Is Direct Mail Worth It?

This is episode number 2188. Jill and I are talking about the real cost of sending a land offer campaign mailer. Is it cost-efficient? Does it cost anything at all? It doesn’t cost me anything to send a text. Why do I have to spend money on mail? We’ll talk about all these topics. We would not be here making millions of dollars a year buying and selling real estate if it weren’t cost-efficient and incredibly fast and effective, and for us, easy to execute and manage. It’s the greatest thing ever, quite honestly. Each day on the show, Jill and I answer a question from our Land Academy Member Discord forum, and we take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request.

Stanley wrote, “How much money do you guys really make when you send out mail, and how much of it is because you have a lot of experience?” That’s a great question. 

What he’s asking is, “That’s great, guys. I’m happy for you, you make so much money, but I’m brand new, and I got to learn all this stuff. How long is it going to take me? What’s the learning curve like for me to start turning out some deals to make some money?”

Even, “What kind of deals should I do?” which actually came up for me recently in a group session, too, with a sweet couple, and they’re new. They’re getting married, I think, in August. I think one of them is probably listening, and it was really cool because he said, “Look, the writing on the wall is, if I’m going to use deal funding, which I am, Jack and Jill, I’m going to use your money. It needs to make sense, so we’re just going for these bigger deals. That’s where I’m going.” I said, “Yay, you’re doing everything right. Thank you for listening and paying attention, you’re right.” That’s another way you’re going to make more money, too. Just go for it.

He said, “Getting married and writing on the wall,” all in one big whoosh.

I did. She’s on board with all of this. It’s them. They’re a couple. They’re a team, just like you and I are a team in everything we do.

We wouldn’t be making millions a year buying and selling real estate if it weren’t cost-efficient, incredibly fast, effective, and easy for us to execute and manage. Honestly, it’s the greatest thing ever. Share on X

If you want to get to know your spouse really well, make sure she’s your business partner and you do a daily show.

You know what? I wish we did more together. 

I miss you, Jill. I miss you when I walk across the house.

I miss you when I go to the grocery store, and you’re not there. Every time I’m having lunch with my girlfriends, I go, “It’d be way more fun if Jack were here.”

You add value to every minute.

I wonder what Jack would say about fill-in-the-blank because I want his opinion on everything.

I hope I dress okay. I’m not going to see Jill all day, and I wonder if it’s okay.

Does he think this is a good hair color? Maybe I should ask first.

I have an Arctic Fox truck camper in my driveway so that when Jill and I have just had enough of each other in a very healthy way, there are a lot of different ways I can phrase this, “When I need to go off and process new business ideas,” we’ll say that.

I want to do that. Can I use that? I’m going to say, “When is the new business idea weekend coming? I’m going to put it on the calendar for you.”

The truck is packed. It’s got food in there and all kinds of stuff. It’s just you turn a key, ready to go, and the key gets turned every once in a while.

This is actually truth time. My girlfriends came to town, and you took the truck camper out for new business ideas. You know what I did? I lovingly, seriously made sure he had good sandwiches and some good food. I did because I want you to have a good experience on your own.

You want to stay out multiple days.

Here’s a week’s worth of food, “But Jill, I’m only going for two nights.” Just in case.

If you would like to hear about working with your spouse, please let us know. We’ll do a whole week on that.

Back to Stanley’s question, “How much do you guys really make when you send out mail, and how much of it is because you have a lot of experience?” Can I answer this first, please?

For sure.

You, Stanley, get into the equity planner. I think you remember. How much we make is how much we set out to make. I hate to answer it like that, but it’s true. We set out to only do deals that are going to yield the money that we want to make per deal, to yield the money we want to make per month, to yield the money we want to make annually. That’s it. If it doesn’t fall into those areas, we don’t do the deals. That’s number one.

We’re focused on doing only the deals that generate the income we need per deal, per month, and per year—period. If a deal doesn’t meet those criteria, we don’t do it. Share on X

The Real Earnings Strategy Behind Mailers

What Jill means is that when there’s land that’s regularly trading on the internet or just on the real estate market for, let’s say, between $30,000 and $60,000, you can expect to buy that property for around $20,000 and sell it for around $40,000. If you’re not going to do that in Manhattan, you’re not going to do that in LA County. Those markets don’t support that. That’s also way too high of a number to do it in, let’s say Riverside County, or it’s just desert squares. What Jill’s saying is you have a tremendous amount of control over where you send mail, for how much, and what the yield’s going to be.

In the second part, you asked, “How much is because of your experience?” Yeah, that’s a fact. I’m going to get more deals when the phone starts ringing, just because I’ve been doing this for so long. That’s it. Does that mean you will never get to that? You sure can. I’m sure there are many of you reading right now. Think about your very first phone call when you first found us, you got into this, and you joined Land Academy. You’re like, “I was a bumbling idiot on the phone. I could barely spell APN. Explaining it to these sellers, I didn’t sound good,” and whatever. Now, you’re so seasoned, you’re into it, the call rings, and you’re excited like I’m excited.

You’re like, “It could be a buyer, it could be a seller, who knows how old this mailer is. Let’s see what this person’s got. I know what to ask.” You’re so experienced, and it could only be a year into it. You could only be a year into this and be so familiar with these areas because you’ve done deals there now. “Wait a minute, you’re in such and such county. Okay, got it. Are you north or south of fill in the blank?” You’re going to be that way. That’s a real thing, just like anything. If I opened up a liquor store tomorrow, I would be the bumbling idiot. I wouldn’t know what inventory to order, how to do tracking and SKUs, and all that, but if you’re into it. I’m going to know my stuff, so it’s the same thing.

Show the liquor store owner.

Wouldn’t that be fun?

She’s extremely attractive.

I feel like a liquor store owner because I have a liquor store behind me. Jack stocks our liquor store. On to the topic.

Our topic is the real cost of sending a land offer campaign mailer. Let’s just start with basic math.

That’s what I want to know.

Mailer Response Rates & What To Expect

If you send out, your mailer is going to, in general, generate a 1% response. What that means is if you send 10,000 letters out, 1% of 10,000 is about 100. You’re going to get 100 responses. Some of those responses, a material number, are going to be people that say, “Lose my phone number. I’m not interested in buying this or selling this property ever. I’m going to die here. I picked out my tombstone. That’s it. Go pound sand.” A percentage is going to say that.

Another percentage is going to call Jill back, and they’re going to say, “Look, I appreciate your pricing here, but that doesn’t work for me. What does work is this number.” That number may work for Jill, or it may not. We don’t know. Those are very specific case-by-case scenarios. A third of the four groups are, “Yeah, I do want to sell my property,” and then we look it up and say, “Yeah, it turns out we don’t want to buy it. It doesn’t have any access. It’s on the wrong side of the tracks.” For whatever reason, it doesn’t pass due diligence.

It’s part of a cliff.

It doesn’t have the attribute I thought. It’s not the property that I want. Finally, the one that we’re all looking for is the percentage of people that call back and say, “I do want to do this deal,” or, “Yes, I do want to do this deal. Can you please add $600 to it or $1,000 to it to get my business partner off my back?” It’s that last portion. It’s a very predictable number, but that assumes two things. 1) You do the mailer right, and you mail it correctly or price it correctly. 2) You execute with some reasonable success rate what Jill does. You take a real estate deal, a piece of real estate where there wasn’t anything, and ten minutes later, you have a real estate transaction happening. Jill’s an expert at that.

To answer Stanley’s question, that takes some time. It depends on what you’re bringing to the table. Jill had a corporate sales position, and I can price the mailers correctly. There is a learning curve, but on the other side of that curve is massive profitability for the rest of your life. The cost of doing that, you have to ask yourself. Now, let’s say you send out 10,000 letters, and you get that great deal. In the equity planner, you planned on buying for $60,000 and selling for $100,000. You do. You get one deal. You make $40,000 on it. You buy for $60,000 and sell for $100,000.

How much did it cost to send that mailer out? If you use Offers2Owners, it’s going to cost around $0.70 a unit. This is after all the scrubbing. You’re sending these to potentially real sellers. That costs around $7,000 to send a mailer out-ish. You can shave some money off that, or you can spend a little bit more, have us have Offers2Owners do the mailer. Offers2Owners is our company. You spent $10,000 to make $40,000. Does that make sense to you? If you do two deals or three deals, now you’re making $80,000. Now, you’re making $160,000, $120,000, and on and on. We’ve had mailers. We’ve sent out three 400-unit mailers and done five deals. We’ve had 10,000 unit mailers that didn’t yield a transaction. Why? The fish weren’t biting that day, or they were.

Or I didn’t like them.

The truth is, we turn down really a lot of deals on the table that we’re so conservative about this.

I’m going to really go on record saying, I can only think of one state and one situation that I would call a “failed mailer.” It was West Virginia, because every property that came back was an undivided interest, and I didn’t want to solve for that.

That’s a really unique situation. That was a scenario where they didn’t own the property.

That’s it. We sent offers to half of the parties involved. I’m going to argue that, and we didn’t know going into it. That was many years ago.

Very hard to get. It’s very hard to not do a deal.

That’s it. You’ve got to really try to not do a deal. What I mean by really try is you don’t answer your phone. You don’t open your mail. You don’t look at your email. You don’t respond at all. That’s the whole point because if you do, you can make a deal out of this. You really can. I can make a deal out of a lot of things.

I’m going to end on this. That’s the cost, and the ROI, the return on investment, for doing a regular mailer is massive. 

You’re being very conservative.

I’m being crazy conservative.

I want to point that out. For anybody just reading like, “That’s a lot of money,” but you know what? No, he’s being really conservative to set you up for realistic results.

You have control over that. The same 10,000 letters, the same $7,000 that you spend to do that, you may be buying properties for $300,000 and selling for $400,000. You’re making $100,000 a pop and do it in two of those, three of those at a time. That’s more likely. That’s what we do. When we need to make $100,000 grand on a deal, not to fund, but just for us in general, we would probably do two or three deals every 10,000-ish. You can’t apply that to yourself when you’re brand new.

There are different things that go on. Seasonality. I will tell you right now, especially in this climate, my phone is ringing more than it used to. That’s another thing. I could do, and I am doing more deals now than I was in 2023.

It’s critical to answer your phone. I cannot express that enough.

Exactly. We are Jack and Jill, information and enunciation, to buy undervalued property. Thank you.