The Most Intereseting Real Estate Marketing trick I have seen

No wonder why Ralph Roberts was dubbed by Time Magazine the best-selling realtor in America. I just read the most interesting and actually funny marketing trick in real estate that I have ever seen.

I will try to explain it in my own words, and I will try to tell you why I think it´s so interesting and funny. And I really like it, even though I understand that it´s really a marketing trick... and I don´t like marketing tricks, well, except for when they are very intereresting and funny.

I don´t know that much about how real estate agents do their job when it comes to marketing, other than that they promote using newspapers. But as I now understand they also send out letters to prospective clients asking them for a job, I am not sure about the contents of the letters though. This letter might be to people who have been contacting the real estate agent for a job to sell their house (I would think that this is what it might be all about). Many people are contacting many different real estate agents in order to find the one with the cheapest price and the best service. So, to follow up on the people that have been in contact, most real estate agents sends out letters to them and try to get them to contact them for that particular job.

According to Ralph Roberts, as many as 90 percent of the people receiving the letter might simply crumple it up and toss it in the trash. But Ralph Roberts´creative marketing idea was to follow up on that letter to those people who didn´t contact him. The 90 percent or so that tossed the letter in the trash.

So, what he did was the interesting and funny part:

About four days after I sent out the original letter, if the prospect had not gotten in touch with me, I would send out a nearly identical letter, but this time, I wadded it up first, smoothed it out a bit, and wrote with a red marker at the bottom of the letter, "Please Don't Throw Me Away Again!" I inserted the letter in a plain envelope, addressed it by hand, and mailed it to the original recipient.

This is what I call creative marketing. He received a lot of response after starting this new marketing campaign. Many people even thougth that he had dug through their trash to find the letter and resend it. It´s a marketing trick and most people might understand that, some might even get a little upset by it - but I find it very amusing.