Real estate postcards are some of the most effective mailers you can use in your business.
If you want to make them work for you, though, you don’t want to start sending out the same boring, tired, overused mailers that every other investor and agent are sending.
You’ll want to get creative and make sure your business is the one that stands out.
To help, we’ve put together 7 of the best real estate postcard examples you can copy in 2024.
Each of these examples have been proven to deliver great conversions and each serves their own purpose inside of your bigger campaign goals.
Before we get into them, though…
Should You Use Real Estate Postcards?
While real estate postcards can be incredibly effective at generating fresh leads for your business, they also come with a few other benefits.
Like…
- Being Recognized — While generating leads may be your overall goal, 42.2% of the people you send postcards to will read or scan it, helping them recognize your business or brand later.
- Generating Leads — When you start with the right list and message, you can get up to a 9% response rate compared to 0.2% to 0.5% for random direct mail blasts into an area.
- Higher Open Rates — Compared to email, direct mail postcards have an 80-90% open rate. A typical warm email list open rate is 20% to 30% or 1% to 2% for a cold email list.
- Staying Top Of Mind — While prospects may not be ready to buy or sell right now, your direct mail campaigns can keep you top of mind so when the time is right, they call you first.
- Being Easy To Automate & Scale — Direct mail postcards can be sent by the piece or by the 1,000 pieces, and fully automated. They’re a solution that scales as big or as small as you need.
If you’re looking to grow your brand recognition while you generate new leads, and get higher open rates than other forms of marketing, using real estate postcards should be the play.
They make it easier for you to stay top of mind and, with services like Ballpoint Marketing, are easy to automate and scale so you can focus on other growth strategies while your campaigns are running.
How To Make Real Estate Postcards As Effective As Possible
One of the unfortunate side effects of direct mail is people’s own bias toward it.
They believe that if they open the mail and immediately discard unwanted mailers in the trash that their prospects are going to do the same thing.
Which isn’t actually the case.
In our own business, we see a 2x to 3x higher response rate from the mailers we send versus what most people claim they get because we understand what needs to happen to keep our mailers from getting tossed into the bin.
To make direct mail real estate postcards as effective as possible, there’s a few things you need to do.
Start With A Targeted Audience
Mailing to anyone and everyone is a quick way to blow your marketing budget and generate mediocre results, at best.
To avoid making this massive mistake (one that WAY too many investors and agents make), start your campaigns with the right data.
You want to know that you’re mailing people at the right time with the right message.
To do this, you can use a tool like Propstream to pull your own lists of highly-targeted prospects, like people in pre-foreclosure or pre-probate.
Or people who have inherited properties. Or absentee owners.
To see how easy it can be to make sure you’re targeting the right people, check out the video below:
Set Your Budget
Then, once you have a list of highly-targeted, motivated prospects, you’ll need to set a budget.
It’s pretty easy to set compared to other forms of marketing, too.
For instance, if you’re running one of these postcard campaigns, you can expect to spend around $1,100 per campaign you mail — and between 10 and 15 incoming calls from the campaign.
That works out to around $74 to $111 per call.
Or, if you subscribe to a full 7-month auto-drip campaign, you can get your cost-per-call down to between $59 to $88.
Compare that to other forms of advertising, like social media marketing, and you’re saving a ton of money.
Be Consistent & Follow Up
One of the keys to getting your cost-per-call as low as you can is following up with people and staying consistent in your approach.
One major mistake that many investors and agents[ make is “testing the waters”.
They’ll send 1 or 2 campaigns and expect amazing results without realizing that the fortune is in the follow up and consistently reaching out to prospects is critical to making direct mail work.
With direct mail, your success revolves around getting in front of the right person at the right time.
For some prospects, that may be the first time you mail them. For others, it may be the 5th, 6th, or even 7th time they get one of your postcards.
If you only mail once or twice, you’re missing out on all of the prospects who weren’t ready the first time you mailed them.
Track Everything
If you are serious about the performance of your direct mail postcards, you need to track everything.
This is true for any form of advertising, but especially true for direct mail.
If you are having prospects call your phone, make sure you have a dedicated phone number for the campaign that you’re sending out so you can track how many calls it has generated.
Or, if you are driving people to a website, make sure you’re using a dedicated landing page that helps show you which campaign those prospects came in from.
Then, over time, you can monitor the performance of each audience, message, and mailer you’re sending so you know which ones to cut, which ones to tweak, and which ones to double down on.
Make Your Postcards Stand Out
Finally, to make direct mail work, you need to stand out in the mailbox.
The first way to do this is to use a postcard that grabs attention.
We’ll show you some designs that have been proven to grab attention (and even get hung on the fridge as a collectible) in a second.
But once you’ve gotten their attention, you also need a message that’s customized to their specific situation.
By targeting the right audiences — say, pre-foreclosure — with a message that speaks to their pain points, you greatly increase the odds that the message hits home and turns a prospect into a new call.
What you don’t want to do, though, is send out boring postcards with the same generic message that every other investor is sending out.
Instead of doing that…
Here’s 7 Real Estate Postcard Examples To Copy In 2024
#1 – AI Postcards
These AI postcards are quickly becoming one of the most popular postcards we’ve sent — both with our prospects and investors who know how quickly AI is making its way into real estate.
ChatGPT was used to identify the top reasons homeowners sell to investors.
Then, each of those reasons was included on the front of the card, with an AI generated image accompanying the message.
We’ve seen some of the best results by sending the AI sequence out over a 6-month period. But they can be singled out and chosen for their specific message if you’re sending to a highly-targeted list.
#2 – Americana
If you’re working with an older demographic, the Americana series of postcards is perfect.
We’ve had prospects comment on wanting to collect these as they came in and even hanging them on their fridge as decorations.
They cultivate a sense of nostalgia and make it easy for you to stand out in a crowded mailbox.
If you’ve never experienced seeing your direct mail on someone’s refrigerator when you’re going over documents, you have to give the Americana series a try.
#3 – Comic Cards
Another postcard that’s been battle tested by hundreds of investors and proven to convert at a higher-than-average rate is the Comic Card sequence.
The art on these postcards guarantees that your prospects will look at them on their way into the house.
Then, the punchy message on the front lets them know exactly how you can help them.
When you drip them out over the 7-month sequence, you put the right message in front of the right prospect at the right time.
On the backside of each card is a customized, handwritten message that helps personalize your approach based on the list you’re sending them to.
#4 – Deep Prospecting
When you know the one specific property you want to buy, you can run a deep prospecting campaign to get in front of the homeowner without spending a ton of money.
Our deep prospecting “We Want To Buy Your House” cards can be sent piece by piece with no minimum order quantities, making these great for niche lists.
All you have to do is upload your list, your phone number, and your name and let our software handle the rest of the campaign.
#5 – Commercial Mailers
If you’re looking at commercial, multi-family homes, mobile home parks, storage facilities, hotels, or MFUs, the “Golden Letter” is the perfect postcard to send.
You can dial in the message to be customized to your prospect and list and highlight specific sections to immediately draw attention to where you want it to go.
We’ve tested a ton of different versions of this letter and settled on the real blue-ink envelope after it was proven to generate superior results in each of our tests.
These Golden Letters work great for real estate agents looking to get in front of sellers, too.
#6 – Greeting Cards
While most investor’s direct mail gets opened over the trash, the Greeting Cards either get opened immediately or tossed into the open pile to take a look at later.
We’ve designed these to look like invitations and if there’s one thing that will get your postcards opened, it’s curiosity.
When prospects get these in their mailbox, their curiosity forces them to take a look.
And when you have the right message on the insert, you start getting calls wanting to know more.
In terms of grabbing attention, these are some of the most unique, highest-performing postcards we’ve ever tested. 
#7 – Lazy Investor
Two of the key factors in every successful direct mail campaign are consistency and variety.
The Lazy Investor sequence combines the best of both worlds.
These start with our proven Professional Letters (or Golden Letter) and then transition into the attention-grabbing Americana or Comic Card series.
We call them the “Lazy Investor” series because they’re one of the most hands-off, highest-performing postcard campaigns you can run.
In our experience, this 8-touch combination has generated the lowest cost-per-deal and you only have to pull a list once — taking leads out of the list as they start coming in.
How To Take Over An Area With Real Estate Postcards
Now that you’ve seen what a winning real estate postcard actually looks like, and can use them in your own campaigns, the next step is using direct mail to take over an entire area.
To do that, you can use a strategy called Real Estate Farming.
It gives you a massive competitive advantage just by understanding the data in an area that you want to target with your mailers.
We’ve broken down the exact strategy and put it into a guide that’s easy to understand, from what to look for in an area, how to know if it’s worth targeting, how to properly target the area, and how to extract as many leads as possible from it.
If you’re interested in learning more about it, you can click here to check out the guide now.
