Real Estate Investing: How to Track Your Marketing Response through a Voice Mail System

One of the real advantages of a voice mail system is you have all these boxes, so every one of your different marketing pieces should have a different box number so it can be tracked precisely each and every month. That way you'll know, and you can learn, which of your marketing systems are working and which aren't.

For example, let's say you sent out a newspaper ad and you got one call. Let's just use an extreme example where you only got one call. You spent $150 to market for that newspaper ad. One call for $150, that's pretty expensive, and with the postcards you got 15 phone calls, and let's say it cost you $150 also just as an example. So we know that lead cost you $10 per lead.

You could actually figure out what your cost is per lead, which is extremely valuable information, because if you really want to be a sophisticated advanced real estate investor you've got to know what's working, what's not working, what's it costing you per lead, and then you could make an educated decision about what you should be doing the following month.

Maybe the following month you won't bother to do the newspaper ad, so take that $150 and allocate it to more postcards, because we know the postcards generated a lot more calls for you.

This is sophisticated stuff. This is the stuff that really good real estate investors use because now you're fine tuning and improving your systems.

Voice Mail Box Messages

That being said, what's on the voice mail system when the person calls in to say Box 103? You should have on there an introduction, like who you are and your company, and then if you want to give them some options like "Press Box 103" or press whatever box number was on your marketing piece, "Please press that number now."

Then they press 103 and then within that box should be a 1 to 3 minute pre-recorded message. You would describe your company, who you are, why they should be doing business with you, the normal marketing stuff. Why is it compelling for them to do business with you?

Then you could end it at that point by asking them to leave their name and number and you'll call them and discuss buying their property further. But the important thing is you don't have to deliver that 1 to 3 minute presentation each and every time someone calls.

I guarantee you, if somebody calls you and you're in the car or somebody calls you when you're eating lunch or whatever, you're not going to deliver that presentation particularly well because you're not going to be focused.

Whereas if you could do it on this voice mailbox, you could practice it two or three times, you can re-record it, you can listen to it, you can say, "Boy, I don't like the last part of it. I'm going to re-record it," and maybe it takes you an hour or two. But by the end of that hour or two or three, you've got a pretty good recording, you should be fairly happy with it, it should be delivered fairly nicely and succinctly.