When it comes to real estate marketing, direct mail is far from dead – but it’s also far from easy. With the flood of marketing messages most people receive these days (more than 1000 a day by most estimates), it’s all too easy to ignore yet another mailer.

So if you know you want to do a real estate postcard campaign (and you should!), how do you increase its effectiveness? There are a lot of little strategies that we’ll talk about over the coming months, but at the core of every campaign should be a single question:

“What do I want to happen when I send out this mailer?”

It seems like a simple question, but it’s deceptively deep. You’re probably thinking that what you want to have happen is to get more business. But if you want that to work, you have to get specific. What action do you want people to take when they receive your postcard – should they give you a call? Visit your website? Refer a friend or a co-worker to you?

Let’s say you’re planning a farming campaign, so you decide you want to send out some prospecting postcards. You want more people to give you a call. So, think through what you want to happen on that call. Do you want people calling to find out how much their house is worth? Do you want people calling to say that they are ready to buy their first home?

General messages can work well as part of an EDDM campaign to raise awareness of your brand, but if you want real action you need a targeted demographic and a targeted message. Don’t worry about your postcard campaign not applying to everyone on your mailing list – that’s why you send out multiple cards with different messages! It’s only when you’re able to identify a specific need that you’ll be able to prompt people to take real action, and that’s when the real leads start coming in.