This year is going to be a hectic one for sure, so one of my early goals was to create a schedule for all my mailings this year. Last year I basically decided what to send out at the beginning of the week. I’d sit at home on Monday night and figure out how many mailers I wanted to send, see which of my current lists needed a 2nd or 3rd mailing and create those. If there weren’t enough, I’d pick a new town, pull that list and create that mailing. Some weeks it was harder then others to come up with enough mailings but I managed to make it work. This was however a disorganized system to say the least. I wasted a lot of time thinking about what I should be doing next instead of doing.
I can’t afford to do that again this year so I spent the last week looking at SI Lead Manager, the county tax records and the New Jersey Census data to come up with my 2012 Schedule. Here is the basics for how I determine my schedule…
Current Campaigns
I took a look at the calendar in SI Lead Manager and made note of all the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc… mailings that where already planned for 2012. I then transferred them to my 2012 Schedule Spread Sheet based on the week they were scheduled to go out.
NJ Tax Records
In my weekly phone call with my partner, we discussed which counties we were going to market too. I used the tax site to then pull out all the towns in each of those counties and wrote them down. I’m sure I could have used other sites to get this info, but NJActB.org I knew gave me that data so I went with it.
I then cross matched these towns with the my current campaigns and marked in green which towns I’ve already started mailing too. This was also a great exercise as it helped me see which counties we were concentrating on the most. We weren’t has targeted as I once thought.
Median Home Values
Because of our buying strategy we don’t want to target any homes worth more then $500,000. Knowing New Jersey, there are plenty of towns that average well above that number and we don’t want to market to them. This led me to look up the median home values for each town. There are a few sites you can do this with…
- Trulia Home Prices
- Government Census
- MLS – Must have Agent Access (at least for gsmls)
I really think this schedule is going to help me out through the first few months of the baby era. I also think that the research and planning will definitely make a huge impact on our results as well. We used to guess as to which towns were good to target, now we will be able to look at the numbers and know.
For those that would like to schedule out your 2012, I created a word template for you all to download.
2012 Direct Mail Schedule Template
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Good call with the schedule idea. I need to get on that, but at least I have an excuse of being busy with a couple of properties we’re working on. Good start to the year!
MikeG’s last blog post ..BiggerPockets REI Summit
The schedule is really helping out right now. That and lead manager make it really easy to see which mailing needs to be going out in any given week.
Thanks for taking the time to make a downloadable schedule for all of us to use! Sometimes it seems like the hardest part about reaching my goals for the year is keeping track of the data I need to keep track of in an organized fashion!
Thomas’s last blog post ..Idaho’s Very Own River Gorge, Hell’s Canyon
Your welcome Thomas. The organizing of my schedule was quite easy once I came up with the template, now that hard part is to keep it updated with my new lists. I tend to get lazy with that.