Go here for some free templates once you have your list.

The cheapest List is actually the most expensive

That must sound weird but its true. Looking for and finding the cheapest mailing list is not the smartest thing to do. It might sound cheap at the beginning but trust me, its going to cost you many times over what you saved during buying your list. If you are to get quality data where the list providers take responsibility for the list and stand behind their data, such lists will not be the cheapest ones.

Data updated to the minute!

For you to be able to target the right kind of people with the right messages, you will need the most up to date data on your list. These lists are usually updated monthly, so you should ensure that the ones you are buying is the most updated version of that list. I have quoted this example before but I would do it again here. If you are going to send someone a mortgage postcard on how you can help them get out of their ARM and it turns out they have already refinanced, you are only going to make yourself look like an idiot!

Aim your list on the target market.

While choosing your list, don’t even think about getting a list of every other person in a neighborhood. That will doom your mortgage postcard marketing way before it gets started. Too many mortgage professionals try to e everything to be every body, misguided by the hope that they will get a better response by reaching a more extensive range of prospects. Please do not make the same mistake as hundreds of others. The list you choose should be as targeted as possible. Your headlines and the content (offer on the back) should all be relevant to the list of prospects that you will send out your postcards to.

If you follow these three guide lines above while choosing your list, you will have done the most important part of your mortgage postcard marketing campaign correct.

Once you have your list taken care of, you can find some free mortgage postcard templates here.

Do you find this post helpful? Do you think it could have been better? Please leave you comments and feedback.

In all your marketing efforts, you will have a call to action for a marketing message to be effective. You will want them to email you, or visit your website or perhaps call you? Of course you want to do any of this because you want to have the person as a lead which you can then nurture into a conversion over a course of weeks or months. Ideally you will want people to phone you right away with your mortgage broker postcards. Some people will do that but not a lot of people today will call you directly without doing any research on you or doing some research on your competitors as well.  Today, 85% of consumers will go online to find as much data they can about a company before making a decision.  To ensure you get a response on your mortgage broker postcards and for leads to be generated, you would want to use landing pages as a call to action from your postcards.

A good landing page aka squeeze page will convince your prospect to submit their contact information to you. The way it is supposed to work is that you will initiate a communication message with your mortgage postcard and you will direct the recipient to your online landing page where you will continue that communication. On your landing pages, you are to convince your visitors exactly why they should choose you over the competition and let them download valuable content that is highly targeted to the list that you had originally targeted with your postcards. The only thing to be required of them to do should be to give you their contact information. The valuable content can come in the way of Free consumer reports which can be found easily on the internet. Some are available on this website.

Let’s take a simple example to help you understand better. If you initially targeted a debt consolidation list, your message on the postcard should speak to your prospects needs and benefits of consolidating their debt into their mortgage and should redirect them to a landing page that you have designed specifically for only this list. When someone visits, you landing page, you will put forth your value proposition and offer them a free consumer report to be sent to their email/mailing address. Either way, you will need their contact information, which you will ask for to be able to fulfill your promise. I have done a simple landing page so that you could see the basics.

You can have a look at the sample landing page here. Please note this is a very basic page that I have done very quickly just to give you a basic idea on how its done. You would probably need to have more to your actual landing page.

Every person who enters their information is a lead for you which you can now contact via email and direct mail with your marketing messages and warm them up to yourself. Of course, you will eventually want to go for the close once you have built up a level of trust with your prospects.

That’s all for now. I would love to have any questions, feed backs or comments.

Identify your market

While sending out mortgage postcards, too many mortgage brokers try to be every thing to everybody thinking that they will reach out to a larger audience and thus will get a better response. Unfortunately, that is not true. When you try to get everyone’s business, you end up getting none. Your message becomes diluted and no one feels its relevant to their situation.

First and foremost, you need to determine a niche – a target market for your mortgage postcard marketing and then create your message around that one particular kind of people so that it speaks to them directly.

Be the recipient

Try to assume the view point of the person who is on the receiving end of your postcards. In your head, try to be that person. Put yourself in their shoes. Taking a few examples, if you are reaching out to a list of renters you need to speak to their desires to own a home. Try to understand what they think and what their hopes and aspirations are, and then create a message that communicates to their aspirations. When you do this, you will sound very real to them. They will be able to relate to their message, they will be able to see that you understand what is going through their minds and that this understanding will convert into something tangible for them i.e. e the home that they desire. Taking another example, if you are reaching out to divorce clients, make your message relevant to their situation. It should speak in a way that it reflects your understanding of what they are going through and how it is that you can help them out to get a new mortgage. Also, you message should speak to each recipient. This mean you should make your messages in singular, not plural. The recipient should not feel that he is just one of the many that you are contacting though this mortgage postcard.

Using questions in your mortgage postcards

Asking questions in your message can be very powerful. A question continues communication. By asking a question, you initiate a conversation and the recipient is going to be compelled to answer that question. Even if from the time they look at your postcard, they are walking over to the trash with the postcard in their hand, they are going to answer your question in their head. That’s when they will begin to think and ponder over it. For example, Christmas might be coming up and you ask them “Are you giving your kids the Christmas they want?” or “How would you like a debt free Christmas?” Questions put in this way are very powerful and hook people in so make sure you include a few very specific and impactful questions in your copy.

You can also find about 18 free ready made postcards on this website.

I hope this helps you understand how you should create your messages for your mortgage postcards campaign. I would love any comments or feedback on whether you found this information useful or not.

Headline

You want to have a very simple headline that addresses a problem somebody is trying to solve. Nobody wants to see a headline ‘I’m the best mortgage broker in town!’ They’re not really interested in you, they are interested in what you can do for them. So you want to have a very direct and simple, not a lot of words, headline.

Image

You want to have a graphic image that supports that headline. This has proved to be very powerful. Having a relevant image with your headline helps the prospect to better understand your message and relate to the situation they are in. It does not necessarily has to be a very high quality image, relevancy is of higher priority here.

Offer on the Back

If you get the first two right, then you will have captured your prospects attention and they will then turn over the postcard to see what you say in the back. The back of the card should continue your communication where your headline left off. The transition should be swift and seem less. On the back of the card you want to list features and benefits of working with you, or the rate of the mortgage, whether you are going to save them from their adjustable rate mortgage, whether your going to get them to stop seeding a fat landlord. Whoever your market is, you are going to push the buttons just a little bit further, bullet pointed. A paragraph with a lot of type on the back of a postcard is not going to get read. People are too bombarded with promotional messages they need snippets, you know they need bullet pointed items.

Continue the communication

You should have some kind of an offer on the postcard. And I am going to tell you something now that not a lot of mortgage professional are doing. The ones who are doing it are reaping the benefits. You need to continue the communication with the postcard; you are initially starting a communication with a postcard. You then need to get the recipient to continue that communication by sending these prospects to specially designed landing pages where you give out free reports and guides in exchange for their information. Once you have their info, you now have a lead and you can follow up with them through phone, email or further pieces of direct mail.

Tweaking these four components in combination until you have an optimum response rate. You will know you have an optimum response rate when further improvements and tweaks stop having a positive impact on your campaign. Once you have the winning campaign, continue to send out the same message to the same prospects again and again and you will see results week after week.

For those of you wondering whether sending the same old message will work; YES it will work. It has been tested and proven… even if you continue to send it over and over again to the same list. After a certain point in time though, your response will begin to diminish. You should still keep on sending the postcards until it goes down to a point where you start getting negative returns. However, as you hit the point of diminishing returns, you should simultaneously start a new post card campaign. This will enable you to tweak your new campaign before you stop getting any returns from your previous one.

I would love to hear your comments or feedbacks. If there is anything you do not understand, just post a question and I will explain further.

There are a few other factors involved in improving your response rate on your postcards. I am going to list some of them down and explain them briefly.

Tweaking and testing: The real key to getting a better response on your campaigns is to be in a constant state of testing, tweaking and improving your post cards, message, images value proposition and the audience receiving your cards. Once your changes stop creating a positive effect on your response rate that is called your optimum response. At this point you should stop tweaking and testing and should only send your optimum combination continuously.

Consistency: Be consistent with your mail. Segment your list and hit each segment at least once every 4 to 8 weeks. Not everyone takes action on your first contact with them. Most people will hang on to your card or just remember you in their mind. When you follow up with them repeatedly, that is when they will begin to see credibility in you and you will begin to get a better response with each passing mailer that you send to your list.

Track your response: Unless you are tracking the response on your promotions, you will not know whether your marketing dollars are coming back to you with returns or not. This is the same as you being blind. You cannot make well informed decisions for you business unless you know what is working and what is not. Many times, this can be a simple matter of just asking the prospect where they heard about you.

Therefore When I found this FREE mortgage postcards offer by Doren Aldana, I thought it should share it with my visitors on my blog. I have therefore done a review of his offer for you to decide whether this is something you want to take advantage of.

Click here for the FREE Post Cards Offer

I will try to be as transparent as possible with the review for the benefits of my members. I will first give you the details  of the offer, then whats required of you and then my unbiased opinion. I will also add a little bit about the company that is giving this offer as I think it is relevant and will help you make your decision as to whether you should take up or not.

The offer: This is a Free offer where you would not be required to pay anything to get access to any of the material. It not only gives you mortgage marketing post cards, but it also gives you access to some other

mortgage marketing tools. Here is a list of what you get.

• 25 Lead Generation Post Cards.
• 6 Marketing Tutorial and Expert Interview CDs
• 48 Online Audio Programs
• FSBO Marketing Kit (13 Templates)
• 8 Members Only Live Q&A Calls with Doren Aldana ( Sales page shows 2)
• 13 Issues of Mortgage Marketing Mastery Newsletter (Sales page Shows 2)
• 15-Step Ultimate Mortgage Marketing Plan – 1 module for each step (Audio Training)
• A Free Ad Critique by Doren Aldana
• 2 Months FREE Silver Membership to his website

Some of these benefits you get inside your Free silver membership. For example you will be able to download your postcards from the silver membership along with the instructions on how to use them and how to get maximum returns on it. The Sales Copy on the website says you get 18 postcards, but I found out there are actually about 26-27 of them inside the free membership. It looks like the offer page has not been updated after the addition of those new postcards. same goes for the live Q&A Calls with Doren ALdana. When he first put up the page, he used to do 1 call a month with his members. He now does 1 everyweek, thus you get exposure to 8 Q&A calls with this offer.

I have done a small video to show you what it looks like inside the silver membership.

Below is a list of the postcards that you get inside the membership.

Get the Free Post Card offer here

In addition to the above mortgage postcards, some other Major tools you get are;

• Consumer reports for lead generation
• mortgage marketing plan checklist
• A sample client newsletter showing you what it should look like and the important elements of a winning newsletter.

Okay, so now that you know what you get in this offer and what it looks like after you sign up… lets get down to what’s expected of you.

COST
This is a TRIAL offer for the first 2 months. This means that you will not be charged at all for 2 months.However, Power of Choice Coaching does ask that you cover the shipping and handling for $19.95. This is to cover the postage for the Free marketing materials, CDs and DVD that you receive from them in this free offer.

Cost after the two months.
The cost of the silver membership after the free 2 months is $37 plus $9.95 per month.

The Catch
There is no catch as such. The one being that Doren Aldana wants you to try out his marketing ideas for free for two months and guarantees that you would be so much IN LOVE with his stuff that you wouldn’t look back.

Contract: None. cancel or downgrade anytime

A little about the company: Power of Choice Coaching is owned by Doren Aldana. Doren Aldana is a contributing author for CMP magazine and The Mortgage Journal. He was also recently voted the “mortgage originator coach” of the year by “my mortgage community”. He has also been awarded Mortgage Coach of the year by CMP two years in a row 07-08.

Conclusion

The offer is well thought out. It not only gives you the mortgage marketing post cards that you’re looking for but also a lot of other material which can be very useful for you in your mortgage marketing. 2 months for free also gives you quite a lot of time to put some of his strategies to test. The only setback is that you need to provide your credit card information to take advantage of the FREE 2 months trial. But then, that is true for any kind of a trial you would do for a service. So definitely worth giving the offer a shot especially considering there is no risk involved.

You can find the complete offer detail on this page.