Granted, this is not advice you’re about to hear every day when you embark on a postcard mailing. But it is, in my experience, some of the most valuable experience around. I adapted this very clever idea from a journalism professor I had in college who had worked for The New York Times. I figured if it was good enough for him (as well as The New York Times); it was definitely good enough for me.
Most of us find ourselves having a tough time writing our real estate direct mails. Although we know what message we want to communicate to our prospects, we find ourselves at a standstill and can’t seem to produce our ideas in the right order. Hence, the simple method we are suggesting is just to start writing, then rework the piece by rearranging our ideas into the proper order.
You can simply start by writing your copy while keeping in mind the AIDA formula which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Make sure that you capture the attention of your customers right away by stating your services in an attractive way. Inform them about customer benefits and provide all the answers you think your potential customers have in mind.
Make sure to include sub-headlines in your real estate direct mail. And when you are satisfied with the completeness of the content, print a copy.
Next, with your scissors, cut the document into distinct paragraphs with the sub-headlines included. Of course, each of these paragraphs should contain coherent sentences.
Next, try to read the document once more. You can now decide if you want to reorder the paragraphs or keep it that way. Make sure though that the entire document is coherent and has a clear information about your offer.
The idea is to put these paragraphs into an order from first to last that will create a complete postcard mailing for you. Once you have every paragraph and subhead in its proper order, rearrange them on your original document in the computer.
But it doesn’t stop there. You still have to revise the copy until it has a better flow. Repeat the whole process and print another copy in order to see if you can still improve it. You can modify some changes in a sentence or the whole paragraph. Exclamation marks can also be placed properly for a more animated copy.
So what was usually a stressful real estate marketing task filled with several start-and-stop moments, has now become manageable and smoothly flowing.
Isn’t this the experience all of us wish to have when working on our real estate marketing campaigns?
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