Steve,

I was wondering if you might know the answer to a question. I live in a small affluent area maybe 10,000 people living here.
Do I have to purchase a mailing list in order to direct mail out postcards? Would it be possible to drive around writing down addresses and simply compile my own list of addresses of specific homes I think would meet my criteria as far as target market goes?

Maybe a program that you type them into that can be submitted when you go to mail them? I have some friends in the real estate business maybe they have some sort of access they could pull some strings on to get addresses based on certain demographic factors like home value?? I am gonna probably try and get a batch of postcards printed up soon and shipped out
very soon. I am gonna sit down and try modifying one of the postcards that you included and using that.Talk to you soon.

Luke

My Response:

Hi Luke:

Good morning.  I would follow what I talk about in chapter 7 as far as using the "carrier route" method. The problem with driving all over the place copying down addresses is that it’s way too time consuming. It would take a long time to come up with a decent list and then have to write each address on a postcard. If you look at my postcard file that I sent you (the "pdf" version), you’ll see it says "Attn Postal Patron". So every homeowner within a carrier route will get one. This is much easier than having to address each postcard.

And the problem with mailing lists sometimes is that yes…you can target the lists by income, by home value, etc. but the homeowners may be spread out all over your town.  You want to use laser focus and target specific areas of people that are close together.  That’s what carrier route mailings do.  Each route consists of a group of homes (usually in the same subdivision).  So this works to your advantage because once you start getting jobs in an area, other folks in that area will see you, they’ll be receiving postcards from you, and you’ll be getting more exposure vs if you bounced from one area to another area to another area to another area, etc. etc.  Make sense?  So I personally focused on few areas and spread out from there. 

If you have any questions on this, let me know.  And I’d recommend going back and rereading chapter 7 also to catch up on what I’m talking about as far as carrier route mailings.  Take care for now.

Regards,

Steve

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