“I would like to know where I can get a mailing list of owner-held notes.”
I am asked this question often. Mailing solicitations to note holders offering to buy their notes is not a marketing method I recommend. It is labor-intensive and expensive, and if you don’t know much about direct mail, your chances of success are slim to none.
If you still want to try it, here are the questions to ask a mailing list vendor before you spend your money.
Where the names come from
- What are the sources of your leads? How do you know these people actually own notes?
- Is the price for one-time use, or are you selling the list? If they sell it, beware. Lots of others probably already own it and are mailing it.
- Are the leads sorted by the type of note owned, and will I get details on each lead’s note (type of property, location, balance due, terms and so on)? You don’t want a list of people who hold unsecured paper.
- How many times has this list been rented in the past six months? Every time it has been rented or sold, assume the note holders have received a solicitation from someone to buy their notes.
Exclusivity and targeting
- Is there a mailing window? In other words, will the vendor agree not to sell or rent the list to anyone else for a period after your purchase? That gives you a chance to use the list exclusively for a while.
- Can you provide customized lists, such as by state, city, type of note or size of note?
- Do you provide phone numbers and email addresses for the note holders? Personal follow-up is what sells, not the first contact. The prospect must see your message repeatedly; most sales aren’t made until the prospect’s seventh exposure to your marketing.
Accuracy and list cleaning
- What deliverability percentage do you guarantee? Professional list vendors usually guarantee that 90 percent or more of their addresses are accurate.
- Do you clean the list each time it is mailed? If they say yes, ask how. The right answer is “Our customers send us the nixies” (nixies are returned letters). If they don’t get the nixies back somehow, they can’t clean the list.
- Do you merge and purge? This is a test question. If they don’t know what it means, they don’t know what they are doing. (It means that when the list is cleaned, duplicate names are merged into one and the rest are deleted.)
Refunds and testing
- What is your refund policy? Suppose you buy the list and half your letters come back undeliverable. Or you find out it’s not a list of note holders at all, just names from a phone book. You have thrown away hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars. Will you at least be able to recover what you paid for the list?
- Can I buy a small number of names for a test mailing?
Always test. Never send a full mailing without first testing both the list and your different mailing pieces.
A better use of your money
My advice is to avoid direct mail altogether. If you insist on doing it, I think you are better off hiring a high school student and training him or her in courthouse research.
