Real Estate Newsletters and the “Know, Like, Trust” Rule

David Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, was the first to point out that a prospect will hire you mainly because they’ve come to “know, like and trust” you.

Let’s break this down. The “know” part is obvious. A prospect must find out about you somehow. That’s the first step.

It’s the other two steps that are critical. You need to get prospects to “like and trust” you before they’ll put, what may be, one of the most important sales transactions of their lives in your hands.

How do you accomplish that?

There are many ways. But one of the surest is the time-tested real estate newsletter. A seasoned approach, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s lost any of its effectiveness — despite the growth of digital marketing. On the contrary, direct mail newsletters for real estate agents are still the workhorse of building trust with prospects. Particularly, long-term prospects.

Why is that? There are a number of reasons.

First of all, according to an article by Caitlin Johnson in CBSnews.com, your prospects and clients are inundated with an average of 5,000 marketing messages a day. That’s about 300 every waking hour! In order to break through with your messages, your real estate marketing piece needs to get noticed, get read (or, at least, scanned) and get action.

A good direct mail newsletter has a huge advantage in this regard.

It gets noticed because it comes in the mail — and everyone, for the most part, appreciates getting useful commercial mail, and often acts on it. Research and studies consistently show this. Direct mail newsletters also get noticed and read more so than most other types of commercial mail, especially if it has a high perceived value (i.e. personal messages, helpful articles, valuable news, etc.) Only supermarket flyers with discount coupons get noticed and hung onto more often.

Then there’s the consistently factor.

Let’s face it. Many prospects won’t come to “know, like and trust you” overnight — no matter how great your first meeting was! What a good real estate newsletter does is “meet” with your best prospects, past clients and geographic farm contacts each month. That regularity creates momentum that builds the relationship while keeping you in top-of-mind status. Working together with calls and visits, the right direct mail newsletter can steadily take you from being just one of many agents “out there” to being a prospect’s first — and, perhaps, only — choice when it comes time to buy or sell.

So don’t dismiss the real estate newsletter simply because it’s a marketing tool that’s been used for ages. If you want to generate more real estate agent leads and referrals, this time-honoured marketing tactic is a must in your real estate marketing system.