Seth: Hey, everybody, how's it going? Seth Williams here from REtipster.com.

Today I'm talking with Phillip Ton from REIPrintmail. So I learned about REIPrintmail not long ago and when I got on my first call with them, I learned about a lot of cool things they were doing, some really interesting direct mail templates, different types of value propositions that they bring to the market. And I thought it was worth talking about it right here to all of you with REtipster.

Not saying that you need to go with them, but I want you to at least be aware of what they're doing and you can sort of self-select and decide, “Is this right for me or not?” And Phillip is going to walk us through the website, how the company works, and what you can expect if you decide to work with them.

So Phillip, welcome. How's it going?

Phillip: Hey, pretty good, Seth, thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. REtipster audience. Good to meet you guys.

Seth: Yeah, maybe we'll just start from the very beginning. The foundational level. What is REIPrintmail?

Phillip: REIPrintmail. We're a 31-year-old direct-response marketing company. I like to say 31 years because that resonates with people saying, “Hey, a company that's still going strong made it on the 5000 INC fastest-growing private companies out there.”

Being that we're 31 years in business means we've made it through two recessions and we're still kicking butt, still going strong. About eleven years ago, we entered the REI space. We specialize in real estate investors. So based on our templates, based on our customer service, that's what sets us apart. Jumping into eleven years ago, jumping into that REI space, we grew to be the biggest and largest REI direct mail marketing company in the nation.

Two years into that market, we realized, “Hey, what's going on here? What's happening to people when they have that bad stigma of direct mail? Why do people have that belief that it's not working anymore?” What we noticed is that there are coaches, you can go anywhere in the nation and go on Facebook groups, go on YouTube, and find a coach. And at the end of the day, that coach is going to say, yeah, you got to give me a retainer fee, $1,000, $1,500, whatever it is to get some coaching.

We said, hey, you know what? What if we provide our customers service that we've always provided for 31 years, assigned a free direct marketing coach to analyze your market, keep you on best practice, give you one-on-one tutorial on what to mail, how to mail, how many pieces are required to mail? Taking all that guesswork out, making your life easier. As an investor, we attached our direct marketing to it. So you get me a coach like myself, absolutely free. It's complimentary with going with REIPrintmail.

And at the end of the day, we just love to share our advice. We want to make better investors in the world. We want to educate the world. We're a marketing company, but at the end of the day, what I consider us, we're a people development firm. We're a real estate investor development firm where there is true transparency. We put everything on the table, inform our clients, and then let them make the best decision they possibly could with all education and tools at hand. Seth: The thing you mentioned about a coach, so that was one of the first things that stuck out to me that I haven't seen any other mail service provider do in terms of sign-up. And there's actually a person that you can talk to and they'll actually give you some insights on, like, “Send this kind of mail to this market because this has been shown to work better.” Is that the idea? Like, what exactly does this coach do for a person?

Phillip: The coach is hand in hand, but we are an extension of their marketing team. So once they come on board with us, we're an extension of their marketing. So what we do is we analyze the market. Typically it starts with a first 15-minute phone call, us getting to know each other, just getting to know who the investor is, and then letting them know who we are.

So building that trust, building that rapport, building that relationship. Because, at the end of the day, it's a partnership. And I say partnership lightly there because people are associating, “Oh, partnership. That means I got to give some of my funds once I get a deal. How much does REIPrintmail take from that deal?”

We don't. At the end of the day, you're paying for paper, ink, postage, and that's it. Like we said, it's complimentary to have that direct marketing coach. Can you go without and place orders through REIPrintmail without a coach? Absolutely. All day.

Do I recommend it? Not really. At the end of the day, you'll be mailing blindly. What a coach actually does here, Seth, is the coach takes a look at their market, wherever their target audience is whether it's single-family, residential, multifamily, commercial land acquisition, whatever it is. Because we mail 7 to 8 million pieces of mail a month. We track every single piece of mail that goes out. So what's working in the market, we're linked up with big investors out there. And if they're making it and it's working for them, we share that knowledge with the newbies that are starting off or the smaller investors.

So based on that data and our beta testing across the nation with our templates and mail pieces, we kind of have to a certain extent what mail pieces resonated, what's generating that response rate, what that response rate is, how many mail pieces are required to generate a response rate.

At the end of the day, it's a numbers game. You'll look at the numbers and in certain areas, let's say you're in California, if you're not mailing 5,000 pieces of mail, you're probably not getting a deal. And at the end of the day, all direct marketing coaches at REIPrintmail, our objective is to make sure our investors are getting a deal.

Seth: When you're talking about, you're able to see what works for other people. So how do you know what works for other people? Do they somehow report back to you with like, yeah, I got a deal, or this response rate is what I got? How do you know that stuff?

Phillip: We track every single mail piece. You have a coach that's assigned to you. You're designated direct money coach just like myself. So what I do is once we launch a campaign together, we do follow-ups. We follow up two weeks after that campaign dropped. Once it hits the mailbox, we call you. And like I said, it's a partnership based on trust and honesty.

So I call you, saying, “Hey, we mailed out 5,000 mailers. How many phone calls did you get? And of those five phone calls that you got, how many were don't call me, lose my number, or hey, your offer is too low, what happened?” We play that scenario saying, hey, we follow up with you, we track that, and then at that point we'll see your KPI, Key Performance Indicators, what's working, what's not.

Seth: Is there any way that you track this automatically through, I don't know, on the mail page? It's like, hey, call this specific number that we can track and tell how many people are calling, or use this QR code which you can somehow track that way. Or is it just a manual phone call to the user to say, how to go, that kind of thing?

Phillip: At REIPrintmail, like I said, we're an all-in-one workshop here. We help investors in every aspect. So there are areas that we would offer that, we offer our CRM and VA response team where you can pull a track number if it triggers a call that goes on a report on your CRM and saying, hey, you got this many inbound calls from that mail piece.

Seth: Do you guys track deliverability, too, so people can know when their mail actually hit mailboxes or anything like that?

Phillip: Unfortunately, not like Amazon. Not like UPS or FedEx. We use the United States Postal Service. So the way we track return addresses is using that first class postage where the United States Postal Service tracks it. In 45 days, we can send a notice to the United States Postal Service saying, hey, did this get dropped? Based on the postage, if it's first class, we know it's going to be anywhere from one to seven days when the post office drops. If you're using marketing mail, which used to be associated with bulk mail, it usually takes about two to four weeks to drop. We always add that skin in there. So we add that mailer that gets sent to you, the investor, so they see what the product looks like. They see their mail piece and associate with it.

Seth: How does this work? Say, if I sign up with you right now and I have my own list, I've got my own mail template, like I have my normal way that I do this, do I just give that stuff to you and then you monkey around with it so that it works? Or do I just kind of throw that out and start over from scratch with new, better-looking mail templates that you guys have? What is the process, the journey, look like for a new customer for you?

Phillip: So we'll do a full walkthrough of a new client, a new family of what we would walk them through. First we’d be setting up a 15-minute phone call. Like we said, we get to know each other. No pitch, nothing like that. We tell them who we are, figure out what their business model is, where their target area is.

So they would provide us with zip codes, counties, state, whatever it is. And if they have their own list, then we would look in that geographic area where they're at and say, hey, you know what? This is the mail piece that we would recommend. This is the mail piece that's generating the highest response rate, and at that point, we can attach their list and mail it.

Now, let's say someone's mail piece, but they sent us a list of 100 mains and numbers, and we don't stop them. But what we want to do is we want to play the numbers game where we'll look in their area and say, hey, this is a response rate based on sending this many. And if that response rate is too low, we know at the end of the day, based on log averages, based on the average across the nation, for someone starting off in real estate investment, they need to generate at least 20 phone calls in order to make a deal. If you don't generate 20 phone calls, you're not talking to enough people because the first five, ten phone calls, you're going to fumble because you're brand new, and we understand that. And it's okay to fumble because you're going to improve every single step.

If you can get 20 inbound phone calls, you're expected to get the deal. At the end of the day, there are no guarantees, but the expectation, the law of averages, 20 phone calls for a newbie.

Seth: I get a lot of the stuff you're saying. I don't know for sure, but I'm half assuming that what you're talking about is with houses and house investors. And I know with land investors it's just kind of a different animal in different ways. I wonder how much crossover is there, is it the same kind of thing, or are there totally different assumptions to be made when you're talking about what works best and response rates and that kind of thing?

Phillip: Correct. So we work with some of the biggest names out there in land investments. We do work with some big names, I'm sure everybody's heard of them. But when it comes to land acquisition, we know that people are buying land for what amount of market value they're buying that land for.

So we cater to that when land acquisition, we know that everybody's starting to jump over to land acquisitions now and buying it. So the competition level is getting a little harder, a little higher, because people are jumping on board.

But that being said, we've seen a significant response rate based on land versus single-family. So we'll analyze that whole market. We do our research as your coach to figure out what's working best based on what's working out there in the market.

Seth: If somebody is sending mail to a new market that maybe you guys haven't worked in before, land specifically, is it kind of just like admitted guesswork at that point or is it sort of comparing it to other…

Phillip: You could throw a dart anywhere on that map and we're sending mail there.

Seth: Is that for land and houses or just one?

Phillip: All of the above.

Seth: Yeah, gotcha.

So I know one thing that struck me when I first did my call with you guys to figure out what you're all about. And I'm just saying this because it has to be addressed because you guys are not the cheapest shop in town in terms of a per mail piece cost to send out direct mail. And it kind of depends on who you're comparing it to and what the standard is in your mind, but it's definitely not the cheapest one. So why would a person pay more with you versus going with a cheaper option out there?

Phillip: The results. Are you closing deals? Are you getting deals? We play the long number game. Our objective is to make sure you're getting a deal because, at the end of the day, it's what matters. Are you getting a deal from your mail piece, whether you paid a penny for it or whether you paid $0.03 for it, if you're not getting a deal and you're spending less money, averages say you're going to be spending more in order to get a deal. At the end of the day, using our method, using our philosophy here at our REIPrintmail, our objective is to get you a deal.

Seth: That's a big deal. Because I know with direct mail, I hate this about it. Whenever I hear from somebody who they did the stuff, they sent out the mail and the deals didn't come in, they want me to tell them what the problem is and why it didn't work. And it's like there are a million different things you can do wrong to mess with this up.

And it makes me wonder, with this role of a coach that you take on or other people in the company, are there certain potential mistakes that you can help catch and save a person from as they're going through this?

Because I know with a lot of other companies, you are on your own. At the most, if you have a relationship with somebody, that relationship is just to get you to order more mail. It's not to actually teach you anything. There's just not that much help in terms of actually executing it right. So are there certain things where you could be like, oh, I don't know if I would do that, I would do it this way instead? Based on these results or what are some examples of things that you could help a person with?

Phillip: Like our competitors, we love them, don't get us wrong. We don't talk down on any other company. But are they asking the right questions? Are you asking them how many mail pieces are required? Are they giving you that answer? Hey, which mail piece works the best? Five years ago, what was it? A yellow letter? Handwritten?

Fine. Send out an envelope. That worked great. Killed the market. We know nowadays we send that same letter. What's that associated with the lowball offer? At the end of the day, it's marketing. So why would someone send a letter and respond to it if they already associated that in their mind? Because they've seen it in the past, saying, if I call this guy, it's just a lowball offer at that point.

So we're always tweaking it. We're always tweaking and changing that. We're experts at what we do. We're experts at direct mail. We call up with our own pieces. We test the waters to see if they're working. And at the end of the day, the results are what proves it. If our clients are getting deals and they're happy, and once they get that deal, it's a life changer. From zero to one is a life changer.

Seth: Oh, yeah, for sure.

Phillip: And it's scalable. You got one deal in 30 days. How do I get two deals? We change the whole philosophy, get you two deals, and then we go to three deals. And then once we generate a predictable lead flow for you, we offer a CRM package where we have a VA team that's trained, heavily hired, trained by us, our CRMs built by investors or investors, where we're handling that influx of phone calls now just to make your life easier. So we cater to every single tier.

Seth: So I got a couple of questions here and maybe it makes sense to actually get into the website and you can show us around a little bit.

And for those of you out there who are just listening to this, maybe in podcast format and you can't see what we're talking about, I'll try to sort of annotate what we're seeing, but if you want to see it, check out the video in the show notes for this episode.

But one question is, are there any minimum order amounts? Can I just send out one letter with you, just as a ridiculous example? Or 50 or 100? Do I have to do 5,000 units? Are there any minimums with you guys or no?

Phillip: Yes. So that being said, there are minimums. Our minimum lowest order amount, quantity-wise, would be 100 pieces. And then we have our price breaks at 500 quantity, we have our price breaks at 1,000, which is going to be our biggest price break.

But typically, we know the biggest stipulation when it comes to direct mail is someone's budget. So we analyze their market, we build out a campaign, and the last piece of the puzzle is sitting in their budget, making sure that works for them. And if our recommendations don't fit their budget, we want to build them a safety net on, hey, this is what it looks like. We all shoot for that 30-day close because this generation, nowadays, they want instant gratification. So we build it out for a 30-day close or a 30-day response rate to where you're getting enough responses to make a deal.

Now for the last stipulation, the last piece of the bubble, if their budget will fit that, then we tweak that model. But then, instead of the 30 days, we send it to 90 days to spread the budget out. And then from 90 days, six months if needed, most of the design is done within 90 days.

Seth: This whole thing about just even the name REIPrintmail, instead of just some other mail company that does it for anybody and everybody, like political campaigns, religious organizations, other businesses, that kind of thing. Is there some kind of competitive edge or benefit that you guys have, just being that you exist for real estate investors? That's the point. It's not serving anybody and everybody.

Is it kind of just this general understanding of what to say and what marketers are expecting and how to get results from that kind of industry?

Phillip: REIPrintmail Real Estate Investors. The reason why it's named that is because we're experts in the direct mail marketing for real estate investors. At the end of the day, we print whatever you need us to print. If it's a custom design that you have a site business, we'll definitely do that for you.

We just won't be able to know the response rate at that point. It's going to be based on normal mail. We specialize in real estate investors because, at the end of the day, our objective is to make sure they're getting those deals or we're presenting enough predictable lead flow for them to generate a deal. But because it's called REIPrintmail, we're specifically geared for real estate investors.

Seth: I mean, I know when I first started doing direct mail many years ago, I used Click2Mail, which was like a self-serve website. You just get in, you do your own order. If you screw it up, it's your problem.

And then ITI DirectMail or letterprinting.net. It was kind of a similar thing with a little bit more human involvement. And then with RocketPrint, I couldn't do it on my own. I had to go through a person and they had to kind of hold my hand.

With you guys, can I do this all on my own? If I'm an introvert and I don't want to talk to anybody, do I have to work with you to make this happen?

Phillip: If you're an introvert and you don't want to talk to us, we completely understand. Some people don't want to talk, but at the end of the day, they want to just go ahead and place their order.

There's a lot of guessing when you do that, but once you get that first order with a direct marketing coach, you'll kind of understand. But like I said, hey, you know what? We recommend talking to a coach. Are you required to talk to a direct marketing coach? No, not at all. You can go to our website, place that order.

What our coaches do, though, is they're going to see the order come through, they're going to make sure everything's done properly. Some people say, hey, does a website work if I put my website? Those questions are answered with a direct marketing coach. Do I put my website, is my email and then did I attach my list right? Is my list sent in the right format? You can definitely do that on your own. If there are any errors, our coaches are going to be reaching out.

If you're perfect at it and you send it through, they'll go straight to the printers. Our production team will take a look at it, make sure everything works, we’ll do a visual inspection to make sure everything's proper, and they'll go to the printers. We'll print it out for you so you can do it on your own, or we always recommend you talk to one of ours. That way, they can be another point of resource there for you.

And there's no difference if you did it on your own or if you got a coach. You're paying the same price at the end of the day.

Seth: And for those of you out there who want to give this a try, we do have an affiliate link with REIPrintmail. It's The retipster.com/reiprintmail, and you can sign up and talk to Phillip and get started.

Do you want to show us how the website works?

Phillip: Yeah. So I'm going to share my screen with you guys so you can take a look at it. I'm going to move this over here. So this is going to be our website. Once you click REtipster link, it's going to send you here.

Don't forget that all first-time registered users through REtipster get 10% off on their paper, ink, and mailer. We don't discount postage. Unfortunately, that's just due to U.S. postal services.

Let's just do a full walkthrough here. So once you click that link off of REtipster, it's going to send you to this page here.

Click here, log in, you can register. Simple way to remember your username, password, email, skip it—all three are the same. Your username is your email, your password. They'll send you back to REIPrintmail here.

Because we're the fulfillment center printing for a lot of other database companies out there, we were tracking that data as well as saying, hey, if you got on Facebook and you put a post saying, hey, who has the best data out there? You're going to get about 50 responses. And all 50 of those responses are going to be correct because everybody has great data, but depending on where your market is.

So based on your geographic area, we offer REISmartData, which is our database that used to be called REW Smart. We knew that based on that in the past, that we were mailing out to people pulling data from REW Smart. They were getting better results. So what we did was we acquired their company, approached them with an offer, took over their company, reengineered it, and provided our customer care with that.

It's refreshed on a daily basis. I know a lot of people have come to us with their list and saying, “We mailed out based on a list that we pulled from another source. And that property was under contract or was already sold.” Because most other data companies refresh their data on about a 30- to 60-day refresh. We refresh our data on a daily basis. Based on that, we can go in there, pull data for you, and attach it to your mail piece. We would go in there, set our filters.

You're going to have multiple questions on what kind of data do I pull when it comes to land acquisition or single family, what qualifies as a true motivated seller. What we'll do is we'll analyze that market as your direct marketing goes, we analyze that market, we see what properties are moving, what criteria did they fall in. Is it five years ownership? Is it ten years ownership? How much equity is there? What's the market value? Should I be attacking people on the MLS? Should I go after bank-owned or LLCs? Or should I go after owner-occupied or absentees?

We answer those questions for you. We sit there, we have that discussion, just like how we're having today. We just sit there and talk. Once we get to know the market, once we share our input, you'll have all that information on the table so you can make your most informed decision.

Seth: A lot of people, in the REtipster audience anyway, will come to this having a list already. It sounds like if they want, they could just get it right here from REIPrintmail. Say I'm coming to you with a list and with a template, like I know just what I want to do. I just want to get started and do a mail merge and place the order. What would that ordering process look like?

And then maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the specific templates that you guys have for mail. Because I know that really caught my eye when you were showing me before. I was just like, wow, those mail pieces are amazing.

Phillip: Absolutely. So that being said, you would log in, register, and then it'll send you back out to this page. All you do is click Start Campaign.

Now our minimum order, like we mentioned earlier, was a hundred pieces, but let's do a thousand. So we see the price range here. Now you already have a list, so you're just going to follow through the steps. 1,000 pieces, I already have a list. And then we do unique postcards and then unique mailers. So you have your letter, envelope mailer, or unique postcards.

Let's just say, for instance, we're going to do a letter this time. We'll click the unique mailer. We'll throw up some of our templates here for land acquisition. That's killing the market for us, generating a significant response. It's our soft offer mail piece. We do have the neutral land letter, if that's what you're looking for. But as far as templates go, we're putting it because it's a land acquisition, it just has a site number. There's no real property address there. So we're putting a property in this address. Here's the number.

The key thing to note in this piece is that when you're marketing to folks, or when you're mailing to folks, what's the first thing you do when you get your mail? For me, I walk straight to the trash can, filter through my trash can. My first filter is to throw away all my spam mail, all my junk mail. When you get a piece like this, the only thing you're seeing is this little window right here where it has your address and the background of a check. Nobody puts money away. Not me. I keep all the money I can. So what we're doing is we're getting past the trash can filter and we're getting inside their house.

So where they're going to take another soft look at this piece. They're actually going to have to open it. That being said, when we do that piece, we're mailing it out in an envelope like this. Doesn't mention anything about real estate. It just shows just through that window as their name has their address, time-sensitive.

So it's marketing. At the end of the day, we're a marketing company. We got to market it away to pass that trash can to get into their hand. Once they get that envelope, they're opening it up. They're reading the message, scrolling back up here, scrolling up, and then they're seeing an investor wants to buy their property.

But the key thing about this piece is that we got to manipulate that dollar amount to connect with the seller. And in certain areas, we know, based on the amount of mail we send out there, based on the response rate, what percentage that is. That's where the coach comes into play and says, hey, you know what, this is the percentage that most folks are doing. I would recommend that.

Seth: It's worth pointing out, I mean, this is another differentiator between REIPrintmail and any other mail shop up there is that these guys understand real estate investors and what the messaging has to be in order to get results. Literally the future of your company depends on getting this right.

So if you're a direct marketer and maybe you've had your template that you've used for years and you just kind of stuck on that, or maybe you want to try something different, but you don't really know what else to say or how else to say it or how to make it look. I mean, this is a huge part of the value of working with REIPrintmail is that they have it. There are all kinds of stuff you can try that's very unique and new and fresh to your recipients that they probably haven't seen before. And I would imagine as time goes on, you'll probably come up with even more of this stuff, right?

Phillip: The market is always changing. I mean, if you're stuck on one piece and we'll write it out until it stops working, until that response rate drops, if we're not getting calls, you're not getting deals, we don't want to be in that business because we're going to go bankrupt. But if we're getting you a deal, there's no reason to question, hey, does this work or not? Because we taking that guesswork out for you.

Going back to sharing my screen with you. We can print it if it's a neutral letter. One of the main things that we love—and we carry it with a badge of honor—is we got the first cease and desist from Google saying, hey, stop using our images. We didn't know any better, saying, hey, they're online. We can use their images and put it on a mail piece or a postcard, a picture of their land lot, a satellite image of their land lot, or a picture of their home picture. It resonates with people because you don't throw a picture away of your house, you stick that on your fridge. It's a constant reminder of someone wanting to buy your house.

Seth: With land, for example, I know a lot of times in rural areas, there is no Google Street view out there. Would you take a satellite image of that with a parcel line or something? Or what would you have in place?

Phillip: Yeah, we'll do a Google image of that parcel of land. That being said, there's another question to bring up: where does this check work? I mean, if we're going to metropolitan areas and mailing the people that are used to getting checks in the mail, this is a great piece. But then if you're going to rural America where they don't get too many checks, they're going to think it's mail, then we would do a neutral letter. How do we market a neutral letter? And we do all custom work.

So just based on this, if you had your own template and you wanted us to send that, we'd be able to send that as well. But we have to ask ourselves that question, how do we get past the trash can based on that, if we're not utilizing the check in rural America where the check doesn't work because we track it, we're not generating the response rate, how else would we market? We know a neutral land letter works, but how do you disguise it to get past that trash can?

You can do the number ten envelope handwritten to make it look more personable. Then we also offer the wedding style invitation where it sticks above every single mail piece there. Put a real stamp on there and we do the first-class stamp handwritten as well. But it looks like a wedding invitation, so they're going to take a deeper dive into it. They're not just going to take this piece and throw it away, because it looks like a wedding invitation or birthday card invitation.

We build it all together so every single campaign that you have, we're getting past that trash can, getting that open rate, that read rate, and triggering a response rate for them to call you. Once we build that response rate, you're creating a predictable lead flow. Because even if they're calling you to sell their property, if they make that phone call, we know we've gotten a hold of them somehow.

Seth: What if somebody is maybe a brand new land investor or maybe they've been doing this for a while and they have their template that they stand by that they've used for so long. If they bring an existing template to you, can you work with that, or do they have to use one of yours?

Phillip: No. Yeah, just going back to that screen. Sorry, I keep jumping back and forth going back to that screen right here.

We can do custom pieces based on the template that you send us. If it has ink in there, if it's black and white, black ink, or if it has color ink, we'll do that based on the paper. If you want to do yellow paper, white paper, pink paper, blue paper, we price that out accordingly. If it's a template where it's just black ink, normal type font, we'll jump that piece for you with your own template. If you're a land investor, and I know land investors like to put their contract on there as well, we'll do that for you. Put it together, we can stack up the four pages in envelope.

Seth: For those who are watching the video, if you're a land investor, you'll probably agree. Nine of the ten templates you've shown me, I've never seen anything even remotely like it before. And I get plenty of offers from other people on the properties that I own. And I'm pretty familiar with a lot of the other templates out there, and there are really not that many different versions of it. A lot of people just don't have the creativity or the energy to think of a new way to say it or a new way to look.

And that's a big deal. I mean, to be able to stand out and look different from everything else to the point that even I take pause and be like, whoa, what is this? And open that. That's worked a lot.

Phillip: I'll tell you a story. The mail pieces and the quality that we print with, as far as the ink goes and the paper, we love it because we had a story where one of my investors, one of my clients called and said, hey, I had a seller go try to cash that check. He walked into the bank and tried to cash the check, and I loved it. And I loved it. I'm like, so what happened? He goes, “I got a deal out of it. I got a deal!”

Seth: Yeah. Whenever I see a really good idea like that, like this thing that looks like a check, I've seen that out there from time to time, but I haven't seen it done at mass scale where everybody's doing it. But what I like about it is that you've got so many different good options to work with that even if everybody did start doing that, you could easily pivot and look very different and still look very good and eye-catching, probably at the same level of effectiveness. So it's not like you're a one-trick pony. You're like a 20-trick pony.

Phillip: And the beauty of REIPrintmail is that we don't stack our mail. If we know that we have another investor using that exact same mail piece in your same area, we’ll let you know, saying, hey, maybe we switch it up to a different color. Maybe we switch it up to a different mail piece. Tax season, green checks work.

At the end of the day, the message here can be changed, any of the font here. But what we want to do is send out the check to get through the door. One piece that we offer and we're the only print shop, a direct mail printhouse that offers it, is our slap pack. I'm sure you've gotten these in the mail. We do it for land, we do it for single-family homes. We even do it for commercial real estate as well. But it's the cellophane window. It's the trifold. There's no envelope required. You still see the check. It's self-sealed so it drives the price down.

Now you're not paying for an envelope anymore. Now you're paying pennies on the dollar for a mail piece that actually works, generates a response rate, and it's just killing the market and we're the only ones doing it. You got to stay ahead all the time.

Seth: Yeah, that's hard to do.

Phillip: It's hard, but we do that.

Seth: Being ahead of the curve and being able to think about what would resonate with people before anybody else has done it, it almost kind of takes some creative genius to do that. So it's kind of nice to just have that job done for you.

Phillip: Exactly. And then not having to second guess or know if that mail piece works. Because we're giving you hard numbers saying, hey, this is what that piece is doing. This is what it's doing in your state. This is what it's doing here. This is the number that we should be expected. It's the expectation and hard numbers of what the average is. That numbers game. Then we know exactly how many phone calls it's going to trigger.

At the end of the day, there are no guarantees, but if we have scientific data and results that are backing it, hard facts backing it, then we have a good estimate of what's going to happen.

Seth: I don't know if you hear this much these days with how your company works, but from time to time I'll hear from somebody who's like, “Yeah, I sent out 5,000 units of mail or 10,000, and I got nothing from it.” And I'm just like, oh gosh, that's terrible. That's just such a kick in the gut.

Phillip: Yeah.

Seth: So if somebody were to come to you and say that, how do you pick apart what went wrong? How do you dissect them? “Okay, well, next time we got to change this. That was the problem.” Do you do that or no?

Phillip: Yeah, we ask them. Well, it's true transparency. If you're believing in us, we're going to believe in you. We're going to ask you, what piece did you send? Who told you to print that? Or why did you print that? We analyze what they did and then we kind of merge it to how we view our business, and we see the dividing factors there. I understand you mailed out 5,000, but what mail piece did you use? Who did you target?

Because at the end of the day, if your data sucks, your mail piece sucks, who is your target audience? What mail pieces did you use? Did you use something that worked great in 1996? Did you use something that worked great pre-COVID? Just times change, and if you're not with times, you're mailing blind. We hate to see that happen, but then we'll fix it. Fix it so you're not mailing blindly anymore.

Seth: Yeah, Maybe there's an argument to be made for doing as much as you can through REIPrintmail, including the list, the mail piece, what you're saying, all that. Because I think the more corners you guys can control, the more it seems like the success would be ensured. I mean, not guaranteed, but the fewer loose ends that are hanging out there, like, I don't know where you got this from, I don't know how you sorted that thing.

If you can actually know that, and if a person could walk through this with your coach at REIPrintmail, I mean, does that improve the success rate at all?

Phillip: Well, that being said, depends where I pulled their list from, we utilize other services, price. We utilize price for land acquisition, and we know their filters that they use in there. PropStream, we used to use them before we owned a data company, and we know how to set the filters in their list source.

Wherever you pull your data from, we will share our filters that are working in that market. I'll send it right to you. You can pull your data yourself, or I'll send you the filters that are working. And then once you pull that data, you send it over to us, and then we'll attach it with the mail piece.

But we share the filters. I don't know how to reiterate it enough that we are true transparency. We want you to succeed. We're not here to say, mail out 10,000 mail and come back and mail out 10,000 more. No, you mailed out 10,000 with us. We're expecting you to get a deal no matter what at that point, and we're going to follow up to make sure you're following best practices as well.

Hey, what happens when your world changes and you get that first deal? Especially for the newbies, anybody that gets a lump sum. Let's say a land acquisition deal, average $10,000, $15,000 on the deal that changes their life because they got it all at once. What do they do with that money? We follow up with you. We stay on track with you to make sure you're reinvesting that in your business to quadruple it. Or we set the limit saying, “Why don't you make a deal with us and we'll make a deal with you?”

Where? Once you get to $100,000 in profit, spend five grand on yourself, but reinvest that money to keep this machine going. Because if the wheel is rolling, you don't want to stop it.

Seth: As we kind of wrap this thing up here, I don't know if you're going to be able to answer this question, but if you can, I'm just out of curiosity, what kind of person should not use REIPrintmail? Is anybody out there where you say, “No, we're probably not the right one for you. Go somewhere else.”

Phillip: If someone says, “Hey, I want to mail out 100 hundred pieces.” I know 100 is our minimum. And they're like, “I just want to try it out and I want to do this,” we as coaches will kind of reject it. We'll just say, “You know what? It's not going to generate that deal because, at the end of the day, my objective is to get you a deal. If I know deep down inside doing this for the amount of years I've been doing it, if I know that you're not getting a deal from it, I don't want to take your money because then you're just going to hate us. You're going to give us a bad review.”

We have 200-plus reviews on Google, reviews that are all by investors taking time out of their day to write a review about us because of the success stories they've had. So I always encourage any newbie that's looking into REIPrintmail. If the company that you're using for direct mail doesn't have reviews from investors, it's saying something.

And by us providing that level of customer care, by us analyzing your market, assigning you a direct marketing coach for free, by us doing that, we know that we're catering to the right client. Our objective is to get you the deal. And if you came to us saying, “I want to mail out 100 pieces,” I'd love to take your money, love to mail out 100 pieces, but you're not going to get the results, then you're going to hate me.

At the end of the day, what we're going to tell you, if you're steadfast, you want to use REIPrintmail, you just want to do 100 pieces, you want to use us for our templates, we'll do it. But then, at the end of the day, we're going to tell you, hey, these are the results. At 100 mail pieces, you're going to get maybe a 0.3 response rate. That's not even a phone call.

Seth: Yeah, and that is a good point.

You mentioned about your Google review. I don't know that I've ever seen this where a company has over 200 reviews and it's a 5 across the board. That never happens. I don't know how you do that. Did you pay Google for anything?

Phillip: We don't pay. These are all reviews that people took the time out of their day, and they said they wanted to rave about us. They say we're the hidden gem in the real estate investment industry.

And the beauty of working here is that we're a family. We joke around, we're loud, we're obnoxious. But just because you're assigned Phillip as your direct marketing coach doesn't mean I'm the only coach. All the coaches, I believe there are eight of us, all eight of us get together every three weeks, and we see what our clients are going, who's mailing out to Missouri, who's mailing out to California, who's mailing out to North Carolina, which is a hot market? Who's mailing, what mail piece did you use? What was your response rate for that client?

We share that data. So you're collectively getting the whole company backing you up on your campaign.

Seth: You guys have your whole print shop in-house, right? You're not outsourcing this to some other company? It's all printed right at your location.

Phillip: Oh, yeah, everything's done here. I can walk next door, hit stop on the printer if there was an error, and I'll tell you right now there’s 0.0001% chance there's an error. Because before we print anything, let's say we take the order. You came to us and said, here's my template. Your template or our template? And you said, “Here's my list, here's my mail piece, this is what I want to do, I want to go ahead and process that.” We don't go ahead and say, we're printing right away. No. It takes us about two or three days to generate a proof, simply about two day turnaround time.

So I send it over to production. They generate a PDF proof for you. They send you a finalized list. They'll send you an offer column saying, “This is the amount that's going on that check, and it's manipulated per property.”

So you'll see it. You're going to approve the proof. Within two days, you get that proof, it's going to be a PDF version. It's going to have your information on there. It's going to have the separate attachment. It's going to have your list that we're mailing to thoroughly double-check that.

Typically, what I like to do for my clients, is I like to jump on a phone call saying, “Your proof came in. Please double-check that. And then, if there's anything wrong with it, list them all out. Don't just list one thing, because it's going to delay the process of how long it takes to print. Because every time there's a change, it's another two days to generate a new proof.

What we do is send you that proof then you list out any changes that you need to be made. Sometimes people change their phone number. Sometimes people change their email. If that was the case list it all out. If everything looks good, reply “Approved.” Once you approve it, that's when we start printing.

Seth: Again, if people go to the retipster.com/reiprintmail, that's our affiliate link. And what are the discounts they get if they go through that link?

Phillip: They get a 10% discount on their first order. Or if they even want to just know more, they can go through retipster.com/reiprintmail and then they can just book a 15-minute phone call.

You even get a one-on-one session. Those are free just to discuss your market. Just grab our advice, you go on there, book a 15-minute phone call. If you're ready to launch, I would say book at least 30 minutes to an hour. But we want to build that relationship before we jump onto launching a campaign.

Going back to what Seth had said earlier, I know with Rocket Print they require you to buy 5,000 at a time. We don't have any order requirements. It's pay as you go, pay per order. And after that, if you want to continue, which the majority of our clients always continue, but you're going to pay for every time you do the mail. No minimums as far as how many quantities you need to buy, pre-bought quantities.

Seth: Phillip, thanks again for giving us the overview. Sounds like REIPrintmail is definitely worth checking out. If nothing else, just a phone call to find out is this for me or not? And you can kind of decide for yourself.

Phillip: But I'll leave you on an ending note. Here's the thing about direct mail, period. Whether us or any other print company, the beauty of direct mail is that… I'll paint a picture here. You're standing on stage, you have your mic, and you're saying (if you're using direct mail), you're asking the audience, “Who's interested in selling their house, please step to the left.” You've attacked the whole audience at once, and the ones that stepped to the left are the ones that called you back on your mail piece.

If you're a cold caller, text blast, or anything like that, you're having to go to each person in that audience one at a time, saying, “Do you want to sell your house?”

So the beauty of direct mail is that you've targeted the whole audience all in one. And then the beauty of our template, you've made a soft offer on everybody's house all at once. I love it.

All the coaches here, we love real estate. We're all investors ourselves and we love it. We breathe it, we love it. And we just want to share our advice across the board.

Seth: Again, retipster.com/reiprintmail. If you want to check out the show notes for this episode, go to retipster.com/159 and wish you all the best in your direct mail. Talk to you guys later.

Phillip: Been a pleasure.