HANG ON.
August 28, 2013 ~ We’ve had a terrible experience working with Click2Mail this week. On Monday, we reported to them that their payment process was broken. It really was. So broken that on Tuesday they still could not process our request for a simple mailing list. The finally did it manually and sent us the list at the end of Tuesday. IT WAS THE WRONG LIST. Supposed to be for Dallas County and it included only 2,000 Dallas records and the remaining 6,000 were in Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Amarillo, etc. Contacted their Customer Service and they said they would resend. As of Wednesday morning, we’ve received another list – now looks like Dallas only but it has almost 1,000 more records than we got when we searched their site. So we suspect that one or more of the list criteria (filters) was set incorrectly. Just don’t know which one because it’s just a bunch of names and addresses. Their response was “We just billed you for the original number of records (~8,250).”. We have more confidence in our data when WE (or YOU) pull it. When you involve a “data specialist” to pull your data, you just don’t know what they did. That’s why we only recommend data vendors that allow you to search and pull their data ONLINE via their websites.
We continue to want to work with Click2Mail because they have more filters at a better price per record than most others. But with their provisioning and billing processes in such a state of brokenness, we must temporarily SUSPEND their status as a We Buy Houses® Recommended Vendor. We will keep you posted & hope they get their sh*t together! The only silver lining is that the final list they sent us – which IS good data – was over 9,000 records and we only paid them for 8,250 (a savings of $69).
If you use Click2Mail, just proceed with caution and be aware of these issues. As an alternative, you might use My Mailing Leads from Acxiom. Their price is about the same. They just don’t offer all the filters that Click2Mail offers.
https://click2mail.com/
Click2Mail is a turnkey provider of mailing lists and direct mail. Their system initially appears to be rather complex, but once you use it, you’ll find that it works very well. We like Click2Mail because their online process provide real-time editing and selection of your mailing list. You can upload our postcard design, edit it onscreen, go thru their process to pull your mailing list (which is a separate process – they probably get the list from a 3rd party vendor), and then upload your mailing list, select the postage type (standard vs. first class), and you’re in business.
Click2Mail’s LIST
The total cost of Click2Mail is significantly more expensive than imageMEDIA, but the cost of their list is cheaper, and we like that they have a Real Property List that is tailored to the needs of people involved in real estate, with criteria including % or amount of equity. LTV, etc. One thing to consider – you could buy your list from Click2Mail and then upload it at imageMEDIA and have them do your printing and mailing at a lower cost (i.e., save 7 cents per piece, which adds up to $175 on a 2,500 piece mailing!)
Here’s what you might expect for cost for a 2,500 piece campaign:
ESTIMATED COST
Postcard printing .50
List – per record .09 (multi-use list; single use is .06)
Processing .00 (included in the printing cost)
Standard postage .28 (add .10 more for First Class)
TOTAL .87 per piece for the first mailing
.79 per piece for add’l mailing to same list
Click2Mail’s PROCESS
Let’s take a look at their process for uploading your postcard and selecting your list:
You start by selecting the product – in this case we’ve chosen their 5×8” postcard – and they show you a quick estimate of the cost for the printing and mailing. The cost of the list is not yet reflected on this screen.
Next, you upload your postcard design:
After getting your design uploaded (and edited, if necessary), you proceed to select your mailing list. This really takes you off to a separate process.
When you click on DEFINE RECIPIENTS to go off to the mailing list function, you’ll see a number of list types from which to choose. Their Real Property List has criteria that are valuable for targeting REI prospects, but we found the information about the list to be confusing. When trying to Learn More about the Real Property List, we got to this screen which was very confusing:
For the most part, you can ignore this pricing table, as the price for your list will be computing when you define what you want. So let’s proceed off to that next step – once we define the criteria we are interested in selecting, you’ll be taken to this screen to make the actual data range choices for each of your selected criteria:
With all the choices made, you click Continue at the bottom of the screen and you’ll then see how many records were found for your selected criteria and the cost for each one. Here we see that the cost is 5.7 cents per record for a single-use list:
If you want to mail to the list several times (recommended), click on “Use Multiple Times” and the price will update – it’s 8.6 cents per record for a “multi-use” list:
Once you have your list criteria all set and know the number of records and pricing, you can proceed to get your list in either a FILE or as printed mailing labels. This is what we meant by this being a separate process:
Once you get your list, you go back to the postcard process and UPLOAD your list:
That’s pretty much their process. It is a little cumbersome how the list is generated outside of the main process and you have to go retrieve it. With imageMEDIA. they get and integrate (and control) the list.
One advantage of getting your list separately is that you will have/own that list and you can mail to it multiple times, upload it into Excel, create your own mailing labels, etc.
Click2Mail is a good source that is trusted by a number of real estate investors. Their price on the list is very good; their price on printing postcards is not very good. But they have an integrated, turnkey process, so they are definitely a legitimate provider.
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