How Much Direct Mail Offering is too much? (CFFL 511)

Transcript:

Jack Butala:                         Jack Butala with Jill DeWitt.

Jill DeWitt:                           Hi.

Jack Butala:                         Welcome to the show. In this episode Jill and I talk about how much direct mail is too much. Can you send too much mail? I don't think so. let'S take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvesters.com online community first. It's free.

Jill DeWitt:                          Marrid asks, "Hi all. I'm new to the group and I'm going through the steps to get out my first mailer. I plan on scheduling a call with Jack beforehand to get it right, but I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with pricing a mailer too low and what they did to rectify it."

Jack Butala:                         I have.

Jill DeWitt:                          Yeah right. We all have.

Jack Butala:                         Marrid is a cool name, isn't it?

Jill DeWitt:                          It is a cool name. Thank you. Suppose I send out a 3,000 piece mailer to a more expensive area and get zero deals because I only offered $300 an acre. Turns out I should've offered three to four times as much. Would you immediately resend the same mailer with a higher offer with or without some explanation as to why you low balled it the first time?

Jack Butala:                         Yes.

Jill DeWitt:                          Or send a right price mailer to different acreage range in the same county?

Jack Butala:                         Yes to that too.

Jill DeWitt:                          Or would you wait six to 12 months and repeat at the higher offer price?

Jack Butala:                         No.

Jill DeWitt:                          Or would you just drop the whole thing, change your name to lookingformethlablandinyourniceneighborhood.com This is so good.

Jack Butala:                         Who the heck is this person? This is hilarious.

Jill DeWitt:                          Knowing that you're forever branded yourself as a crooked kingpin of land flipping. Thanks for your thoughts.

Jack Butala:                         First of all ...

Jill DeWitt:                          I want to see if that name's available, number one. Lookingformethlablandinyourniceneighborhood.com. I love that.

Jack Butala:                         Marrid, whoever you are, I can tell ...

Jill DeWitt:                          Awesome.

Jack Butala:                         You're going to be really good at this.

Jill DeWitt:                          Totally.

Jack Butala:                         You have a sense of humor about it, which is important.

Jill DeWitt:                          Exactly.

Jack Butala:                         To honestly and sincerely answer your question, sometimes these things happen. Sometimes you send a mailer out and it wasn't priced right. I talk to people every week who say some version of this and then they follow it up by, "Turns out I bought a piece of property anyway."

Jill DeWitt:                          Exactly. I did it all wrong. What'd you do? I bought five.

Jack Butala:                         I sent out, this is a true story, I sent out an incorrect mailer in a northern county of Arizona a lot of years ago. It went to really high priced property for next to nothing. I ended up buying a piece of property across from the county building that we sold for $240,000.

Jill DeWitt:                          I know, I remember, exactly.

Jack Butala:                         I bought it for like 10 grand. I don't remember the exact numbers. It's actually very conceivable that you're going to misprice a mailer and then potentially get stumped. I personally have never been stumped, and I don't think ... I talk to people once in a while who say they're stumped but then they let me know a week later that, oh wait,