all right, you spent eight grand. You’re going to generate 20, probably, it sounds like by the end of the day. Now you’re going to go buy some more property. That’s the whole point to this. Spend a little bit of money on the first few deals. Generate a big bank balance. Don’t go crazy and spend it. Spend it on more land, and just keep going and going and going until you’ve got some serious money.
Jill DeWit: Then you can make … That’s what I tell people. Start small, like you just said, and then when you have 30, 40, 50, whatever it is in the bank, now you can start making some different decisions.
Jack Butala: Right. If you have a question or you’d like to be on our show, reach out to either one of us on LandAcademy.com. Today’s topic, five reasons to outsource bulk mail offers (don’t do them yourself, please.) Jill, what are your five? This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Here are my five. I will go through them quickly and then we can talk more if you want about each one.
Jack Butala: Perfect.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Number one, do you want to be a printer?
Jack Butala: That’s actually one of mine. What business are you in? You want to make a deal-maker or do you want to be a commercial printer?
Jill DeWit: Do you want this commercial equipment, all this equipment, in your garage? That’s number one. Number two, they confirm all the addresses via software and things like that. That’s their business.
Jack Butala: Oh, that’s one of mine, too. We’re going to get to talk about that in a great deal, because people don’t get that.
Jill DeWit: Okay, cool. Thank you. Number three, postage. Bulk rates. Can’t beat it.
Jack Butala: That’s right.
Jill DeWit: Number four, the paper, all the ink, everything around it. Bulk rates. Bulk savings.
Jack Butala: Expensive, expensive, expensive.
Jill DeWit: Last and final, my number five. This is my absolute favorite. Your family will love you. Seriously.
Jack Butala: Oh, because you have more time?
Jill DeWit: Well not only do you have more time, we’re not all sitting around the dining room table licking envelopes.
Jack Butala: Yeah, you never want to do that.
Jill DeWit: Right?
Jack Butala: I’ve done it.
Jill DeWit: Right. That’s my five.
Jack Butala: Let me preface it by saying this. I have done this all the wrong ways. That’s how I actually know that we do it the right way now and have been doing it the right way for about 10 years. Here’s my five real quick. It’s cheaper. Number two, it’s faster. Number three, it comes out perfect. It’s all professional. It’s professionally done. You’re sending a professional message on professional grade paper to a seller and asking them to sell you their property for less than they know it’s worth. Number four, post software that Jill alluded to. When you said your data and your documents to a commercial printer, they run it through all kinds of software. They have to, and I’ll explain in a second about why. They have to to get their special bulk … it’s called a bulk mail rate … from the Post Office, because that software makes it so much more efficient for the Post Office to start scattering stuff all over the country. And then finally, the last one is you get analytics with a commercial printer that you don’t get by sitting at your coffee table and doing it. And you don’t get the analytics with the wrong commercial printer, by the way, too.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: Shall we?
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Let’s take them one by one. It’s cheaper. Let’s look at the different cost scenarios. This is how a commercial printer works, and this is the 35,000 foot basic view. The first thing a commercial printer does is they go get a bulk mail license. We’re going to use just a regular business letter from the financial standpoint to explain how this works. You can have a few options. If you want to send a regular letter, just a single letter, you put a stamp on it, right? It’s, what, 49, 50 cents?
Jill DeWit: 49 cents. 49.
Jack Butala: Then you print the letter out. You write the letter. You print it out and it prints off on your desk and you stuff it in there and you lick it. You send it. That’s option one. Number two is you can send it to a commercial bulk mail person. Why do they get away with charging me 49 cents? Isn’t that the price of postage? No. They apply for, and promise to do in exchange for a way cheaper rate from the Post Office, a bulk mail license. It’s about 30 cents right now. They can, through running through software and really helping the Post Office out, by delivering it to the actual Post Office in a way that’s very much more manageable, then to them, than showing up with a bin, like a clothes basket bin full of letters like we all have done.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: In exchange for that they’re rewarded by price. It can get lower than 30 cents for them to send that. They can just charge you. It’s a win win scenario. They charge you the price of a stamp. You don’t have to do any work. They make a little bit of money. Go ahead.
Jill DeWit: Another thing to point out, just because you’re spending less money doesn’t mean it’s any less efficient. That’s the point I want to make, too.
Jack Butala: It’s more efficient.
Jill DeWit: It’s more efficient. Exactly.
Jack Butala: It’s way more efficient.
Jill DeWit: “Oh, if I’m putting a real stamp on there I know it’s going to get there faster.” Not necessarily.
Jack Butala: It’s actually not.
Jill DeWit: Because yours is, I mean … This all pre-bundled in a certain order that goes really smooth and convenient for the Post Office, is going to take priority over 18 random Christmas cards that are going out here in six kind of things. They’re hand-written and they can barely even read them.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: Let’s think about that. Thank you.
Jack Butala: That takes care of cheaper. At the end I’ll run you through an exact, what happens when you send a thousand. I’ll run you through the exact example and why it’s so much cheaper and faster and better. I can do it right now. Number two, it’s faster. Now you’re writing one letter and then you have what’s called a mail merge. You have all kinds of data for, let’s say, a thousand letters, right? Everybody’s got a different first name and they’ve got a different last name, a different APN, a different legal description. All of those make your end letter, or your end offer, to each specific person, it makes it look like you just sent it to them. That’s huge.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Exactly.
Jack Butala: Can you do this on your desktop computer? Yeah, you can, but you’re going to run, then, you know, a thousand letters out through your printer. What’s going to happen? You’re going to run out of toner. You’re going to run out of paper.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, and paper.
Jack Butala: Then you’re going to go buy more and you’re going to end up going to Staples instead of somewhere smart.
Jill DeWit: You’re going to do like we did. You’re going to find yourself looking at these big machines and almost pulling the trigger on these $40,000 and 50 and $100,000 machines, which are nuts. You don’t need to do that.
Jack Butala: Right. Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Don’t do that.
Jack Butala: A lot of years ago we thought we were going to get in that business.
Jill DeWit: Then we realized that’s crazy.
Jack Butala: Half the letters are going to come out at the end. There’s going to be toner all over the place. It’s not professional.
Jill DeWit: No one can sleep because you’re doing it in the middle of the night.
Jack Butala: Then there’s this issue with software, so when a good bulk mail printer gets your data set and the letter that you want to send, they run it through software to make sure that the Post Office agrees with the list and that all of the data is live. Where you’re sending the letter is actually a live, real address so there’s no more ‘Return to Sender,’ so that saves … You know, the Post Office loses their butt on ‘Return to Sender’ situations so they love that. They love when you run it through software.
Jill DeWit: The Post Office loses their butt. That’s hilarious.
Jack Butala: They lose their butt anyway, but they lose their butt way more. I mean, they have to send it twice. They send it there. It doesn’t get there. It’s not a right address. They send it back to you. What the heck?
Jill DeWit: That’s right.
Jack Butala: Now they did twice as much work for the same amount of money.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: It really does make a lot of … Wow, it’s thundering. Isn’t that great?
Jill DeWit: That’s awesome. I love it. We’re clearly not in our studio right now.
Jack Butala: We’re in Scottsdale and it’s like when it rains here everybody celebrates.
Jill DeWit: Uh huh.
Jack Butala: That takes care of the software piece, and then there’s analytics. My number five is analytics. You can find out, with the right bulk printer, when the … You can watch on the Internet, or on a dashboard, when each letter gets to the owner and the whole thing. It just is overwhelmingly … There’s no reason. Let me be real frank about this. The takeaway is this. Never send out letters. Never, never, never, ever sit at your house or your office and do a mailer like that. It never makes sense, never.
Jill DeWit: If you’re sending five … I mean, you’re not sending five.
Jack Butala: It doesn’t matter even if you send five.
Jill DeWit: This is my point. Follow me on this one. If I’m only sending five, maybe I don’t need to upload it, but even at that, you do. My point is you’re not sending five because this is your business. You’re not messing around. You’re sending 1,500. Am I going to hand write 1,500? Oh, heck no. That would take two years. That means I’m not an acquisition person. I’m a letter writer. I’m a stenographer, is what I am.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: I’m not doing that. There really is no argument …
Jack Butala: There’s no argument.
Jill DeWit: … I think, for doing this yourself.
Jack Butala: That’s right, Jill.
Jill DeWit: Period. No matter whether you’re doing 1,500 or 15,000. You know? There’s no way. Going and getting the equipment and doing it all, bringing that in house. Boy, we’ve talked about that. That’s one of reasons people love us is because, hey, we’ve been there. We’ve made some mistakes. We never made that mistake, but we looked at it and did all the work. It’s definitely does not make sense. You know? Unless you want to be a printer.
Jack Butala: What we’ve done … Jill and I, have done is negotiate, because we have a very large group that sends out mail often, negotiated an unbelievable deal with an extremely professional, up to the second IT performing, commercial bulk printer here in Scottsdale. We’ve passed that on to you. Regardless of whether you send five letters out or five million, it’s the same price and it’s always cheaper than a stamp. You know it’s going to get delivered. You can see when it’s getting delivered and the whole thing. We’re not ready to release it yet. The product’s just about done and we’re actually pretty proud of it.
It’s just I love … Once in a while … Once in a great while, you can just sit there and say, “Yup, this is black and white.”
Jill DeWit: Yeah, this is.
Jack Butala: There’s no grey area here. It makes absolutely no sense to send out mail yourself.
Jill DeWit: Yes. This is the coolest thing on the planet right now, I’ve got to tell you. We’re sitting and there’s a thunderstorm outside. It’s raining. You can hear the thunder. I just love this. It’s so good.
Jack Butala: Yeah, me too.
Jill DeWit: It’s so cool. I’m trying to think what else I wanted to say about that. Yeah, no matter how much you think you’re doing. Oh, you know what else? I know you touched on it, Jack, but I want to circle back around. I think some people think that you need more of a personal touch, like a really hand written or a signature and all that. You can put all that in.
Jack Butala: It is in there, yeah.
Jill DeWit: That’s what I’m saying. You can have your signature in there. You sign it. If you want to do colored, you don’t need to, but you could. I know this is kind of another show, but it’s the way the letter is formatted is really what makes it stand out. This is just the delivery process. Just do it the right way, the cheapest way, because you are the deal maker. You should be looking at properties. You should be finding the areas. You should be formulating the offers. You should not be spending a week of your time getting them in the mail. That’s the last thing you should be wasting your time on.
Jack Butala: That’s right. The last thing, too, you want to be worried about is when are they going to get there?
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: You need to be watching on the computer screen when the stuff is getting delivered. You want as much detail as you can, and you just don’t get that by doing it yourself. You also don’t get it with a lot of … A lot of commercial printers out there are not software-driven the way that the one that we use is.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Where it’s really, truly beneficial and you can have control. You know when the people are going to call you back.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: It’s pretty cool.
Jill DeWit: It’s awesome.
Jack Butala: I’m excited about it if you can’t tell.
Jill DeWit: I know. I’m glad, very glad.
Jack Butala: Join us on another episode where Jack and Jill discuss how to use information, that’s me.
Jill DeWit: And inspiration, that’s me.
Jack Butala: To get just about anything you want.
Jill DeWit: We use it every day to not lose our place on the page.
Jack Butala: I got excited.
Jill DeWit: It should be routine by now, but okay.
Jack Butala: I got excited about … I just love this topic.
Jill DeWit: I’m glad. I know.
Jack Butala: I love when stuff is like, “Oh my gosh. It’s way more efficient now.”
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Every day to buy property for half of what it’s worth and sell it immediately. Get it in there before Jack loses his train of thought again. Just kidding.
Jack Butala: My God.
Jill DeWit: I’m just kidding.
Jack Butala: I know.
Jill DeWit: You are excited.
Jack Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition. You’re cracking me up, man.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: We’re real excited about the rain.
Jill DeWit: I know I am. It’s so good. Is that what distracted you? It’s really cool.
Jack Butala: No.
Jill DeWit: Oh, okay.
Jack Butala: No, honestly, there’s a lot more to say on this, but really, the whole point is this. It’s so easy. You don’t have to do a mail merge.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: You don’t have to learn all that stuff. You nailed it. The takeaway is this. You want to just eliminate all those back office functions one by one. This completely eliminates it. It’s cheaper and better and faster and way more effective.
Jill DeWit: This is one of the single biggest time wasting things you could do in this business if you are really focused on the mail part of it and getting them out. You know what I mean? The actual stamps and envelopes.
Jack Butala: Yeah, it’s not just doing it yourself.
Jill DeWit: If you are ordering stamps on Amazon or envelopes on Amazon, knock it off.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: You shouldn’t be doing that.
Jack Butala: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want to have all these office supplies in a closet somewhere? You don’t want that.
Jill DeWit: No.
Jack Butala: Paper and envelopes and toner and printers. You’re going to get … A substantial number of letters are going to come back. The amount of money that you save on a per unit basis is staggering, first of all. Number two, all the stuff, the postage, that you actually pay for, in the end is going to get delivered. I’ve seen 10% return rates on some of these older lists. It’s awful. Coupled with the RealQuest data and how we do it, and then with this printing scenario, it doesn’t get any better. It’s a good thing, man.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s a no brainer, I think.
Jack Butala: What are you doing this weekend?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know. What are we doing this weekend?
Jack Butala: I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. All I thought about was work this whole week even though it was kind of a holiday week.
Jill DeWit: Oh. You know what I’m not going to probably do? Well, I might do it. Shoot. The Saints are playing the Rams. I might have to watch that game.
Jack Butala: Oh.
Jill DeWit: Just because.
Jack Butala: Football woman.
Jill DeWit: Just because.
Jack Butala: You should let me know how that game goes.
Jill DeWit: Just because. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property. Have a good weekend.
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