Recycle quality leads 

You mail 1000 qualified homeowner prospects.  You close 5% of those leads.  Are the other 95% junk leads that you can never close?  No. Yet our experience indicates that most agents don’t fully mine their prospect lists.  They mail the list once, then throw it out and start all over with a new list. 

Re-contacting non-repliers---or at least a segment of non-repliers---makes good economic sense.  It maximizes the initial time and dollar investments you made in setting up the list, qualifying prospects, creating the mailer, and mail handling.  Multiple contacts to qualified prospects will produce a better ROI than starting all over with a new list.  

Here are a couple of lead-recycling ideas.   

. Re-send the original mailer to prospects; consider sending it a total of 3 times to everyone on the list (or a select segment.) 

. Test market: re-send the original mailer to half the original prospect list, and  a new mailer to the other half.  Which one pulls the best?  Use the best performer as you continue to mine your prospect list over time.  

NOTE:  If you are test marketing, you don’t have to change the whole mailer. The keys to successful direct response mailers are: the quality of the prospect list---have you targeted the right prospects? and your offer---what incentive to respond are you giving the prospect?  Often, changing the offer makes a major difference in the results.