Outbound vs. Inbound Marketing — Raise Your Game

Outbound marketing involves directly reaching out to prospects to ask if they want to sell. 

Inbound marketing involves public advertising that urges prospects to contact you. 

Which one works better? 

They both have pros and cons — and the most successful real estate investors and wholesalers combine both. 

Outbound marketing challenges & opportunities

First and foremost, what specific strategies are we talking about? 

Common examples of outbound marketing strategies in real estate investing include:

• Cold calling
• SMS marketing
• Direct mail
• Handwritten notes left at properties

Each can be effective, so keep the following in mind as you choose strategies for your business.

Cold calling & SMS

Increasing regulations such as TCPA and A2P 10DLC laws have made cold calling and SMS outreach more difficult in recent years. 

That higher barrier to entry cuts both ways. Sure, it makes life harder for the marketers who actually do it. But far fewer marketers are even bothering to try — which means less competition. 

That in turn means higher profits per deal, among wholesalers and investors who use cold calling. 

If you opt to cold call prospects, lean into technology such as single-line dialers that can help you avoid spam flags. REsimpli’s Leads Dialer can help you with this. 

As a final thought, many investors also avoid cold calling simply because they don’t like it. Again, that spells lower competition. 

The good news? You don’t have to cold call prospects yourself. You can hire and train a VA to do it, combining a low hourly rate with bonuses for closed deals. 

Direct mail

An oldie but goodie, direct mail remains extremely effective. It can also prove expensive in some markets, depending on the competition and close rates. 

On the plus side, direct mail avoid regulatory hurdles, delivers high-intent leads, and can have a long shelf life. 

On the other hand, it requires a longer lead time compared to faster marketing strategies like SMS messages or PPC ads. Think 60-90 days, before they generate meaningful response rates.

You can lower your cost per lead (and closed deal) by targeting your mailing lists with more precision. Consider targeting absentee owners, vacant properties, tax delinquencies, and probate leads for maximum callback rates. 

And, of course, REsimpli’s list stacking feature can help you combine multiple lists to find the overlap. For example, you might upload a list of vacant properties and a list of out-of-state owners to find properties that fit both criteria. 

Beyond better filtering, it also helps to mail the same list at least three times. Only stop when your response rates drop, the property sells to someone else, or the motivation expires (such as foreclosure or tax sale). 

Types of mail to send

Not surprisingly, the cheaper mailing types perform worse than more expensive ones. I typically see the following response rates for these mailing types:

• Printed Bulk Mail (Pre-Sorted Letters): Less than 0.25%
• Postcards: 0.5% to 0.75% 
• Handwritten Letters: 1% to 1.5% 

Property owners are more likely to open handwritten envelopes and call back handwritten letters. The good news? You can buy these in bulk from companies like RoboQuill and Handwrytten. 

As a general rule, aim to send handwritten letters if you’re mailing fewer than 2,500 recipients. If you’re sending more than 3,000 mailings, consider postcards.

Hand delivered notes

Some investors leave handwritten notes at the property, in blank envelopes taped to the door. If you’re driving for dollars, it’s not even very inconvenient. 

It yields much higher response rates, as you can guess. But it’s not particularly scalable. 

For both mailed and hand delivered letters, give the prospect a phone number where they can text you. Some people prefer texting nowadays to phone calls — at least for the initial contact. 

Professionalize Your Real Estate Business

Professional athletes don’t duct tape together their shoes. So why are you trying to duct tape together your real estate business?

If you want to earn profits like a professional real estate investor, use the tools your pro competitors are using. That starts with marketing and accounting tools like REsimpli. 

Don’t take our word for it. Try it out for yourself with a 30-day free trial. 

We look forward to hearing your feedback and successes after your first month running with the big dogs. 

Inbound marketing channels

When we talk about inbound marketing strategies for real estate investors, the most common include: 

• Pay-per-lead (PPL) services
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
• Radio & TV ads
• Bandit signs
• Billboards
• Craigslist ads
• Referral partners

Here’s a little more detail on these, with some requiring more strategy tips than others. 

Bandit Signs & Billboards

Bandit signs are dirt cheap — you buy a bundle of them and then hang them in high-visibility places in your target neighborhoods. 

Just beware that some municipalities have outlawed them, putting the “bandit” back in bandit signs. 

Billboards are not cheap, but they’re also legal everywhere. They can prove incredibly effective in some markets, and ineffective in others. Try clustering 8-10 of them in a single area to boost brand awareness. 

Craigslist Ads

Do people still use Craigslist? 

It turns out that some people do. Try posting ads as a property buyer, and also responding to rental properties listed for sale. It’s a cheap form of marketing that can occasionally yield a huge payoff. 

Radio & TV Advertising

Radio and television ads are expensive, but they can work wonders for inbound leads. Beyond generating leads directly, they also boost your brand recognition, making sellers more likely to click your PPC ads or call you after receiving direct mail. 

The high cost forms a barrier to entry that keeps out most of your competitors. These ads can differentiate you from them, and help entrench you as the top buyer in your market. 

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Advertising on search engines like Google and Bing, as well as social media platforms like Facebook, can deliver plenty of high-quality leads. They can also get expensive quickly if you’re not closing a strong percentage of your leads.

Bing ads don’t deliver the same volume as Google, but the ads are cheaper and the quality of the leads can be higher. 

Facebook ads also cost less, but in my experience the intent and quality of the leads are lower. 

Some investors run multiple ads under different brand names, sending leads to different websites. Feel free to experiment with this after you’ve already established profitable PPC campaigns, but beware that you’re bidding against yourself at that point. 

Of course, you’ll need a website to send sellers to, when they click your ads. REsimpli users now get free websites, with template landing pages that you can just plug your own images and copy into. Choose from different templates for different seller motivations (foreclosure, tax delinquency, general distressed sellers, etc.). 

You can then A/B test different landing pages to find the one that converts best. 

As a final note, you can charge PPC ads to your credit card and earn reward points. If you spend $10,000 a month on PPC ads and earn $30,000 a month in profits from those leads, you’ll not only earn a strong ROI but also rack up travel rewards quickly. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While SEO has gotten harder in the era of AI answers to search queries, many investors still rank well for local searches. Often they target search keywords like “sell my house fast Omaha,” or “sell house for cash Omaha.” 

Beware that SEO is a long-term strategy. It takes time to rank well for search keywords, to establish your website as an “authority” with search engines. But if you can rank well locally for high-intent searches like the examples above, you can generate ongoing high-quality leads without spending money on ads. 

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) Services

Alternatively, you can just buy leads. 

Some companies specialize in finding motivated seller leads and selling them to real estate wholesalers and flippers. Reputable examples include Motivated Leads and Need To Sell My House Fast. In fact, I’ve interviewed the founders from both companies — check out my interview with Joe Tenenbaum and Bryan Driscoll for details about how these companies work. 

These companies only sell leads to one buyer, so you’re not competing with a dozen other investors who bought the same lead. The downside? Leads go to the highest bidder. 

Bids vary by county. Investors enter their bid per lead, and the total number of leads they want to buy that month. If Flipper Fred bids $350 per lead for ten leads, and I bid $300 per lead, the first ten leads go to him before his $3,500 budget maxes out. Then leads start flowing to me. 

Word to the wise: refine your sales strategy before buying leads. The higher your conversion rate (percent of leads that you close as deals), the more cost effective it becomes to buy leads. 

Referral Leads

Other people can send you leads as well. If you’re a flipper for example, you can get leads from wholesalers of course. But you can also get them from other local flippers, who may not have the budget or bandwidth to buy a deal that lands in their lap. 

Real estate agents can refer leads to you as well. Most of all, you can build a network of bird dogs, who send you leads in exchange for a fee. For example, postal workers can tip you off when a house becomes vacant, or bartenders and baristas can refer their regulars who have complained about money trouble. 

You have to make it worth their while however. Often that means paying $500 or $1,000 for each referred house that closes. 

Optimizing your marketing ROI

Before you can optimize your return on marketing investment, you have to measure it. 

As a general rule, aim to earn $3-5 for every $1 you spend on marketing. Track your marketing costs and deal closings weekly, attributing the profits from each deal to the marketing channel that produced it. 

Focus on cost per deal, rather than cost per lead. If you convert 10% of your PPC leads and spend $300 per lead ($3,000/deal), that costs you less per deal than than a $5 cold call lead that requires 100 leads to close a deal ($5,000/deal).

That means, of course, that not all leads are created equal. You can filter for the highest quality leads with list stacking, finding leads that meet several criteria such as vacant and in tax sale. 

But how do you track where leads came from? 

Use different phone numbers for each marketing channel. REsimpli helps you set up different tracking numbers for your marketing campaigns. 

Likewise, you can create different landing pages for different web-based leads. You can then A/B test different landing pages to find the ones that convert best. 

As a final thought, you can both close more leads and reduce risk by having more exit strategies. For example, some entry-level properties can be flipped, or wholetailed, or sold through novation, or sold as turnkey rental properties, or kept as BRRRR rental properties. 

Just don’t go too low-end, or you’ll find little demand for the property. 

Tying it together

It doesn’t matter how many leads you bring in, or how high the quality is, if you don’t convert them well. 

The first investor to respond to a lead has the highest chance of closing the deal. Use REsimpli’s Speed to Lead system to ring your phone — and optionally all your sales managers’ phones — when a new lead comes in. 

You also want to automate lead follow-up. If you miss a phone call, REsimpli can send an automated SMS message to the seller, asking them to text you back with a few key details. 

Drip automations keep you in touch with leads, even those that haven’t called you back. Often a lead will respond weeks, months, or even years later, when they receive one of your automated messages, emails, or letters. 

Give REsimpli a free test drive for the next 30 days to see firsthand how our real estate CRM gives you a competitive edge over other investors in your market. You’ll close more deals, cutting down your cost per deal and letting you scale your business in record time.