Appraisal Scoop: Appraiser Marketing: How to say goodbye to AMC's

Author: Jeff Patterson, owner of Residential Appraisals - For the past 25 years, Jeff has been providing residential appraisals for most of southern and central Maine. Jeff's clients range from private appraisals to working with brokers, banks, litigation support and expert court testimony.

In Part 1 of How To Say Goodbye To AMC Work, Jeff outlined his four principals of Appraisal Marketing and how he uses XSellerate to automate his marketing efforts. In Part 2, He explains his process for developing a Contact List for both email and postcard marketing campaigns.

One of the most important resources of an appraisal business is its Contact List. The reason? Because it is so hard to develop and maintain.

If you're beginning, I would suggest the HUD Lender List. For me, it brought up 1118 lenders that work in the state of Maine. This list included the potential client's name, address, phone numbers and e-mail address. This stuff is worth its weight in gold!

Now the process. First off, we need to set-up a new ad campaign in our XSellerate program. This will automatically send e-mail ads over the the next few weeks and months. Keep in mind, it will be a month or two before we start to see some results.

[Side Note: I like e-mail campaigns primarily because most lenders market this way and second, I can reuse the contacts again and again and at basically no cost to me. 12 months down the road, my time spent today, will still be bearing fruit.]

Remember, we need to qualify prospects. I require an e-mail address, phone number, and address. Without these they are not considered a qualified prospect. If I don't have an individual's name, sometimes I'll enter a contact in as “general delivery”, keeping in mind what the mailing labels will look like when I send out my post card campaign.

So let’s get started….Creating a "Company". The first contact entry is for the "Company". I enter the company's name and also the branch, section of town and state, because I may have more than one office. Next, I check the company's website to see if I can find other e-mail address or names to enter in the system. After adding the company, with as much detail as possible, I categorize this new entry as a "Lender".

I then add "Individual" contacts to the new "Company" I just created. This system allows me to enter each employee with their own individual contact information. For those that have the same address as the main company, I simply check the "Use Company Address" box and add the individual to a "Group".

XSellerate lets you organize contacts into logical groups and types such as “Client” or “Lender”. When a contact is assigned a Group or Type, they automatically start getting marketing designated for that Group or Type, without any further steps.

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No more than 850 names in each "Group"! The XSellerate software does not allow for more than 1,000 e-mails at a time. And the fact that you may have a new campaign going out every day, you could exceed 1,000 e-mails and get the excess kicked back to you. I get around this by breaking down my campaigns into groups of 850 names. For example; My Mortgage Broker "Group 1" will consist of 850 names, Mortgage Group 2 will consist of 850 names and so on.

A couple things should be noted.

I will create a separate group for general delivery, and when I have a company that provides an e-mail address of info.XXXX.com I enter it in.
If John Dean has a mailing address of “[email protected], and I see Jason Smith, I add Jason Smith with an e-mail address “[email protected] using the same "format"
If I receive a request for a comp check, I check the contact list to see if they, or someone in their company, was sent an e-mail. If they haven't, I add them to the list and send them a new campaign letter.
If they order an appraisal I change their type of contact to "Client" and thereby can gauge what percentage of new lenders are becoming clients. Marketing 103

[Click here for a short video illustrating this process.]

After sending out about 200 post cards and 2000 e-mails a week (which include my new campaign program through XSellerate) I'm receiving about two orders a day and crossing my fingers that it continues. This doubled my volume from an all time low, I hit in April, and yet shy of the 30% reduction from last year.

Keep in mind the new campaign is only part of your marketing program. We have holidays, special e-mail mailings, post cards, and even possible phone calls and faxes that will go out to these new clients.

Also by creating Group 1, Group 2, and etc you will be able to gauge your attrition or loss of contacts over time. That is to say, how many leave the business, unsubscribe to your e-mails and etc. It’s very important that you don’t just throw all this information against the proverbial wall.

After putting in the contact and indicating save, the program asks if I want to add to the new campaign and I say yes. The software will not only send out the "first" campaign ad (in 24 hours) but also series of e-mail campaigns over the next 6 weeks. That's called a "Drip" campaign. All of your selected ads will "Drip" slowly at pre-determined intervals with no further action from you.

Based on my experience it will take at least 6 e-mail campaigns to get clients to start looking at what I have to offer.

In less than hour’s time I have put in just about 15 names. If I hire the data entry part out, a good typist can enter in about 1 new contact every 5 minutes. It all depends on if you find web pages in which the mortgage company lists the names of their representatives. In those situations you can add about 1 a minute.

I tend to be conservative, but after five hours let's say we've entered in 100 names. I am expecting a net return of at least two inquiries per month, or 24 inquiries a year, with a net return of four assignments.

With each campaign that goes out you’re going to get some coming back. Some will say no longer there, some will say unsubscribed. Simply remove them from you contact list but keep the company information in the system.

Then there are postcards: First off . . . you have your names and company address already in XSellerate. What you need to determine is what you want to send them.

Again, my experience and information taken from the market tells me FHA/HUD appraisers are in demand. In the beginning I had decided that two types of postcards should be sent out, one is the typical postcard created by a la mode, inc, the other more in line with what real estate agents send out for cards.

I developed the "custom" real estate agent type of card from “Microsoft Office Publisher”. What I consistently found in real estate agent post cards, is that they almost always had a picture of themselves. There's lots of boiler plate stuff available through “Microsoft Office Publisher” however I developed my own.

Postcard recipients were most responsive to those cards with my picture. My card was basically a business card noting my contact information in large print, what areas I covered, that I was FHA approved and some points that I was trying to sell. From what I can envision, these cards sit on a desk or are posted to the back of a cubical somewhere. When they need my services they glance over to their wall or pull my contact information from the drawer!

Back to the plan, if I want to get 20 more orders a month, I need to add about 1,000 to 2,000 names. That means a commitment of about 125 hours of work, which you could do in 6 to 12 weeks. CAUTION! In that period of time you could be too busy and tempted to no longer be putting names in your system!

You need to stay committed to the process of continually searching for names, and devoting a couple hours a week entering them, to keep the number of contacts up to where your want them. Again the main object is to say good bye to AMC’s

Now on to non-lender based clients. Shall I continue?

Side note: A couple of appraisers have asked for help in their marketing efforts and one way to do that is to share contacts. If a group of 6 appraisers share 200 names each appraiser would end up having 1,000 more names, it’s a suggestion for those looking to get their potential client numbers up and reduce their dependence on AMC of other companies that are looking for a split. If you are interested please contact me or make your comments here on this blog.

Author: Jeff Patterson, owner of Residential Appraisals - Has been providing residential appraisals for most of southern and central Maine for the past 25 years. Jeff's clients range from private appraisals to working with brokers, banks, litigation support and expert court testimony.