How SoldFast Uses REsimpli’s List Stacker

Direct mail marketing campaigns can get expensive, and quickly. As a real estate investor, you need to minimize your cost per lead if you want to maximize your return on investment for marketing campaigns. 

To lower your cost per lead, REsimpli uses list stacking to let you quickly compare different lead lists. Here’s how our client SoldFast used list stacking to cut marketing costs and close on more properties. 

What Is List Stacking?

As a real estate wholesaler or investor, you generate or buy access to lists of leads — often distressed properties such as pre-foreclosures, tax liens, or vacant homes. 

But these raw lists come with more noise than signal, making it hard to identify high-probability purchases. List stacking lets you combine and filter these lists to weed out low-likelihood deals. 

For example, you can use list stacking to compare your list of pre-foreclosures to a list showing home equity. That lets you sort out just the pre-foreclosures with significant equity, so you can avoid wasting money on direct mail to upside-down owners.

Or you could stack together lists of homeowners going through divorce, or those who have owned their homes for at least four years, or property owners who don’t occupy the property as their primary residence. The more you refine your list, the more likely you are to only spend money marketing to the best prospects. 

The SoldFast Case Study: Success Through REsimpli’s List Stacker

SoldFast follows the tried-and-true business model of buying distressed properties as-is, fast, for cash. They wholesale or flip those properties as they prefer. 

“We pulled a list of seniors with equity from Deal Machine,” explains Ryan Dossey, founder of SoldFast. “Our original list was north of 8,000 records which included duplicates, invalid addresses, and incomplete data.” 

Dossey used REsimpli’s list stacker to instantly identify and remove those non-viable leads, and drop it down to 7,632. “Simply utilizing REsimpli’s list stacking function allowed us to save north of $500 in marketing on just this one campaign.”

So how exactly did SoldFast trim the fat from their list with REsimpli’s list stacking tools?

Removing Invalid & RTS Addresses

The first step in streamlining the list involved cutting the invalid mailing addresses. 

“The U.S. Postal Service estimates that 4-7% of direct mail marketing gets returned to the sender (RTS). If you’re not removing the RTS addresses from your marketing campaigns, you’re lighting around one month of your entire annual marketing budget on fire. 

“Prior to mailing this particular list, we removed the RTS addresses and suppressed all of our responders. This allows SoldFast to honor opt-out requests from consumers in our market and protect our brand reputation.”

If you have questions about how to remove RTS addresses or turn off your responders for certain groups, contact us for more information on REsimpli’s list stacking.

How SoldFast Refined Further with List Stacking

SoldFast doesn’t stop at removing the duplicate and invalid mailing addresses. They also filter their lists to only send to prospects who are in a position to sell at a low enough price. 

“On all of my lists I do a 35-100% equity filter,” explains Dossey. There’s no point in mailing a homeowner with little or no equity. 

But Dossey didn’t stop there, at least in refining this particular list of senior homeowners. “Seniors are also the only list that I recommend putting a length of ownership filter on. I don’t want to mail a retiree who just purchased their dream home. I want to mail a retiree that’s ready to downsize! Typically I do a minimum length of ownership of around three to five years or longer.” 

SoldFast also increases their open rates with pen-written letters. “We send the sellers custom-branded Ballpoint Marketing greeting letters so the owners actually open them.” The mailing service uses machines that use real ballpoint pens to write both the letters and the mailing addresses on the envelopes. You can also choose colorful, eye-catching envelope styles to further boost open rates. 

SoldFast’s Results

On just this one list, SoldFast sent 7,632 letters. “Within 90 days this campaign generated three contracts and a substantial tracked ROI.”

With each one of those contracts worth five figures in profit, SoldFast earned an enormous return on their direct mail marketing investment. In fact, simply eliminating the non-viable leads through list stacking saved them hundreds of dollars — on just this one list.

“Our annual savings from REsimpli’s list stacker alone more than cover our annual subscription!” 

It underscores why real estate investors need to know their key performance numbers, and track the ROI on every single marketing channel. When you know what works and what doesn’t, you can double down on the former and stop wasting money on the latter. 

Final Thoughts

The costs of direct mail campaigns add up fast, especially when each list contains thousands of leads. “At the time of this writing, we have 175 lists uploaded in REsimpli, spanning 11 geographical regions. I cannot imagine keeping this straight outside of REsimpli.” 

List stacking lets you quickly filter, compare, and refine your lists to only spend money marketing to the absolute best leads. When each letter costs you $1-2, you only want to send mail to the highest-likelihood prospects. Read up on exactly how list stacking works, and try it for yourself with a 30-day free trial. “REsimpli is the only real estate CRM that I endorse. There’s a lot of Podio-built white label garbage out there. I’ve been following the team and using the software since 2019. I’m extremely grateful for what Sharad and the team have built.”