Great Real Estate Marketing Offers to Place on Your Postcards
Updated on December 11, 2023
As you know better than anyone else, the real estate market is super competitive — especially now that the available properties to sell in the U.S. have plummeted. Even though lots of people are moving to new locations, there are still fewer homes to list compared to the number of agents who need to sell them to make a commission.
That means you have to stand out from the massive amounts of real estate agents in your area and give a client something of perceived value to persuade them to choose you. Consider that the majority of real estate firms aren’t making any special offers at all! So you will stand out if you do this.
There are some guidelines you should follow for selecting the right offers on your real estate mailer.
Nope, “just any offer” won’t do!
But, lucky for you we’ve helped more than 13,000 real estate agents drive up their revenue with direct mail. We also are the only marketing company that has an entire department with full-time staff dedicated to tracking client results to help other small businesses succeed.
With thousands of real estate direct mail campaigns under our belt and many offers that have been tested for effectiveness, we are excited to show you the top offers that can generate high response rates. Keep scrolling for ideas!
Selecting the perfect real estate marketing offer will not only cause more people to choose to work with you when selling or purchasing a home, but it will also be something cost-effective for you to offer.
Here are some examples of offers that have been tested by our clients AND brought in amazing results!
Free Professional Staging
This real estate agent advertised a free professional staging consultation on her postcard, and she ended up generating $12,600 in revenue! The same offer was also placed on the follow-up digital ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram through her Everywhere Business campaign. You can read her entire case study here.
Gift Card to Lowe’s, Home Depot, or other home goods store
Realtor LaToya Latimore offered a $150 Lowe’s gift card for responding to the postcard within 30 days of mailing. She also offered free professional staging. So, keep in mind that one offer will help bring in responses, but two or more will add even more pull to the postcard and elicit an even bigger response from prospects. As a result of this campaign, she acquired 4 listings and made $30,000 in revenue.
Promote a Low Commission Rate
Take a look at these two postcards that offer a reduced fee/commission for listings.
A low commission rate may be a good option for some real estate agents because homeowners want to make the most profit on the sale of their home, and reduced fees mean more money in their pockets. You’ll have to do the math to figure out which cost reduction works for you that will still earn you enough income to make taking on the client worthwhile.
The first example, broker Anthony Wiench, has a super low fee at 1% because he specializes in listing properties in the millions to California moguls. His campaign resulted in successfully listing one property, and he made $2.3 million for it! Just a small fee on a big property sale still made him a hefty profit.
In the second postcard example, broker DeAnn Wylie reduced her commission to 2.35% and she attained one new client as a result.
Free Comparative Market Analysis
Real estate agent, Keri Parmeter, offered a free comparative market analysis to help families find out what their home is worth and the market details.
This is a great offer to put on a postcard because you are providing professional data and advice that doesn’t really cost you anything other than time to analyze their home’s value. But, people are still enticed because knowing the value of their home could lead them to consider selling if the listing price and market are right.
Keri was able to list 5 properties with this postcard and make $25,000 total.
Free Home Warranty
Associate Broker Elizabeth Izquierdo had 2 offers on her postcard including a free comparative market analysis (mentioned above as a great offer) and a free home warranty. She placed an expiration date on the card to help encourage prospects to pull the trigger sooner rather than later. As a result, she got 2 listings and sold one for $500,000!
Free Moving Services / Free Cleaning Services
The cost of moving or cleaning services may be a small investment compared to the overall revenue you’ll receive from the sale of a home. For example, if it costs you between $100-$500 to cover moving or cleaning costs, but you are going to make $20,000 total, it’s worth winning the client over with these offers.
It may seem like a small freebie, but if you are the only real estate agent in the area offering something for free by listing with them, they’ll choose you!
This particular company, Desert Dream Realty, generated $20,000 in revenue from 3 listings after mailing this postcard.
Give Cash Back at Closing
Similar to giving clients a discount by lowering the commission fee, you could simply give them cash back once the house sells. This is a good option when you have a set budget on how much you could give back to clients. Determine the amount you can afford and place it on your postcard design with an expiration date to move people to act fast.
FastCashSD achieved a 10% response rate with this postcard offer, accumulated 7 different cash orders, and earned $35,000 in commissions.
Cover the Closing Costs
Even though it’s one of the more pricey options when it comes to offers, if you can afford to cover the closing costs, you’ll see a big return from prospects. This could amount to huge savings for a client.
This postcard was done for a real estate investor and agent, Barr Properties. After mailing out this postcard offer, they generated 24 responses and $60,000.
Why are these offers effective?
So, what is the secret recipe to a good offer that will cause a prospect to pick you? The above offers we showed you all have these characteristics in common.
We have 3 ingredients:
- High Perceived Value
Your offer needs to grab a recipient’s attention immediately, and that has a lot to do with how appealing it is, which is determined by the perceived value. Let’s say you get a postcard in the mail with an offer for a free consultation. This doesn’t hold any real value and won’t sway a person to contact you.
An offer like, “I’ll pay for the movers!” will sound high value because it can be costly to move, and covering this expense will appeal to families who would love to avoid this hassle and additional expense.
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- Low Cost
The prospect needs to feel they are getting a steal, especially if they are taking a risk by trying you out.
To continue with the example in point number one, an offer like “FREE Moving Services” is very appealing but will cost you $1000 and upwards. You may even be able to work out a deal with a company you know, or hire family members or friends, to keep the expense low.
But you don’t always have to give something for free. It could be a commission reduction. The profit you receive from selling a home will far outweigh the slight discount.
Consider this equation…
If you spend $5,000 and get 100 leads, your cost per lead is $50.
Now, let’s say you add an offer for a $25 Home Depot gift card to everyone that calls, and instead of 100 you get 200 responses.
Your cost per lead is still $50 ($25 per response and then the $25 gift card), BUT this way you get twice as many leads, meaning you will likely make twice as much revenue off of that promotion.
- Relevance
Try your best to make the item or discount apply to the person’s needs or situation. For example, giving out a free iPad or a discount on a spa service may sound like a nice gesture, but it isn’t super relevant.
Meet the homebuyer where they are at and give them something they really need right now, like a free home staging or cleaning to get them started on listing their property, or a free book on how to find the right home. Make your offer more suitable to their needs as buyers or sellers, and they will jump on your offer faster.
- Believability
Many scammers have used too-good-to-be-true offers to nab a person’s money, personal information, or bank account/credit card numbers. Don’t write the offer in a way that will make it seem fake. Try to avoid using symbols like an asterisk, which immediately lets people know that your offer has certain strings attached.
State the offer clearly and accurately to make sound as authentic as possible. For example, “FREE* 2022 Mustang!” isn’t fooling anyone.
How to Supercharge Your Offers
So how can you ensure that your offers will make an impact? There are a few things you can do to boost their effectiveness.
First, track how many responses you get from your offers. You won’t really know which of your offers have the highest return on investment unless you track the results. There are a number of ways you can do this.
Mail Tracking
All mail pieces that move through the USPS receive a barcode that tracks their delivery. At PostcardMania, we print our own unique barcodes directly onto every mail piece so that we can track all of our direct mail orders throughout their journey, from our in-house print center to mail carriers and then into homes.
Knowing when your mail is delivered means you can notice any upticks in business. Perry Phillips from Yellow Dog Lawn Care Services said he remembers exactly where he was when his first mailing with PostcardMania hit mailboxes. He was eating sushi at a restaurant and had just received a notification that his postcards were successfully mailed and within minutes received multiple phone calls during his lunch! He knew right then and there how powerful those postcards were.
All PostcardMania clients can see where the cards were delivered, when, and how many landed in mailboxes. Take a look at our dashboard that shows this information:
After tracking where and when your mail pieces were delivered over a few months, you can start to see which areas performed best, which months or seasons returned the most responses, and then you can tweak future direct mail campaigns to reap the best results.
Phone Call Tracking
By placing a unique phone number on your postcard, you’ll know exactly where the incoming calls are coming from. Then count every call and the conversions you generate from them so that you can compare the response and close rate with other advertising you do.
Let’s say for example you send out a postcard in the spring and offer a “free market analysis” on the front of the card. Each person that calls the specific phone number listed on that card will be tracked.
Then, test that offer against a different one, like “low listing fee of 2%!” and count how many responses you get that time. By comparing the two, you’ll be able to see which one brings in the most responses and revenue. Then you can stick with the offer that works best.
We recommend that you perform this A/B testing for at least 3 months so that you have a large enough sample size to make an informed decision.
Phone call tracking (which comes with recording services) is included in our Everywhere Small Business packages so you don’t have to go through the extra work of setting it up yourself.
This is what the tracking looks like in the Everywhere Small Business tracking dashboard:
However, if you decide to track your phone calls yourself and just place your main phone line on the card, make sure you train your receptionist to ask where they heard about you. You can even give them a printed sheet of questions to ask them, such as:
“How did you hear about us?”
“Did you receive a postcard? Which one was it?”
QR Codes
Another way to supercharge the offers on your postcards is with QR codes. QR codes are great for a lot of reasons, like signaling to your prospects that you are relevant and tech-savvy, but they also have the additional benefit of tracking response rates and driving more traffic to your website or landing page.
How are QR code scans tracked? QR codes can send every person who scans them to a unique URL that logs the visit. This could be a unique landing page, but if you want the visitor to get to your website home page, we can also redirect the scan to your website.
For example, in our case, the QR code would be linked to the URL postcardmania.com/qrcode which tracks the scan, but then it would redirect traffic to the homepage postcardmania.com.
In our Everywhere Small Business campaigns, QR code tracking shows up on your MyPostcardMania dashboard. This is what it looks like:
It shows the total amount of times the QR code was scanned — even if the same person scanned it multiple times — and the number of unique scans, and how many people total used it. Having easy access to this tracking information will enable you to make more informed decisions about your postcard campaigns.
Then, once these prospects arrive on the site, first-party cookies can be established, and then prospects will see your digital ads everywhere online — on their social media feeds, their Gmail inboxes, YouTube videos, and more.
You don’t always have to integrate your direct mail campaign with digital ads for it to be successful; we’ve witnessed many real estate agents bring in loads of revenue from simply sending out mailers consistently.
And when I say consistently, I mean it! Consistency is key when you do direct mail….
However, adding in these more technical elements — QR codes and digital ads — will give your marketing a boost and drive up the results even higher. According to the Canada Post, integrated direct mail and digital campaigns elicit 39% more attention than single-media digital campaigns. JICMAIL also found that when primed by mail, people spent 30% longer looking at ads on social media.
Whether you hire someone like us to design your postcard for you, or you do it yourself, we encourage you to take this advice and apply it to your business. Right now, we have a hyper-targeted direct mail package that is specifically tailored for real estate agents, and it is called Everywhere Real Estate. It will save you time, money, and the hard work of having to run a direct mail campaign yourself.
Click here for more information or call us at 1-800-628-1804 to discuss which real estate offers you’d like to place on your next postcard!
