Is you list up to snuff? Did you get a compiled list? Compiled lists are not very responsive because they are not proven buyers or inquirers of you product or service.

Are you sequencing? Sequencing your letters counting down to some sort of deadline like the famous Dan Kennedy, Second Notice, Third Notice, and Final Notice letters (and postcards) are proven to boost response. Don’t mail one  letter. Especially if your first letter works.

Is your ad copy good? To be sure you have good ad copy for your marketing letters present your letter to a friend and see how they react. Ask them to read the entire letter out loud. If it is really compelling, great! But smooth out any spots that he or she stumbled over.

For a really great study on writing killer sales letters get this book.

I recently created some very good insurance letters for agents and planners. Have a look. They are good letters to model. Also, be sure to get this prospecting letter mini course (it’s free!).

Take care and have a profitable day!

Brian

When we discus email marketing we are really talking about communication with interested prospects and clients.

An effective strategy is to send your prospect and client list a weekly email newsletter that keeps them up do date on what is happening with you, your business, and subjects related to your field.

My favorite email marketing tool is in lead generation. I set up websites that attract free traffic, and then funnel that traffic into a lead generation email marketing system.

The hard part is getting free traffic. But you can get instant traffic using pay per click. The easier part is setting up a page with a lead capture form on it.

The objective on this page is simple. Get your prospects to give up their name and email address (and other information if necessary) in exchange for something valuable, like a mini course, report, audio, video, or a coupon offer.

The marketing system includes follow up emails which include valuable information, with soft offers. After several of these I start hitting them harder with a marketing message that includes a deadline.

It works very well in most cases.

Email marketing is really about how you build and nurture a list that is hungry for the stuff you are offering. If they are not buying/converting, then your list is not hungry or you tainted your list with bad email marketing.

Related Articles:

Insurance Email Marketing

Financial Services Email Marketing

Email Marketing For Salon Owners

In addition, I created a video for the annuity lead system article. The audio is fuzzy but the content is good…

He can actually create a list based upon your ideal prospect in your area. The commercial lists are only available in certain areas. And if you can get one, you will have an unfair advantage in your market.

His residential lists are best for mortgage marketing (particularly residential).

His commercial list services are good for many types of business from commercial loans, banking, to roofers.

If you want a highly targeted list of ideal prospects for your products or services let me know.

There’s some good stuff on this site, even if you are not a mortgage broker or loan officer.

Even if you are not an insurance agent or financial planner, you will find some of the tips helpful. BUT, they are for those of you who are not familiar with online marketing and email marketing. I have more advanced tips on email marketing coming. So stay tuned.

Here is the article I wrote on insurance email marketing. Enjoy. Oh, and if you want a few tips on marketing insurance I wrote a quick article on life insurance marketing that may interest you.

But I am not reducing the price because they are not selling. Just the opposite, in fact. I want you or a friend to get a big dose of my marketing, and then you or your friend will become a lifetime customer or client…

Maybe this is the right way to go, or maybe not.

The marketing courses were recently updated as well, so $7 is pretty much ridiculous. I am a little nervous about this so we’ll see what we have in a few weeks. In the meantime, I highly recommend you take me up on this price reduction. I’m literally giving them away…

Here are three of my products for just $7:

Amazing Prospecting Letters.

Million Dollar Prospecting Letters. (This product is for insurance agents and planners).

Postcard Marketing Secrets.

The market for mortgages is incredibly tight. With the latest ‘credit crunch’, mortgage brokers are getting ever more competitive in trying to find every lead they can.

In this article I will discus buying leads, joint ventures, and online and offline lead generation.

One way of to generate mortgage leads is by simply buying them outright. Mortgage lead brokers generate these leads for you, and you can buy them at a price, and then market to them. Most purchases are anywhere from 25 to 100 leads, depending on your needs and the company you are dealing with. You might want to start out small, and expand when you can show a certain profit per lead purchased. (To do this you need to track how you do with these leads vs how you do with leads from elsewhere).

Be careful from whom you buy leads. There are many companies that tout ‘real time’, and ‘exclusive’ leads, only to throw you an unqualified lead that other brokers are hounding.

Make sure you shop around before buying any mortgage leads, and don’t commit to long term agreements of high start up costs. Also be clear on whether your leads are exclusive to you, or shared with others. And don’t forget about the all important time factor – how long ago were they generated, and how fast can you contact them? The longer the time between whenever the lead was generated and the time you contact them, the less effective the lead will be. They literally will forget that they responded to some kind of advertising.

How can you do joint ventures with other people in the industry to get free mortgage leads? How can you work something out with realtors and builders? It’s usually a 50-50 split on your commission. And that’s 50% more commission than you would have otherwise had.

Advertising can also work wonders for you, as long as you don’t end up looking just like every other mortgage broker out there. Direct response marketing might not look pretty, but it is very effective, so make sure you study it.

If you place an advertisement, make sure it appeals to your prospect. Get into the mind of the person you want to talk to. What is running through their head? What keeps them up at night? What are they complaining to their workmates around the water cooler? These days it’s almost certainly all about the financial crisis, how they’re going to make their repayments, how to find enough money to live on without getting behind.

Why buying advertising is going to be a vital component of your success…

You cannot afford to pay too much. There are several approaches – you can start by asking the publisher for ‘remnant space’, space left over with the deadline approaching. And you can also ask to be put on standby for a late cancellation at an agreed discount. You can even send in, with your ad, a check for some amount considerably lower than the standard rate, and a letter saying that this is all you can afford, and the publisher can cash your check and run your ad if he has some space left over. Unless he’s booked out every month, who is going to send back money? These are all advanced marketing secrets that not many people know, and certainly nobody competing with you.

Like most things, people are searching for mortgage options on the internet, even local brokers. If you aren’t doing something online, these folks are slipping through your fingers. And remember that you want leads, you want people to respond, you need an offer, you don’t need a simple online business card. Make them an offer.

Online mortgage lead generation: Go to Google Adwords and open an account. Buy keywords in your geographic area (assuming you want to sell in a geographic area, otherwise go national), and direct your leads to a lead generation website. You can even put your phone number in your ad.

Secondly, look for local websites (or national) that you can run a lead generation banner advertising campaign.

Test small in all cases, and then go big once you get your mortgage lead generation system down.

One More Mortgage Lead Generation Tip: As described in my real estate lead generation article, create a guide that you can offer your prospects both online and offline as your mortgage lead generator. Make sure both your ad and the title of your lead generator are compelling. See the real estate article for more on this.

Big Money Real Estate Lead Generator: Where are prospects gathering? In this economy there are tens of thousands of foreclosures waiting for buyers to snatch them up. As a result people are looking to buy foreclosures.

Why not have your own class on how to buy foreclosures in your area? Offer a free report as a real estate lead generator: 10 Costly Mistakes People Make When Buying Foreclosure Real Estate and How To Avoid Them! Then, help these people find foreclosures and make a sale.

Good title, right? Use this in your real estate lead generation and you’ll get results. I am certain of it.

Hand out flyers advertising your real estate lead generator at auctions. Maybe banks would like your guide to hand out to customers. Or mortgage brokers, insurance agents, financial planners, etc.

More useful real estate marketing and lead generation tips…

Real estate agents have a term that is very useful to any business – The Farm. The Farm is an area, usually geographically around their office, and they go into it and cultivate it for leads and harvest the results. This is how it’s been done for decades.

The trouble is that they do it the hard way – by cold calling, door knocking or ineffective flyers in your letterbox. It’s a valid business method, but it’s manual labor, hard work, and there are much more efficient and effective ways to generate leads.

Real Estate Lead Generation — Direct mail. Direct mail is going to be a very good way to find buyers and sellers in your local area. You can start with an inexpensive letterbox drop, but before you send anything out, compare it with the flyers your competition is sending out, their ads, etc. If they look similar, throw it out and start again. You can’t break through the clutter by doing what everyone else does.

The first change you should make, and this goes for all advertising material, is to have a bold, attention grabbing headline, at the top. Include some emotional benefits in the middle, and make sure you have an irresistible offer, a reason to respond. So, if your flyer now looks ugly, lots of words, completely different from every other agent’s flyers, then you’re ready to go.

A good powerful sales letter can work even better. The same emotional direct response copywriting guidelines are used here, in longer form. It only needs to be a page or two long, offering something of real value (not a valuation), a reason for them to contact you. Then follow up with letters, postcards, flyers, that’s the key – a sequence of contacts. I bet you get real estate lead generation flyers in your letterbox all the time, and probably from different agents every time. Because they don’t stand out or follow up.

You can also employ some more unusual tactics. More and more people are searching on the internet for local businesses. Google provides ‘local’ ads, and searches will often include locations, such as “buy home Michigan”, or “real estate austin”. Craigslist has local sections, although it’s reputation is tarnished, and a quick search  will give you pages of classified sites. With the internet, remember that your aim is the same – you are generating leads, you want enquiries and responses, you don’t want a business card in cyberspace.

How about broadcast voice? Companies can blanket an area in calls, playing a recorded message, generating leads for you, on autopilot. And there’s broadcast fax. Although not every home has a fax, it can still work well, automatically. (Of course these two lead generation methods are highly regulated in many places, so get your own legal advice before doing anything).

You can even buy leads from other companies. Usually generated on the internet, these are genuinely interested people you can sell to. But you should be very careful when buying real estate leads from online companies. Many are outright scams that re-sell the same leads to multiple agents, or they are not qualified at all.

The point is to make sure you stand out from the rest. Statistics say that a person sees an average of 1,000 to 2,000 plus advertising messages per day. So if you look the same as everyone else, why should people do business with you?

Subway is now taking it to the next level, and I am sure many businesses are going to follow suit. Their text message ordering site is online: SubwayNow.com

You can now order a sandwich via text messaging. This is going to work wonders for the Subway franchise because cell phones and text messaging are becoming a part of our daily lives, and the smart marketer will capitalize on the opportunity to use low cost sms marketing and text message marketing in their businesses.

You don’t have to be a big business to use text messaging in your marketing.

Read more about Subway’s entry into text message marketing and food service.