How AI Direct Mail Is Transforming Real Estate Marketing (With Aaron Chand)

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Show Summary

In this conversation, Dylan Silver interviews Aaron Chand, the founder of Moonify AI, about the innovative integration of AI in direct mail marketing, particularly for real estate. They discuss the power of personalization, the efficiency of AI in crafting unique letters, and the potential for scaling marketing efforts. Aaron shares insights on targeting specific demographics, the importance of human oversight in AI-generated content, and the future of marketing in the real estate sector. The discussion highlights how AI can enhance engagement and improve response rates in direct mail campaigns.

Resources and Links from this show:

• • • Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind
    • Investor Machine Real Estate Lead Generation
    • Mike on Facebook
    • Mike on Instagram
    • Mike on LinkedIn
    • Aaron Chand’s Website
    • Aaron Chand on Instagram

  Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

  Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

  Aaron Chand (00:00)
  Yeah, so it’s really like the last piece people would think of for this kind of thing. But direct mail is like one of the only industries where you can really, you can hyper target who you want to get your ad in front of. And you have the highest likelihood of them opening that up. So that mixed with a couple of things that we incorporate, like QR codes and landing pages makes it, I think, more effective than digital marketing because it’s on the down and

  by using AI to personalize what you can never do at scale, historically. can never write. Basically what we do is we write each and every person a unique letter, which you can never do unless you have like a huge team. No. But AI can do that.

  Dylan Silver (00:42)
  you can never win.

  folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is based in Tampa, Florida and is the founder of Moonify AI where he’s focused on creating better optimized direct mail solutions. Please welcome Aaron Chand. Aaron, welcome to the show.

  Aaron Chand (02:34)
  Yeah, thanks for having me on, Dylan. I’m excited to be here. It’s going be fun to talk about personalization.

  Dylan Silver (02:39)
  It’s great

  to have you on here and before hopping on, I express just how interested I am in this space, the direct mail space and you’re bringing AI to the direct mail space. How is that possible?

  Aaron Chand (02:53)
  Yeah, so it’s really like the last piece people would think of for this kind of thing. But direct mail is like one of the only industries where you can really, you can hyper target who you want to get your ad in front of. And you have the highest likelihood of them opening that up. So that mixed with a couple of things that we incorporate, like QR codes and landing pages makes it, I think, more effective than digital marketing because it’s on the down and

  by using AI to personalize what you can never do at scale, historically. can never write. Basically what we do is we write each and every person a unique letter, which you can never do unless you have like a huge team. No. But AI can do that.

  Dylan Silver (03:36)
  you can never win.

  Aaron Chand (03:39)
  AI can take in large amounts of data, restructure it, write it, and then apply like different language preferences to how we want it to sound and do all that at scale behind the scenes. And then we just, you just have an interface to approve the letter or tweak it.

  and then you just hit send and it goes out. It’s that easy.

  Dylan Silver (03:56)
  I feel like AI is a gold rush to getting the first to market because I remember when I had the first person on this show who did the speed to lead, right? And I said, wow, that’s a great idea, you know, and I felt like that was the first time that I had heard that. And then I saw so many people with the same idea right after that. You’re the first person that I’ve ever encountered who’s thought about AI direct mail marketing. Is it for real estate agents primarily? Is that your avatar?

  Aaron Chand (04:27)
  Yeah, we started with real estate agents because I am a real estate agent. And so that was an industry that I knew I’d written letters in, like I’ve handwritten letters and I knew I could get, I knew I could, we could build an AI system that could write pretty good letters. And then we’re scaling with strategic partners in other industries. So someone who would know what type of ad copy would work really well in that industry. And then we would work with them to personalize it. we want to obviously, we’re just saying investors send out more direct mail than.

  real estate agents. that’s kind of one of four and they send out a lot of direct mail in general.

  Dylan Silver (05:00)
  A lot of direct mail. was just mentioning

  to this before hopping on here. I had a background and I still am very much ⁓ involved from afar I would say. I follow a lot of the news and in the distressed real estate space and I was a wholesaler for about two years before getting active as a licensed realtor. And one of the interesting things is nothing seemed to be more effective. Nothing seemed to be more effective than direct mail when it came to

  Finding distress property and you would see people who would spend, know multiple tens of thousands of dollars Nearing six figures a month in one Metro and it felt like they could dominate the space But you mentioned something Aaron which which really piqued my interest which is yes You do have these people who are doing heavy campaigns and they’re seeing a great ROI and you might think well How can I compete with someone who’s got so much?

  skin in the game, but you said you know actually with a very targeted ⁓ mailer you can.

  Aaron Chand (06:50)
  You can. Yeah. that’s one of the first things we noticed is that on tighter budgets with specific like, I really want that listing like someone could one, if you send multiple letters instantly, ⁓ your odds of receiving a response are drastically, ⁓ multiplied. One way that we use AI to do this too, is in our AI workflows, when it’s time to write letter three, the AI will go and look at what it said in letter one and two and build.

  build off that. So basically by hyper-personalizing each and every letter, each and every step of the process to make the person reading the letter go, whoa, this is personalized offer. This is something that was written to me. The likelihood of them reading the letter is extremely high, and the likelihood of them responding is even higher. Well, not even higher, but even higher than generic, but not higher than.

  Dylan Silver (07:44)
  I think

  what’s probably on the tip of everybody’s mind when they’re listening to this is, well, aren’t we going to know that it’s AI? We’re receiving handwritten or typed out letters, but I don’t think it matters. Right. I think it’s like, well, we know that they’re taking the time to invest in their resources, which are showing me the things that make my property unique and also giving me maybe market data that could be beneficial. So

  I want to align myself with someone who’s going to market my property the way that they’re marketing themselves.

  Aaron Chand (08:18)
  Yeah. And I would say that’s what makes it particularly special is how obsessed our team is with making it sound human. So one, no letters are sent automatically. And I don’t know if we’ll ever necessarily do that unless AI just dramatically improves, but every single letter has to be approved by a human where you can edit it manually, regenerate with the AI or just approve and hit send. And then it gets sent out. that human, the loop factor is huge, but

  Most of the work we do is really spending time crafting the letters. For instance, drawing a specific feature about their home. I love your 1,650 square foot home. That can feel very creepy. You don’t necessarily want to be super specific when you’re talking about their home, but when you’re talking about market data, consumers respond well to when you have exact numbers that are relevant to them. Then sending single family homes in this neighborhood of appreciated.

  36.3 % according to this data source. They appreciate specificity in that sense. So we really do actually get the letters to sound pretty human. Most people don’t know. And you, as the person, are still in charge of what actually gets sent out. It’s more like you’ve got a ghostwriter is how I like to put it.

  Dylan Silver (09:36)
  I want to ask you about, you know, the idea of sending so many out, right? you mentioned that before we hopped on here, you mentioned that you personally saw a great return on time when you were writing handwritten letters. But of course, handwritten versus machine written, it’s exponential how many more that you can get out. ⁓ Now, if you’re going through and you’re approving each one, what’s a realistic number if someone said, hey, I want to send, you know, however many

  Thousand mailers is that realistic for them to send in in a month?

  Aaron Chand (10:09)
  Yeah, we do have a ⁓ option for someone who would want to send that much out where we would do everything in house for you more or less because we’d be more efficient at running a system of that size and then we leverage VAs to ensure that every letter is sent out ⁓ appropriately.

  Dylan Silver (10:29)
  Now, when you’re looking at these, is it a lot of expired listings? Is it a lot of homes that may have ⁓ features that may make it beneficial for, let’s say, you’ve listed a home on the same street or in the same area, would you be targeting it in that regard, or would it be based on an area and a zip code, so on and so

  Aaron Chand (11:23)
  Each AI campaign we make really is for like a specific use case. like expired is one, another one would be just luxury listings in general, circle prospecting, I sold this home in this neighborhood and this is how it’s similar, things like that. And then we want to add kind of more more campaigns. Cash Offer is one that we’re working on adding. ⁓ But we want to go beyond kind of just

  Dylan Silver (11:38)
  Yeah.

  Aaron Chand (11:53)
  We want to do what gets you guys responses, so personalizing our accounts. So we usually base it off a template, and then it’ll go and find information and then kind of fill in that template by itself. But I don’t know if that answers your question. Each campaign is custom made though.

  Dylan Silver (12:08)
  It’s interesting because you mentioned a couple terms one that I hadn’t heard of but I think it’s exactly describes what I was trying to allude to this circle prospecting idea where I sold a home in a similar or in the area this home that you have is in the area You know, here’s here’s how you can benefit from my services and so on and then you mentioned some other different types of prospecting as well

  I do want to ask you about the potential for this to even be used across languages, right? So if you’re in an area in Texas, in South Florida, for instance, where you may have a lot of Spanish speakers, ⁓ is there a way where you could potentially send multiple languages?

  Aaron Chand (12:48)
  Yeah, yeah, you could totally personalize down to that level. We want to personalize down to every level where even if you want to do a postcard, the image of their home personalized to them, the offer that’s in the thing. One thing that we’re working on really getting out sooner rather than later just because of how much I believe this will drastically increase the response rate is adding a QR code to our letter where you scan the QR code and then you go to a landing page where we’d have like a personalized video.

  to them, whereas the thumbnail would be a picture of their home or something like that, or ⁓ off their Zillow or their Google Street View. know some people do. But balancing that, don’t want to be creepy, so it’s OK if they know it’s AI in some senses. But also, we want them to know that we took time to genuinely give them something that they’re going to find valuable. We want them to reach out. And so then the letters would be crafted around that, which I think would be more effective.

  Dylan Silver (13:29)
  Yeah.

  Well, I worked for a company at one point that was sending Google images of people’s homes and this was several years ago and some of the people would call the office and they said, I’ve got this picture of my house. You guys take a picture of my house? But the response rate was so high. The response rate was so high. And this was really, would say before AI is anywhere where it is today. Of course you see like every six months there’s a new ⁓ use case for AI. I’m curious to see, I mean,

  It’s still a new company, but you’ve probably seen so much advancement even in this short time. Where do you see the next six months with these technologies heading towards and how can this benefit prospecting in general?

  Aaron Chand (14:32)
  I think personalization becomes a much, we see improvement across the board in personalization, which we’ve already seen like TikTok. The reason people love TikTok is because it’s personalized content. You can go on to TikTok and the more you use it, the better results you get. Same with Amazon. Like they know exactly what I want to buy. So we’re seeing that already with like a meta ads are super easy to run now because of how well medic can find your target audience. So I think in, I don’t know if you asked in the

  direct mail space as like a real estate investor slash real estate agent. think eventually we do see more personalized marketing using AI within a real estate, but I think that they’ll probably start with like the broadest use case, which will be like putting together your list of leads that you want to send, send mail to. maybe only sending mail to, I don’t know.

  Dylan Silver (15:45)
  Yeah.

  Aaron Chand (16:10)
  Widows over 76 or something like that. I don’t know whatever the campaign distress properties foreclosures ⁓ Historic homes, whatever that is. You can get really good at pinpointing exactly the person you want to put the ad in front of and I think that mixed with ⁓ Even like with the type of letter we get in front of them is AI could

  Dylan Silver (16:14)
  Yeah.

  Aaron Chand (16:35)
  easily look at like a big like 1000 letters and go, purple envelopes work really well in front of this demographic. And then it could, when you select this demographic as your target audience, it kind of automatically knows to use purple envelopes and kind of creates automated, automated personalized campaigns for you is I think where we’re headed.

  Dylan Silver (16:52)
  I want to pivot a bit here, Aaron, and ask you about real estate ⁓ agents and ⁓ realty as a business, brokerage as a business. You know, I think a lot of investors specifically sometimes look at ⁓ being an agent and think, well, it’s highly transactional and it’s not passive. Since I’m ⁓ a former wholesaler, now a realtor, and I’m active in media, one of the things that has really struck me in talking with folks like yourself is that there’s ways to automate these processes to treat

  brokerage like an investment. You can build teams, can have marketing, you can have systems in place where you’re not having to do all of the prospecting yourself, where you have people that the transaction coordinators. And as a realtor, your role really may be ⁓ limited time-wise to I’m going to close the deal and I’m gonna show up at closing and the rest will be handled by agents underneath me. I’m curious to get your perspective on how

  maybe young agents can look at scaling their business without being in the business as much in the future.

  Aaron Chand (17:58)
  I would say 100 % leveraging AI to do things that are unscalable. Like historically, think brokers knew that you have to be belly to belly with your clients in order for it to work. This is an industry where you can kind of just not be involved with them emotionally or relationally. And that’s what’s worked for everybody. So people had big teams and stuff like that, but you can actually scale personal relationships with people by using AI to do things like, for instance,

  As a realtor, I save all my conversations. I upload them all to a database so that I can ask AI, remind me where I went to lunch with them. We looked at some houses, remind me what were they interested in again? And I can use it to kind of do those things that normally it’s just my, quality of my service goes down with the more clients I have. Doesn’t, doesn’t affect it anymore because I can scale with AI systems. And I think that’s where we’re headed because I think people value realtors emotionally.

  most of probably everything. They want to feel good about their decision, think, in a way.

  Dylan Silver (19:02)
  Yeah.

  They want to feel good.

  mean, I tell this to people of all the sales experience that I have, can, unless you’ve got, mean, even if you’ve got a super left brain person and they’re, they want to know all about the numbers, I still believe that at the end of everything, if they don’t feel good about it, something is going to be off. And so you can have all the numbers, right? Everything can be good on paper, but how can you make them

  Resonate with it and feel good about it And I think people will be interested in listening to this podcast say I can use AI to make people feel good about Working with me. I thought that you know, that’s an interesting one Aaron we are we are coming up on on time here Where can folks go if maybe they’re interested in learning more about Munafai or maybe they’re in the greater Tampa area and would like to reach out to you directly

  Aaron Chand (19:42)
  Yeah.

  Yeah, they can find me on Instagram, just my name, and then moonify.ai. can type it in anywhere. can send ⁓ your first letter out for free. yeah, just moonify.ai. That’s it.

  Dylan Silver (20:08)
  Aaron, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

  Aaron Chand (20:11)
  Yeah, thanks Dylan, thanks for having