Home, Sweet Home…

Subjects: Mailings, Headlines
Principle: Headlines and outline of the card DO make a difference

Today we talk about Real Estate Investing. No, we will not go into the details of how to compute your monthly payment for a mortgage or how to choose the best house in the neighbors: we will analyze a sales card I got in the mail from a Real Estate Investment “guru”.

The card uses a lot of the smart-ideas-approved techniques to increase yield with no risk: the card has been designed well.

First of all, it’s a card, not a letter. The marketing letter has advantages: we can put more details, a brochure, a sales letter etc. On the other hand the use of an envelope adds one extra step to the marketing process: getting the envelope opened…

This is such a fascinating field in itself that we will have a posting in 2 days on “How to make somebody open your envelope”. But for now, we just have to remember that the advantage of the card versus the letter is that the card will be read: it’s already open… the person cannot avoid getting a glimpse of it.

Now, the glimpse is a fraction of a second: the good marketer knows that this is all she/he has to capture and retain the attention of the prospect (Steven Scott calls this step “the hook” in his good book “Millionaire's Notebook”. For more information, click here). And key words like “Secret”, ”Money-Making”, “Wealth building” do work: we can smile at them, we can scorn them, but they do work in retaining attention.

Together with the use of the word “FREE” for the tape “hand written” (which got my attention), I enjoyed the very elegant way to make people read the second page: the first page ends with the sentence “Here’s how” (see other side). DIABOLICAL! Still Steven Scott calls this technique “salting”: adding “salt” to the description to make the reader thirsty for more. To quench my thirst, I did turn to the other side.

This second side reserves a couple of pearls for us. One is the use of highlighting to direct the attention to specific areas. Another one is the picture of the tape: this add dimension to the promise, it make it more real. Last but not least, the Toll Free number, which is surely coded to understand which kind of card works best. I am pretty sure, in other part of the state or of the town, they received different versions of the card, and the results are monitored with discipline by the marketers behind this direct-mail campaign.

All right, that’s all for today: I gotta go check for a new house that I want to buy soon…

Till next time,

Kramerilio in USA