netmoney1
Elite Member
- Feb 21, 2012
- 3,429
- 11,101
A friend of mine has a local web design company and was complaining about how his phone doesn't ring anymore. He lives in a touristy beach town and back before the housing market fell to the floor he was crushing it. Everyone and their brother was a real estate agent or was taking the test to get their license. You know what this meant...they all needed websites now. He worked out a deal with the real estate school where he could come in and speak to the students on one of the days and introduce his company and service. Since they saw a face and he was local guess who they all turned to when they passed and now needed a site? He was crushing it and making great money.
Well when the real estate market tanked so did his business. He is a great designer but he is horrible at marketing (he is also one of the laziest people I know)
Every time he called it was the same sob story...business is slow and the phone doesn't ring. I told him I was going to stop by his office.
Now, 7878's Online Reputation Management (dice method) thread on here is one of the best and I though there must be a way to take some of that and tweak it to help generate him a couple of deals with real estate agents since the business in the area was picking up. I knew dice were out of the question because he is way too cheap to pay a couple bucks to mail a letter. So I thought about "keys" - so I stopped by the local hardware store to see if I could buy the blank keys they use to cut new keys. I actually walked out of there with a box of keys for free! The guy gave me a stockpile of "rejects" and "bad cuts" - I thought that was cool. He said they just toss them anyway.
Now I wanted to get creative with the envelopes. Again, this guy is super cheap and with business down I didn't think he would be down to use FedEx or Priority USPS cardboard envelopes. I got some regular white business envelopes and then I also got some yellow greeting card type envelopes I found. They were square...like the envelope a birthday card would arrive in. Figured it may cause an open from a real estate office...thinking it was a thank you card from a client or something.
Now it was time to find potential real estate agents and offices to target. We had a realtor friend help with this. He pulled data from MLS and we got the top 50 offices in terms of sales over the past 3 months.
I had him create an excel spreadsheet with that data - office name, broker in charge and address while I whipped up a letter template.
This is the exact same template we used for him:
Date
Real Estate Company
Broker In Charge
Address
City, State, Zip
Dear ________________________,
My name is ___________________________ and I own _____________________________ right here in _____________________________. I was recently looking at your website and I have to tell you that I feel you are pushing a substantial amount of potential clients to your competition based solely on the user experience that your website delivers.
When a potential client visits your site you need to capture their interest within seconds. They will do either one of two things when they land on your site. They will either like what they see and surf around or they will click the back button and visit your competition. This is the first impression many will get of your company, and it is extremely important to engage them immediately. Wouldn't you agree?
There are several areas of your website that could be fixed and enhanced to deliver a much more user friendly experience, resulting in more phone calls and ultimately more revenue for your company. The most noticeable items are:
*Fix #1
*Fix #2
*Fix #3
*Fix #4
*Fix #5
These were just the immediate areas I found. I would love to speak to you about how I can greatly improve your site. I will also go through your site in much more details and discuss all of the areas that can be improved.
Please give me a call at ___________________________ and we can discuss this in much more detail. I look forward to speaking to you very soon!
Regards,
______________________
PS - You may be wondering why I sent you a key. That key symbolizes the key that you should have been giving to a new homeowner today, but due to an under performing website they did business with your competitor. Let me help you hand out more keys!
Very straight to the point. They either say "wow this guy is a dick" or "shit, he is right"
Now, 50 total letters were sent out on Monday the 26th (this past week) - they were all sent to the same are so delivery happened on Tuesday for all of them. Same letter and key in all 50...but 25 were sent in regular business envelopes and 25 were sent in the square yellow greeting card style envelope.
In the excel spreadsheet it was noted what envelope style was sent to each office.
I told him it was very important that he tracked EVERY phone call...even if the office called in to tell him how much of a dick he was lol
Calls started on Tuesday and continued through Friday.
Out of the 25 regular white business envelopes:
6 calls total
3: said they didn't have the budget to do a design
2: set up meetings at his office for next week
1: met with him the same day and contracted him ($1,400 redesign)
Out of the 25 yellow greeting card style envelopes:
11 calls total
6: said they didn't have the budget to do a design
3: set up meetings at his office for next week
2: met with him during the week and contracted him ($900 redesign & $1,600 redesign)
That is billing of $3,900 for a guy crying that his phone wasn't ringing.
Big thanks to 7878 for sharing that ORM method with the dice...shows you that with a little twist these things work!
Needles to say drinks and food will be on him tomorrow for the Football games! haha
Almost double the calls from the greeting card style envelope! I will update this after next week and let you know how the 5 meetings went and also if more calls come in for him.
Now...go get that $$$$....it is out there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well when the real estate market tanked so did his business. He is a great designer but he is horrible at marketing (he is also one of the laziest people I know)
Every time he called it was the same sob story...business is slow and the phone doesn't ring. I told him I was going to stop by his office.
Now, 7878's Online Reputation Management (dice method) thread on here is one of the best and I though there must be a way to take some of that and tweak it to help generate him a couple of deals with real estate agents since the business in the area was picking up. I knew dice were out of the question because he is way too cheap to pay a couple bucks to mail a letter. So I thought about "keys" - so I stopped by the local hardware store to see if I could buy the blank keys they use to cut new keys. I actually walked out of there with a box of keys for free! The guy gave me a stockpile of "rejects" and "bad cuts" - I thought that was cool. He said they just toss them anyway.
Now I wanted to get creative with the envelopes. Again, this guy is super cheap and with business down I didn't think he would be down to use FedEx or Priority USPS cardboard envelopes. I got some regular white business envelopes and then I also got some yellow greeting card type envelopes I found. They were square...like the envelope a birthday card would arrive in. Figured it may cause an open from a real estate office...thinking it was a thank you card from a client or something.
Now it was time to find potential real estate agents and offices to target. We had a realtor friend help with this. He pulled data from MLS and we got the top 50 offices in terms of sales over the past 3 months.
I had him create an excel spreadsheet with that data - office name, broker in charge and address while I whipped up a letter template.
This is the exact same template we used for him:
Date
Real Estate Company
Broker In Charge
Address
City, State, Zip
Dear ________________________,
My name is ___________________________ and I own _____________________________ right here in _____________________________. I was recently looking at your website and I have to tell you that I feel you are pushing a substantial amount of potential clients to your competition based solely on the user experience that your website delivers.
When a potential client visits your site you need to capture their interest within seconds. They will do either one of two things when they land on your site. They will either like what they see and surf around or they will click the back button and visit your competition. This is the first impression many will get of your company, and it is extremely important to engage them immediately. Wouldn't you agree?
There are several areas of your website that could be fixed and enhanced to deliver a much more user friendly experience, resulting in more phone calls and ultimately more revenue for your company. The most noticeable items are:
*Fix #1
*Fix #2
*Fix #3
*Fix #4
*Fix #5
These were just the immediate areas I found. I would love to speak to you about how I can greatly improve your site. I will also go through your site in much more details and discuss all of the areas that can be improved.
Please give me a call at ___________________________ and we can discuss this in much more detail. I look forward to speaking to you very soon!
Regards,
______________________
PS - You may be wondering why I sent you a key. That key symbolizes the key that you should have been giving to a new homeowner today, but due to an under performing website they did business with your competitor. Let me help you hand out more keys!
Very straight to the point. They either say "wow this guy is a dick" or "shit, he is right"
Now, 50 total letters were sent out on Monday the 26th (this past week) - they were all sent to the same are so delivery happened on Tuesday for all of them. Same letter and key in all 50...but 25 were sent in regular business envelopes and 25 were sent in the square yellow greeting card style envelope.
In the excel spreadsheet it was noted what envelope style was sent to each office.
I told him it was very important that he tracked EVERY phone call...even if the office called in to tell him how much of a dick he was lol
Calls started on Tuesday and continued through Friday.
Out of the 25 regular white business envelopes:
6 calls total
3: said they didn't have the budget to do a design
2: set up meetings at his office for next week
1: met with him the same day and contracted him ($1,400 redesign)
Out of the 25 yellow greeting card style envelopes:
11 calls total
6: said they didn't have the budget to do a design
3: set up meetings at his office for next week
2: met with him during the week and contracted him ($900 redesign & $1,600 redesign)
That is billing of $3,900 for a guy crying that his phone wasn't ringing.
Big thanks to 7878 for sharing that ORM method with the dice...shows you that with a little twist these things work!
Needles to say drinks and food will be on him tomorrow for the Football games! haha
Almost double the calls from the greeting card style envelope! I will update this after next week and let you know how the 5 meetings went and also if more calls come in for him.
Now...go get that $$$$....it is out there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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