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Finding IRA Investors
I’m excited to be here. In this episode, where we’re going to run a little audible. It is going to be a preview about what our episode on Note Night in America. It’s all about IRA investors. We’re familiar with self-directed IRA investors and going to Quest IRA or any of the other 50 plus IRA companies out there to their networking events. We’re reaching out to the county records and tapping into the county appraisal district or the county clerk’s office websites to see who’s either bought a property with their IRA, or who has funded to deal with their IRA. The thing you have to keep in mind is a lot of people ask me, “Scott, what about other people? What about other people that have other IRAs?” There’s a variety of different IRAs and 401(k)s. We all know people are working with their money in other forms and fashion. They’ve got an IRA from a previous company. They haven’t moved it over yet or they’ve got an IRA from Schwab or things like that.
How do you tap into those people? That’s not quite as easy as we think about. For most people, you’re thinking about going and networking with people at your local wine clubs, which I like to do, drink a little Vino or going out to networking events or Christmas parties or things like that. One thing that you have to keep in mind as well, everybody is starting to review how their 2018 went. They’re starting to look at how their investments have performed. They’re starting to see the signs in the industry. Housing sales are down 13% across the board. Foreclosures are taking up days and marketing are starting to increase. People are starting to look at where their money has been, how has it performed, and looking into putting it into other things.
The great thing is between now and the end of the next quarter, besides the end of the year for assets, rolling into the beginning of 2019, people are looking at their statements. People are going to be looking at more to do something. That’s one of the best attendance at real estate investment clubs are. People love to come in January and February. They want to get back into shape. They want to start investing more. They want to start taking action, start sending out letters and start marketing. “I’m going to go be a real estate investor,” those kinds of things. We all know what happens with that. That usually fades over time. One of the best things that we have done over the last couple of years is realize, if we focus on marketing in November, December, January, we’re ahead of the turn.
Buying A List Of Leads
We can plant it. We almost come up with the idea of inception, of planting a seed and letting it grow over time if you’re smart by what you do. We can almost allow people to start thinking about us a little bit more when it comes to investments. What am I talking about? One of the things that I do and we’ve been doing this for a while, is that we literally will buy leads. We’ll buy you a huge list of leads of people that have IRAs. We buy huge lists of leads from different companies. Some people in the mastermind are applauding because they know because I share it with them. What are the rules if we buy these huge lists of leads of people that have an IRA or a 401(k)? You can buy a lot of leads from different companies out there and sometimes it’s expensive, sometimes it’s pretty inexpensive. It just varies.
The nice thing about what we do when we buy a list of leads is we get a lot of information on our lists. I’ll give you an example. Occasionally, we’ll pull a list of people that have a 401(k) that live in a particular area. It gives us the person’s name and it gives us their mailing address. It gives us their email address, which is guaranteed to be working in the last six months. Then we also get phone numbers a chunk of the time. It doesn’t tell me how much they have in their IRA account or their 401(k). It doesn’t give me their age group, but it does give me more valuable information.
Here are a couple of things that I look at immediately. The fact that I have their email address is really great. I could send an email blast out to them via MailChimp or Infusionsoft. That is not the best thing to do. Some people will ask, “If you’ve got this list of emails, why wouldn’t you want to email out to them?” Because to upload a list of 6,000 or 5,000 or 90,000 IRA owners or 401(k) owners’ emails to your Infusionsoft or MailChimp or AWeber is going to get it shut down. You will be sitting there with not being able to market to the list. Most people are like, “I’m just going to send an email out.” If you send an email out to that cold list, because it’s technically a cold email list to you, your account is going to get shut down and you’re going to be in a world of hurt and now can’t email out to anybody. The important thing with this list is to do some other things with it. I talk about it all the time that we don’t do a lot of direct mail.
We don’t do direct mail out for lists. We don’t send it out to distress buyers. We don’t do that stuff. What we do is we’ll send out a postcard. Let’s get your IRA back on track, and we send this out. I buy these in huge chunks from PostcardMania. I’m talking 5,000, 6,000 at a time. I’ve got a box or two boxes It’s blank on the back. This is something different. We take stickies and put them on the back. We use this to hand inside at a workshop or if I’m going to a REIA club meeting and I’ll pass this out to get people to opt-in, name, email and phone number. We have either a promo on the back that we just take the sticky and we peel it on it.
I take this postcard and I create something that I send out as well on the back-end side. What I do is I’ll do a couple things. One is now I have a person’s name and email, I can take this list and upload it to LinkedIn. I can import contacts in LinkedIn, see if they have a LinkedIn profile, connect with them. I can upload it to Facebook and see if they have a Facebook profile, which is really nice because now I can then send a direct video to them. I can market directly to those Facebook profiles very inexpensively. Cheaper than still sending out a postcard.
IRA Investors: If you can educate them, then you’re going to add a lot more value and find it easier to raise capital.
One of the things that I also would like to do is I’ll map the list that I get to see how close they are to an area. When those that are close to an area like it was near where I’m located here in Austin, we’ll do a little bit more in-depth marketing. For those that are outside of an area, one of the big things that we’re doing here is in the Columbus market. We’re pulling a lot of IRA investors in Columbus, Ohio, for a couple of reasons. One, for raising capital. Two, we’re also helping and trying to promote and refer to our big number one IRA vendor, Quest Trust Company, to try and help our clients out, our sponsors out for the show. If I can send new accounts, it’s a win-win.
The beautiful thing is most of these IRA account holders, they’re not the savviest real estate investors out there. I don’t mean that in a bad thing. This means it gives you an opportunity to help educate them. Remember we had Jillian Sidoti on the podcast a few weeks ago. Jillian’s a big advocate of trying to help investors. If you can educate them and provide value, you’re going to add a lot more value to them and be easier for you to raise capital. What we do is I’ll send a postcard out with the link to a video or a link to get my eBook. I use the link provided by MailChimp. I can create a list inside of MailChimp, a custom list. MailChimp, will auto joint a website. That website is not going to be the easiest thing to remember. I’ll go to Bit.ly and create a Bit.ly link like NoteDeals or Bit.ly/PiggyBank or something like that so it’s easy for them to type that in off a postcard. They get this postcard sent to them. On the back it says, “Do you want to put your investments to work? Do you want to make above average returns? Do you want to learn about distress debt? Get my free eBook by going here and opting in.” They go to Bit.ly/PiggyBank. It takes them to my MailChimp account list. They can opt-in there. They hit opt-in with their name and you should not ask all their information. That’s the worst thing you can do. Basically, this is creating a trip wire for IRA investors. A trip wire is either the eBook, mailing the book, or a video series. There’s a whole variety of things that you can do out there. The idea is you want them to respond.
The reason I asked them to fill their information in our MailChimp when I already have their information is once they opt into your CRM, then you can email them. Then that looks like, “That’s a double opt-in.” This person’s a good quality lead versus somebody that’s a brand-new cold list you upload. We take the list and we will actually filter the list down a little bit more in a couple of ways. The nice thing is that we get their full address. What would be valuable about having an address to somebody? We can do a quick search through NoteProz with the address and see what the high-end and low-end values are of a house. We can see if the house is over $100,000, it’s great. We’ll market to it. It’s below $100,000 or if it’s an apartment complex, we won’t easily market to an apartment complex. Why would you do that? Most of our avatar, our ideal client is 35 to 65 homeowners making $75,000 to $250,000 a year. Somebody living in an apartment complex, it doesn’t mean they’re not making good money, but it usually means they don’t have a lot saved. They’re not homeowners and they don’t have the extra liquid capital to be investing in notes or real estate at this point.
My goal is to get them to opt-in to my MailChimp or Infusionsoft account. Click on a video, request a copy of the eBook, and then go from there. It all came from a postcard. Because the postcard is pretty cheap. I can buy 6,000 for $800. The postage, you can get the right postage for the most part at $0.50. Printing’s going to cost you a little bit. That’s the idea. Once I get them to opt-in and they reach out to me, either get the book, then I’ll follow up with another email series. “What you’re doing?” I’ll put them into the Note Night in America Webinar series that go to my general database. They start getting infused with information. The beautiful thing of why I do webinars almost every Monday night is almost every Monday night, 20% of my audience is brand new. A lot of people think it’s the same recycled people over and over and a lot of it is. There are a lot of the same people watching them. Why I track my numbers so much is so I can see if it’s going up or going down.
I track religiously both the numbers of those that are RSVP’d in and how many of those attended, along with how many people are watching on Facebook Live now. Those that I miss out on, it’s worth avoiding the postage sending out to apartment dwellers that don’t have anything for the most part. We have a question, “What home value do you market to? $150,000 plus, $250,000, $350,000?” It depends on the market. I’ll give you an example. If I’m pulling IRA leads in Texas here, the median home price is $300,000. I’m probably going to say above $150,000. I’ll probably not going to go below $100,000. Although now if I was to do it in Columbus, I will probably look at anything $50,000 or more because it all depends on the market. In California, I got to make sure that the values the home are probably at least $250,000 or greater depending on what part of California. That’s the beauty of the list that we pull. I can pull in any county in America. This is not going to the appraisal district and one of the homeowners. The way I pull these assets and the lists I have, the way I embedded into this is I can pull from any county in America, San Francisco, LA or Anaheim.
I can pull and get all the same information, homeowner’s name, their address, IRA name, where they live, full name, email and phone numbers. I’ll tell you there are 1.2 million IRA owners in California alone. You’re like, “What? That’s a lot.” There are 90,000 in San Diego County alone. The beautiful thing is that out of that 90,000, 75,000 of them have a Facebook profile. How do I know? I know because I put my money where my mouth is. I actually do the work. That’s a lot of people. If you have 1% of that, if you had one person respond for $25,000 or $50,000, it’s worth the whole price of the cost of printing and sending out for the most part.
Apartments are not the low-hanging fruit. This is not to offend anybody who lives in an apartment who doesn’t want things. I get that. I’m not arguing with you. It’s just not what we find. We can remove the apartment numbers when we upload to LinkedIn. That gives us another way to opt-in there as well too, and hopefully connect with them there. The whole touch method, 80% of sales comes after the fifth contact. Think about this, how many contacts have I touched them by doing this? Uploading to Facebook is one, uploading to LinkedIn is two. Sending out postcard is three. Those are three spots right there. That’s not even talking about an email blast out to them yet. They do respond to any of those than I have in my email database is four. Hopefully, they’re watching videos is five because that’s one of the things when they opt-in and get an eBook or get a message or get something from me. They’re going to be basically on the rotation for my videos. They get emailed to my series. I did a video series on using your IRA to invest in real estate.
An easy video series that I did in front of the green screen here or the American flag there in the office. That’s a great way to literally reach out to people. It’s not going to be the greatest, it’s not going to be a 25% open rate in the email. You’re not going to make a ton of money. I don’t charge for that, if somebody has opt-in with the email where I do charge other people. If somebody has an IRA and they’re opting into it from organics, I’m sure they’ve already told me. I already know ahead of time that they have an IRA account. My goal is to help educate them by providing great content, to get them into my database on a permanent basis versus a partial basis. That’s the matter of a lot of marketing goes into it.
IRA Investors: Most people don’t want to do the work, but they want to be educated.
The open rate on postcards is about the same, if you’re just sending out to this list, it’s about a 4% to 10% response rate, which is better than direct mail because we’re targeting specific things. “Do you have an IRA that’s not performing?” People will hold onto these postcards for six months or ten months. They post it on their fridge where they keep it with their investment stuff. I’ve worked with people who’ve walked in with these. I have sent these postcards out prior to having an expo or an event taking place and people have walked in with the postcard, which I love. It’s one of the things that we’re doing here in Cape Coral for our Note Mastermind event. We’re getting ready to drop a bunch of postcards out to roughly about 5,000 IRA owners down in Cape Coral, Florida. Cape Coral has pretty nice-end homes. Most of the people there are retired. Most of the people are looking to do some stuff. We’re hoping to drop 3,500 postcards and just get 35 people, 1% to show up to our wine and cheese mixer on Thursday night before the event.
You’re guaranteed with the postcard that they’re going to read it. Whereas if it’s in a white envelope, they’re probably going to chuck it away. Once they’ve opted in here, we follow up with more mail to them. We follow up with closed deals that just closed this year or a letter that goes out to them or email, “We just closed on this portfolio this month, these assets this month. We closed on $33 million in non-performing notes this year. We closed on 33 assets here.” It doesn’t matter if you’re closing on deals, it’s better than they’re doing because most of them aren’t doing anything. Most of them are doing zilch, nada. It’s a great way for you to tap into people who sit on the sidelines and then they’re passive. They’re used to getting a statement once a quarter, like the other traditional IRA. They don’t have to be as active. Most of them don’t want to do the work, but they want to be educated. That’s the ideal list for that stuff.
If you’re interested in doing that, we can sell you a list in any county in America. We do a dollar a lead for you. The minimum order is $1,000, so a thousand leads. It’s going to give you plenty of there. You get one IRA investor to respond, it’s well worth it. I’ll give you some of the things. I’ll give you the template for the postcard. I’ll give you the series of what we do and how we follow up with them as well. If you’re interested, drop me a message at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. Just simply say in the title, “IRA Postcards or IRA Leads.” We’re about to go freaking like IRA blitzing here over the next two months, getting stuff out to people, getting links out. The only thing that costs is the list, the postage and the postcards. That’s not that expensive. You’re probably talking less than $2,000 in total on that aspect of it. It depends on the postcards you send out. You can order fewer postcards from Vistaprint. If you want to go smaller, that’s fine, but we use these for a variety of things.
Pulling A List From Zip Codes
I use this when I go to the real estate club, I’ll use it when I’m out at an expo. I use it when I’m marketing out to IRA investor, self-directed or traditional IRA investors to get into the market. These things come in handy and it’s one of the few direct mail pieces that we do here in the offices anymore. It’s not hard. I’m going to give an example. Quest was going to do their Seattle mixer. The great thing is we pulled a list of 4,000 IRA investors within the zip codes that are in the most profitable zip codes, the higher priced real estate in that area, and it leads to people coming to their meeting. There were only ten people that came from the postcards, but those ten were very valuable. The people that showed up were out of the 50 or 60 that showed up.
If somebody will come from this, it is well-worth doing. It’s just a play that you’ve got to do on a regular basis to make things happen. The thing is I send it out, we actually create different images. We use all races, ethnicities, we do guys, gals, it doesn’t matter. We’ll send out on a variety of things as well too for it. That’s the nice thing, and if the emails bounce back, great. We’ll be doing a couple of emails, bounced back, it’s not a big deal, but often the address is still good. That’s why we like to start off with sending out a list of postcards to the list so that we get those that opt-in to the Bit.ly link and it makes it much more sense for us. The thing you’ve got to keep in mind too is while the email is the most valuable thing, sending an email is the hardest thing to do with these lists. You have to upload them to Facebook. You’ve got upload them there and follow up with them.
I have used this to move assets in Cook County before. We’ve had uploaded a list of 6,000 IRA investors in Cook County in the past. I ran some ads to it with a property we’re trying to sell a reperforming note, and I ended up having 30 people respond back with Facebook posts, which is great. It’s cheap leads on that. I go in my custom audiences. Clark County in Vegas, I uploaded 5,000. 3,700 of them had working Facebook profiles. That’s pretty good. That’s 74%. That was pretty good. I pulled 19,000 IRA contacts in San Diego. I didn’t pull the full amount but pulled 19,000 and at 19,000, 12,000 of them had Facebook profiles. I upload another 75,000 nationwide IRA and 48,000 of them had working Facebook profiles. That’s the beautiful thing. Some people always ask, “Scott, how are you doing things?” This is how we do it. We use the technology that’s available to us and that is why I laugh with the whole Cambridge thing that happened with the elections. People were like, “How do they know these?” We share most of our information. If you put your birthdate and where you live and ZIP code, people can tell roughly what you’re making if you’ve owned a house and you can tell a lot by what a person makes by where they live.
If they own the house, you can tell what’s the mortgage payment for that and you know a mortgage payment is a third roughly of what their income is probably going to be. You can figure out what they’re making on a monthly annual basis relatively easy. The fact that we share interests and likes and things like that, your age and birthdate, all those other things and what your title may be. You can figure out what somebody is making easy. You can be the whole Cambridge Analytics yourself for your own note investing company. I know this may be scary, but I’m just telling you like it is.
This is literally like shooting fish in a barrel. I mentioned this at the Quest Expo. I’ll probably speak at the Quest Expo because it’s here locally, but it’s also one of the reasons I didn’t go to Note Expo. I love going to Note Expo, but if I’m not speaking in an event, there is no reason for me to go just there hanging out. I can literally market for investors online much easier without having to leave the comfort of my own home, without leaving my office here. My beautiful view out here, shorts and a t-shirt and flip-flops most of the time. What I’m saying to everybody is this is so much easier to do this, put these things in place, you just have to work at this stuff. You have to develop the skills over time. If you don’t have a MailChimp account or you are brand new to get a LinkedIn profile, you’re not spending time on LinkedIn, this was going to take you some time to do and that’s okay to do.
IRA Investors: Videos are a great way for you to build rapport with people you know but don’t know who you are.
As long as you have a LinkedIn profile, you’ve got a couple thousand people on LinkedIn, that’s easy. It’s an easy upload in MailChimp and start working through that list. Start seasoning your email database. If you don’t have those, that’s okay. Don’t flip out. You can still use these lists by marketing to Facebook. By uploading the list, you can still mark it out to them something simple. Everybody can shoot a two-minute, three-minute video here and uploaded to YouTube or upload that link into your MailChimp list. If somebody clicks on your Bit link, it takes them there. It sees your smiling face. “Hi, this is Catherine. I’m your local Chicago investor/realtor here to help you, either invest or help you buy real estate in the Chicago land area. Thanks for clicking below. I’ll send you my eBook on how to do blank, blank and blank, and I would love to schedule a time. Click on this link to schedule some time to talk one-on-one.”
It’s very simple. You got a link. You can see how many times people have clicked on the Bit.ly link, which is easy to see. I can go in Bit.ly right now and see how many people are clicking on different links, which is a great. You can see how many people opt-in, when they opt-in, they get an email, “Let’s schedule a time to talk. I would love to find more about your real estate background or your investing background. Where’s your money at right now?” You know what that conversation leads to. It’s leads to you getting the chance to know them and build a rapport. It’s the longer play. You don’t want to call them, “Can you fund my deal right now?” Which many people are doing incorrectly because they haven’t built rapport with people.
By building rapport, “It’s great to know you. I’ve been doing this for a while.” The beautiful thing about this foreplay, it allows them to build trust. It gives them an opportunity to see what else you’re doing. It gives you the opportunity to build rapport. “Here’s another deal that we just closed on this month. Here’s the deal that we closed on two months ago. Here are deals that we’re working on right now,” and people are like, “I want to get involved.” “Let’s work on it.” Then you can basically then have them do what next? Fill out the investor profile sheet. See if they’re really going to pull the trigger, make sure the money’s in the account that can be moved into an investment. I would probably then call Quest IRA, “I’ve got somebody that needs to open a Quest IRA account. I need to do a rollover for you. Call Catherine. She’s got an IRA. She reached out to me.” You’re just knocking it down like shooting fish in a barrel. Become a consultant. You want them on training wheels is the best way I would say to it. Keep it simple. You don’t give them all the ins and outs. This is why we’ve spent so much time with videos and stuff like that, but you can train them. “Here’s what we’re buying and here’s how it could go.”
Video Stories
This is the beautiful thing about your video. This is why we harp on videos because videos become a great way for you to build rapport with your database that doesn’t know who you are, but now you know who they are. They just don’t know about you. The things that you probably want to have more than anything else, you probably have one that have at least five stories. What I mean by these stories, these are basic videos that are not long, two to five minutes in length that are really easy to do. One is about you. Who is Scott Carson? Who is Catherine? Who is Michael? Who is Dan? Who is Laura? Who’s Brady? Simple two-minute videos. You don’t want to go on and on because the minute you go on and on and on, you’ve lost them. It’s a simple, “Here’s who I am. Here’s who Brady the Mortgage Medic is. I’m a retired veteran. I’ve been an active real estate investor though for twenty years. My focus is I buy distressed debt because if you know what happened in the last ten years, it’s going to happen again. I’m committed to helping Americans stay in their home.” About you, who is Scott Carson? Honestly, if I go to my Vimeo, YouTube accounts, that’s the number one video, “Who is Scott Carson? Who is the note guy?” Part of it becomes from our marketing. It goes out.
The second video you want to have, what is note investing? Basic, simple thing. The best thing you want to do is use your camera properly. Don’t flip it up horizontally like this. These are videos. You’re not going to live stream. These are videos that can be recorded. You want to do it horizontally because that’s going to fit into YouTube and Vimeo the easiest. You do this short video. You could literally do it right here. It’s a two to five-minute video. What is note investing and why is it valuable? Then three videos you may want to talk about different exit strategies, how we find our deals, how we fund our deals, how we flip our deals. Those are the five videos. It’s not too difficult to film. Short, sweet, two to five minutes. The longest one would be the exit strategy. That’s going to be the last one that you do. That’s going to be the longest ten-minute video. “I want to give information and absolutely reach out to you.” The beautiful thing is you can put your videos into a playlist. They click on one and they’re watching one link that you send the link for, it will automatically play the next ones in a row. Usually, before they ever get to five or ten, they’re already sent you an email.
The thing is this is a much slower play. This is not like send a postcard out. They call you that week. They fund the deal. That rarely happens. I say you send a postcard out, they respond, they send an email out. You do a follow-up phone call a couple days later. Then you send them video links. Then you send them examples. Then you put them into your regular email campaign. It may take six months, it may take three months, but this is how you add people to your database on a regular basis. It’s very easy for you to do. I know I’m blowing your mind out there. I’ve never done this on this show before. It’s one of the few things that we go through in our Fast Track training that we don’t really share with anybody else. You’re going to get some great stuff this weekend being here.
Basically, you’re sending a postcard or you’re posting it to Facebook. It’s one way to get them into your database. Get them in your database. Then once they’re in your database, then you send them an email. Then you’re following up with a phone call to schedule some time to talk to them. Depending on how that conversation goes, you may want them to fill out an investor profile sheet or just to talk with them. If not, then send them directly over to your five-video campaign. The five videos, who is blank, who are you, what is note investing, what have you done, your resume thing, and then you’ve got how you find them, how do you fund them, and then how do you flip them the exit strategies. Keep it simple. The longest one’s going to be your exit strategy. How do you make money?
I wouldn’t go through all ten exit strategies. There are basically three primary exit strategies, reinstatement modification, Cash for Keys, deed in lieu or foreclosure. The foreclosure has some things. I would keep it simple. Those five emails, those five steps, it’s pretty easy to do. It all starts with the list and we sell those lists at a thousand list increments if you are interested. If you’re a part of the WCN Crew membership, your swag bags are being delivered. I can see them. I literally see them popping up. Shannon did a great job of getting everything packed up. We’ve got another special surprise coming out for WCN Crew members. We’ve got a few bags left, still, drop in the mail, but most of them got dropped in the mail. We’ve finally got new shirt sizes for some people or some new mailing addresses. We’re excited. Keep an eye out for the WCN Crew membership swag bag hitting a Post Office near you. Thank you so much. Hopefully, everyone enjoyed this stuff. Have a great day.
Important Links
- PostcardMania
- Quest Trust Company
- Jillian Sidoti – Previous episode
Bit.ly - Scott@WeCloseNotes.com
- NoteProz
- Vistaprint
- Quest Expo
- Note Expo
- WCN Crew