I can always tell when the housing market slows down.
It’s not the data reports the big finance houses send out.
Or the estate agency industry news.
It’s the demand for a product we have provided since 2015.
We didn’t sell many from May 2020 to June 2022 because everything was selling, and second-agent instructions were low.
That’s changed dramatically.
Agents are using prospecting letters again.
Some do it good. Some do it bad. Some do it ugly.
In response to the increased prospecting letter activity, I ran a week’s worth of Daily Ideas on social media on the subject.
Here’s the collation of them below.
Daily Idea 82
Improving Your Letters’ Prospects
Over the next seven days, I’ll share seven easy-to-implement ideas to improve your prospecting letters’ performance.
Day One – To kick off, let’s do the Blind Person’s Test.
It’s a test printers use to gauge the quality of a brand.
The idea is to close your eyes and feel the paper your prospecting letters are printed on.
The more GSM (grams per square metre) the paper has, the more substantial, higher quality feel it will have.
Some agencies scrimp on the paper quality going under 100 GSM to cut a little cost.
This is a mistake.
If it’s under 90 GSM, it usually fails the blind person’s test and is deemed as feeling ‘cheap’.
Look at 120-150 GSM if you want to sail through the test and give your prospecting letters a distinct feel of quality.
Daily Idea 83
HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR*
Day two of easy-to-implement ideas to improve your prospecting letters’ performance.
Add headlines to your letters that address why you’re sending them to the recipient.
For example:
Good Luck With Your Sale (New to the market property)
Is it Time for A Change? (When a home has been on the market for eight weeks)
Three Reasons Your Property Isn’t Tenanted Yet (Four weeks on the rental market)
A good headline grabs the attention and encourages the reader to keep reading.
Watch out for tomorrow’s idea around the Sniper’s Approach to writing prospecting letters.
*An actual headline from a New York Post front page.
Daily Idea 84
Day three of seven days of ideas to improve your prospecting letters’ performance.
Use the Sniper’s Approach.
This approach is simple, use carefully selected bullet points within your letters that aim at the problems a seller/landlord has (voids, suck on the market, price reduction etc.).
Then fire off the cures your agency offers to solve their problems in the form of those easy-to-understand bullet points.
Daily Idea 85
Day four of seven days of ideas to improve your prospecting letters’ performance.
Add a photo of the sender to your letters.
It adds a personal feel, humanises your brand and can go a long way to building a little trust.
Daily Idea 86
Day five and six of seven days of ideas to improve your prospecting letters’ performance.
Add social proof to your letters as a brief testimonial including the person’s full name – avoid ‘Mrs S’ or even worse, ‘a happy seller’ said…….
Also, consider using your Google Reviews ratings if you have plenty, and they give you a high average score.
You want to give people every possible reason to contact you to solve their problems.
Daily Idea 87
Day six of seven days of ideas to improve your prospecting letters’ performance.
A potential marginal gain.
Send your prospecting letters out on odd weeks to make your marketing stand out against agents who use 2,4,6, 8, and 12-week triggers.
Daily Idea 88
What’s Your Agency’s Prospecting Category of One?
Today’s the seventh of eight easy-to-implement ideas on how to improve your prospecting letter’s performance.
In your letters, always include your agency’s Category of One.
What’s a Category of One?
It’s the one thing you do that your rivals don’t, won’t or can’t.
Examples are:
Do you have the most Google Reviews in your town?
Are you a member of an exclusive industry body or network?
Do you have a killer stat that blows your rivals out of the water?
Are you the longest-established independent agency in the town?
You get the gist.
As shown in this example, the right-hand side of a prospecting letter template is a perfect space to highlight your category of one.
In Summary
These ideas have been used successfully over the years.
But the real skill is in the letters’ content.
Inexperienced writers can’t nail it.
AI can’t either (yet).
The generic stuff from the prospecting software companies isn’t all that much better, either.
We’re excellent at these letters, even if I say so myself.
And we are launching our 23 for 2023 Sales Prospecting Letter pack in mid-April.
To get on the Sneak Peek List, email me the subject line Sneaky Blinders.
Thanks for reading.
Jerry