Higher conversion rates, lower marketing costs with list stacking

Still putzing around with multiple spreadsheets for your different lists of real estate leads?

Ever wasted time and money on sending direct mail to the same property twice? 

You’re doing it wrong. 

It’s time to start managing your prospects like a professional — by list stacking in a CRM.

What is list stacking?

List stacking lets you upload multiple lists of properties into a CRM (like, say, REsimpli), and then compare, manage, and market to those lists.

For example, you have a list of 1,000 vacant properties in disrepair that you found through driving for dollars. You also have a list of 5,000 properties in distress, such as pre-foreclosure. 

You could send 6,000 direct mail letters, at a hefty cost. Or you could upload both lists to REsimpli, and discover that 150 of the addresses are invalid, 300 are duplicates between the two lists, and another 400 have owner mailing addresses flagged as “Vacant” by the U.S. Postal Service.

That knocks out 850 letters right there, that you shouldn’t waste money mailing. And that’s just the beginning.

Why real estate investors stack lists

Specifically, real estate wholesalers and investors use list stacking through CRMs like REsimpli for these (really good) reasons:

Combining duplicate addresses

If you send out separate mailers for two separate lists, any duplicate leads receive two letters at the same time. That’s a waste of your precious marketing dollars. 

When you upload a new list of prospects to REsimpli, it just updates your existing records in the database with the new data. For example, it adds the new tags from the new list you uploaded, such as “Vacant” or “Disrepair.”

You can send a single letter to that prospect rather than two, and you’re now armed with more information about them.

Removing invalid addresses

When you buy or generate lists of prospects, not all of them come with full address information. Some might be missing details like the city, state, or zip code. 

Our system can in some cases generate that missing information. If you know the zip code, REsimpli can auto-generate the city and state, for instance. 

Or your list might be missing too much information to contact the owner. In that case, you can simply delete the entry as invalid.

Which, by the way, you can do in bulk rather than scrubbing the list manually.

Identifying the most motivated sellers

Continuing the example above, you upload both lists: properties in disrepair and those with distressed owners.

The database can tell you which properties show up on both lists, so you can contact those hyper-motivated sellers.

Lowering your marketing costs

Imagine you only have the budget to send 1,000 direct mail letters. By reaching out to the most motivated sellers, you can get the most bang for your marketing budget. 

As you close deals, your marketing budget grows, and you can send more mailings. But start with the most promising leads.

Higher conversion rates, less wasted time

By only targeting the most promising prospects, you end up closing a higher percentage of the ones who call you back. 

That means you waste less time on dead leads. You can put more time toward the best leads as they roll in.

Storing all lead data in one place

Keeping multiple property spreadsheets is a data nightmare. 

That makes it difficult to sort records, to filter the best of them, to spot duplicates, and so on. 

Upload all your prospects to one CRM platform, to sort, filter, compare, and then market to them.

One-click marketing

You’ve identified your most promising prospects. Great! Click a button to start your outbound marketing to them. 

Your direct mail, phone calls, ringless voicemail, and other outreach methods can all hum along, and you can sit back and field phone calls from leads.

How to use list stacking as a real estate wholesaler

All right, you get the concept. How do you put it into action?

1. Upload all your lists of prospects

This isn’t rocket science. Go to “List Stacking” on your REsimpli dashboard and click “Import List.” 

From there, you need to map the columns from your CSV file to the appropriate column field in REsimpli. For example, on your CSV file the column may be titled “Mail Zip,” while in REsimpli that’s mapped as “Mailing Zip Code.” 

Don’t fret: the system is smart enough to connect those dots and propose data mapping for you. Just double-check it and map any incorrect or missing column values.

2. Tag entries

Want to tag all of the entries from this list as “Vacant” or “Distressed” or “Pre-foreclosure” or something else entirely?

No sweat. You can do that when you upload the list. It’ll update any existing properties in your database to add the new tags, in addition to any existing ones.

3. Sort & filter your newly stacked lists

Now the fun begins. 

Like we touched on above, you can filter for properties that showed up on multiple lists, with multiple tags. Want to start by reaching out to owners of vacant properties in pre-foreclosure? Filtering your list takes around five seconds. 

How about vacant properties with fire damage and code violations? As long as you uploaded lists for each of those traits, you can screen for them.

4. Create a new “stacked” list

Take those properties that you filtered for and dump them into a new list on REsimpli.

Now you’re ready to start marketing to them, turning a database into live phone calls, appointments, and closed properties.

5. Create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns

When you combine multiple lists to find the overlapping properties, you can write hyper-focused marketing campaigns that speak to that exact prospect’s situation.

Continuing the example above, you could write direct mail letters that include language like: “I know how hard it is to suffer a fire at your property. And it makes it even harder to get the property back in shape when the city starts slapping you with code violations, and the property just keeps sitting vacant and costing you money.”

Marketing 101: The more focused your messaging to that specific prospect, the more likely the prospect is to bite.

6. Use skip tracing to find missing owners

You can also filter your lists to find missing owner contact information, such as phone numbers. 

On REsimpli, filter for the contacts with missing phone numbers, then use the Skip Tracing feature to try and find them. It won’t find every lead’s phone number every time, but with a 95% match rate, the system is as good as it gets. 

Likewise, you can skip trace for missing owner email addresses. That includes business and trust owners, not just individual owners.  

The more methods of contact that you have for prospective sellers, the more ways you can reach them through a drip campaign. That often makes the difference between a live lead and dead one.

Oh, and the best part? REsimpli offers up to 50,000 free skip tracing credits to get you started.

7. Start marketing to stacked lists

You uploaded multiple lists, and REsimpli scrubbed them for you. You found the most motivated prospects by list stacking, created marketing drip campaigns targeted to them, and skip traced leads with missing contact information. 

It’s time to start reaching out to them.

With a single click, you can start your saved list on an outbound marketing campaign. Options include phone calls (assisted by REsimpli’s dialer), direct mail, emails, and ringless voicemail. 

If a prospect responds, you can automatically start them on a drip campaign with our drip automations. Easy peasy. 

In this way, your marketing campaigns largely run on autopilot. You can spend less time tinkering with marketing and more time talking to leads, touring properties, and closing deals.

Running with the big dogs

If you want the revenue that the professionals earn from real estate wholesaling and flipping, you need to professionalize your business to run like theirs. 

That starts with uploading your leads to a CRM that allows list stacking. When you can manage all your leads in the same place, you filter for the highest quality leads. 

And when you can skip trace and market to your leads from the same CRM, you can automate the entire process. 

This is how the big dogs do it. You can keep yipping at their heels as you bumble around with a dozen different spreadsheets. Or you can professionalize with list stacking.