But that's the advantage of list marketing for commercial loans, as opposed to broadcast marketing (TV ads, radio ads) or display ads (magazine ads, newspaper ads, billboards, or Google ads). When you need more incoming commercial loan business right now, you can use list marketing to instantly go out and get it.
Now I have been using a rather odd term, "list marketing." Don't I just mean email newsletters? No. Sure, both C-Loans.com and Blackburne & Sons have regular email newsletters for commercial loans that go out to the thousands of clients we have developed over the past 33 years. But the term, "marketing lists", also includes fax lists and snail mail lists.
Snail mail is relatively expensive, so if you use snail mail to market for commercial loans, be sure to only send mail pieces to a very limited number of recipients. At Blackburne & Sons, I allow each loan officer to send snail mail out, at the company's expense, to just 300 of their best commercial loan brokers. We call these their 300 Spartans.
Within list marketing, I do like email newsletters the best. You should hire a computer graphics guru to design for you one time a template for your commercial loans email newsletters. I use a wonderful guy named John Merry of NetPilot Web Solutions. John is not terribly expensive, and I have been using him for 16 years.
Once your graphics guru has designed your newsletter template, its relatively easy to write a new email newsletter every week using an ordinary browser. Then you simply send it out weekly using ConstantContact.com or iContact.com. These newsletter services cost less than $100 per month, and they are a great value.
If you choose to market for commercial loans using a newsletter, here are some important tips:
1. Don't be professional! Nobody reads "professional" newsletters. They are soooo boring. Real people - including wealthy commercial real estate investors - read fun newsletters, the ones that are full of slang and juicy gossip.
2. Always includes lots of Rat Goodies, like cute, clean jokes, funny pics, links to hilarious videos, movies reviews, and heart-warming stories about your children.
3. Don't expect any results from your first five newsletters. The Notches on the Belt Theory of Marketing tells us that customers do not buy until they have thought about buying on at least six, separate, independent occassions. This is why good salesmen never accept the first few "No's." Your email newsletters will not work until the recipients receive at least six newsletters. After that your investor, mortgage broker, realtor, and banker clients will start to call in their commercial loan requests in response to your newsletters.
But let's not miss the point of today's lesson: If you market for commercial loans using lists, you can quickly get your phones ringing again by simply increasing the number of clients who receive your newsletter daily.