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Show Summary
In this conversation, Andy Detwiler discusses the complexities of direct mail marketing, emphasizing the importance of compliance and strategy. He shares insights on how to effectively utilize technology in real estate marketing, including customization features that can enhance engagement. The discussion highlights the need for innovation in the industry and the value of personal connections in business development.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Andy Detwiler (00:00)
We haven’t, we haven’t enrolled it yet, but, ⁓ we’ve been beta testing with two, large companies and so far it’s been amazing. And I’ll paint a picture. What if I said to you, Erika, you’re an investor or, ⁓ whatever an agent. And I said, Erika, as a, let’s call you an investor. ⁓ you like meeting people and you like whatever you’re doing right in your business.but you don’t like to spend time marketing. Well, what if I said, well, okay, what areas do you market in? You know what areas you’re marketing? Yeah, okay, cool. What if I drew on a map the areas you like to market in, or you drew on the map the areas you want to market in, or you pick your cities, and then you say, cool, and then what life events would you like to track and monitor knowing that people with a life event are more likely to want to release their property, right? If they have a life event like probate or death or divorce or taxes or bankruptcy or things like that, when you like to market to them automatically when that happens within those three or four cities that you’re monitoring?
Well, that’s what we’re doing.
Erika (02:28)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Erika. And today I’m joined by someone that I’m excited to chat with, Andy Detwiler. He’s been making serious moves with his company, Print Genie. Andy, I’m glad to have you here today.Andy Detwiler (02:45)
Thank you for having me, Erika.Erika (02:48)
I think our listeners are really going to be fascinated with what you’ve built and how you’re revolutionizing the real estate world with your technology. So let’s jump on in. For our listeners, can you share more about that journey and what it was like building Print Genie, how you’re helping people?Andy Detwiler (03:08)
Oh, that’s great. That’s a great intro. And thank you for asking me that. I like to share. one of the things that I’m doing with Printchini, it’s built out of half a billion pieces of mail and 27 years of serving investors primarily. And what we did was after doing what we’ve been calling Gilbic printing and having built print on demand since 1999, we learned a thing or two.And I always lead with that because we have learned a lot of what works and what doesn’t work. So we started around 2019, 2020, mapping out a plan for what we wanted to do better, better than what we had and better than what was out there. And that’s when we started building Princhini. And it’s business agnostic, even though we do service investors, we service all kinds of agents, of course, as well. But it’s the most innovative direct mail platform, having done it the first time in 1999.
⁓ that’s available and that’s why we put our energy towards it on all that we’ve learned in the last what 25 years.
Erika (04:11)
Yeah, wow. you know, fast forward today, what would you say are some of like the biggest ⁓ problems that you are offering solutions to?Andy Detwiler (04:23)
Yeah, so, you know, I have an e-book and I wrote it out of a passion to try to explain to people what I hear and see. ⁓ Oftentimes as a direct mail company, right, we built direct mail as a marketing engine. And I see that people have challenges with this shiny metal object syndrome. And I’m the first to admit that a real estate investor generally runs towards a cheap mini postcard, primarily. We know that sending one postcard to one personis going have a dismal less than 1 % response rate. So the challenges in the market is two things. People run towards that shiny metal object. Well, maybe there’s more than one, two things, but
it’s also they listen to people, like maybe it’s a coach or someone that’s got something going on, a guru or whatever you want to call it. And they listen to them and they hear what they say and they drive to that. Right. So it’s this distraction and confusion when ultimately it’s like you should be communicating to someone often.
because time and circumstances change all things. And so what happens is we realize it’s like, can’t just send one postcard and hope someone’s going to call you just because you sent one postcard. You have to send a ⁓ a sequence of drip, you know, drip campaigns, for example, so that it lands on their lap when they need you, not just when you sent a postcard. So the confusion is people coaching the wrong way or over-exaggerating results. ⁓ It’s also the confusion in the marketplace.
The noise and distraction of, I’ve heard this is a magical pill. It’s not. And I use it this way. There’s no elixir. There’s no one hit wonder. It’s the act of doing things systematically over and over again so you can save time, energy, and be more efficient with your marketing. So those are the challenges in the market, and that’s what we’re trying to solve for.
Erika (06:59)
When it comes to that system, Andy, what do you recommend for a real estate pro? Walk through that process a bit. How do you build that system for them that they don’t have to think about it, that it just does the work for them?Andy Detwiler (07:14)
That’s a great question. So I alluded to the fact that I call it the monkey on my back. The monkey on my back is solving those questions that I get consistently for 27 years. What should I send? How often should I send it? What should it look like? Where do you get your data? People are so confused with analysis paralysis as like, it should be blue ink or black ink, or it should look this way or that way, or get the best results. In fact, this has to be there on someone’s lap when they get it, right? And so what I’ve discovered,you know, from this experience, I guess, is when I can give someone a tool that’s premeditated, maybe call it premeditative marketing. How about that? I just kind of coined that expression right now. So premeditative marketing means that you’re spending time building out your marketing plan and then you’re turning it on. So how do I solve for the monkey on my back is I have pre-created content that you can edit if you want to, but I’m suggesting not.
Or I’m suggesting spend your day putting together the templates, postcards, text letters, and emails and texts as a campaign, spend three hours doing it, and then turn it on. Instead of logging in randomly and going, I should do some marketing. What should I send? What should it say? Editing a postcard. I’m saying don’t do that. So what I’m saying is if you have this machine that’s ready to go, you’re feeding the beast. And this feeding the beast methodology is another way of saying, look,
You’re gonna get your data through the automation platform. We have data, right? Or you’re gonna get it from some other place and you’re gonna ingest it into Printchini. Now that we connect with CRMs, you’re feeding the beast. You’re not logging in and customizing MailPent templates, right? You’re feeding the beast, right? So whether you’re on your phone and you have like we have a mobile phone, right? You can tag a property, take a picture and you’ve added that to your campaign. And now that person is gonna get a sequence.
Or you do nearest neighbor searches from your phone and you hit the 10 nearest neighbors with a multi-touch campaign saying I’m buying houses in this area. So you see in none of these experiences, am I actually logging in, uploading a list, customizing a template, and then ordering? That day, from my perspective, is way, way gone. So automating solutions, so you’re feeding the beast with the data. So if you’re leading with the right data and you’re feeding the beast, the beast as in your marketing engine,
then you can do your day job, which is what you should be doing, right? Unless you want to get into marketing and start doing marketing. I’m saying don’t, right? I’m saying we’re designers. We have call to actions. We’ve done this a long time or from our library of thousands or edit it if you want to personalize it. I mean, not personalized as in dear Mark and Mary, but I’m saying customize it a little bit. But other than that, turn it on, right? Feed the beast. Hope that answered your question. I put a phrase in there randomly, but it’s true, you know.
That’s true.
Erika (10:40)
Yeah, it’s exciting that it has customization features too, because I think that’s where some people kind of get bogged down in the details there. So what kind of features like that have you added?Andy Detwiler (10:52)
Well, I did segment the platform into two sides. There’s called the design studio and there’s the marketplace. The marketplace is where you order. The design studio is where you spend your time putting together your marketing plan, right? What you want your postcard to look like, your letter, your greeting card, your text, your email, your campaign, right? And then we give a user the tools that they’d want to drag and drop. We built our own, it’s not Canva. I wish it were Canva, but it’s not.But you can add your own variables and personal elements. But we have merge blocks. Like you want a Google Street View to show up. You want a dynamic QR code to generate something so you’re a text notification when someone scans your card. You want to build a template because you have a team of 30 people. We do a lot with large companies that use a SaaS company like GHL or Go High Level. And it’s a SaaS company that wants all 20,000 people to have access to their ⁓ pre-created direct mail.
So you can just interject our direct mail templates within their platform and it’ll automatically pull from their profile, such as their photo and logo and things like that. So the tool itself is very versatile, right? And it gives anybody that’s building a tool or I mean, a direct mail piece ⁓ the ability to personalize it with photos and logos and QR codes and dynamic QR codes and all those types of things. Right. We have more to it than that, but that gives you an insight that there’s nothing you can’t do to a mail template.
that you’d want to do, right? As far as like, you know, understanding your response rates and all that good stuff there. So we give that user the tool to do it, but we pre-build them the way we think we should and then allow them to tweak it or make it or duplicate it if they want to. But we really lean on just use it, right? The most, the biggest challenge people have, especially real estate agents by the way, is they want it to be perfect and glossy and pretty and perfect.
And I’m like, just get it out there, right? Turn it on. ⁓ Anyway, sorry to go over there, but yes, there’s plenty of tools built into the application so that you can build and create your own material and then share it with others or share it with your team. You can even share it and earn on it because there’s a big affiliate program in it if you like doing that kind of stuff too.
Erika (13:00)
Wow, there’s so many opportunities there to create more with the system that you’ve built, which means people are getting more results with their campaigns. Do you have any success stories or anything like that where someone using Print Genie has really loved what they’ve designed, what they’ve built?Andy Detwiler (13:23)
Sure. ⁓ So one of the things that ⁓ the lean into Print Genie was, ⁓ case study wise, the lean into Print Genie was to say, okay, I know I love when someone, well, I love and I don’t love. When someone submits 40,000, know, ⁓ an order of 40,000, it’s like, that’s awesome. But I internally know that they’re gonna get less than 1 % on that response rate, 6%. I know that. No matter what it is, it could be, I could,thousands of postcards I was about to show you postcards I guess you know what a postcard looks like but whether it’s handwritten or half handwritten or it’s partially handwritten and it’s whatever you do to make it look authentic right this whole yellow letter concept right Dean Graciosi was my first play into this investor world but right out of the gate Dan Kennedy Bill Glazier great marketing team they do all this authentic stuff handwritten I wrote a note I wrote a note I started to do that back in 2002 yellow letters right handwritten
Right. So we give people the ability to make their own stuff, but I’m not saying it’s perfect. I’m just saying it gives it gives you the ability to edit and customize it if you want to so you can make it feel more personal. So you feel if you feel like it, if you feel like you want to do something to it, then you can do that. As far as response rates, what we’ve discovered is it doesn’t move the needle so much. Right. The important thing is not that you customize it and made it blue ink or black ink.
is that on the fourth touch, your response rate went from 0.6 to maybe 3.5%. So a lot of this stuff is in the direct mail association. ⁓ And then we pull content from people.
But the real end of the ⁓ day responses are, or my response would be, when I listen to coaching companies and they talk about their strategies internally, they do everything under the sun to solicit off market deals, right? Anything they can.
from texting to calling to door knocking to mobile devices to everything possible. And so what we’re trying to do is level the playing field for ⁓ a regular Joe that wants to log in and send out efficient marketing with call to actions that most importantly lands there when they need it. So just to tail end of this thing really quickly, I didn’t want people to send 40,000 postcards. I would say, look, I’d rather you take 40,000, ⁓ do some list stacking on it and send 100,000
of those 40,000 seven times, you’ll get a better response. So when we built Print Genie, it was really built on the pretense of hyper-focused leads. And you know what really came in hot? Foreclosures daily. They started to come in droves because they would get probate leads, 39 probate leads. A, what do you do with a probate lead when you only have 39? Most print shops, you have a minimum of 200. We have no minimums.
And so now what do I do with a probate lead when it’s a long game? You’re playing the long game that’s nine months, 10 months before decisions are made. How are you gonna remember to send them a postcard when you have a minimum of 200 to 39 people? So imagine what we created. Wow, I’ve got 32 leads. What do I do with them? Oh, we’ll just put them here. And now a multi-touch campaign will go out over the next nine or 10 months. And that’s how you service. So each week when they get their 12 or 30 or 40 names,
they’re dumping it and running and then doing their day job. So case study wise is really it’s the validation and the responses we’re getting from people sending out no minimums and hitting them multiple times and increasing your response rates. Our hockey stick curve on our website shows it 0.6 to 81%. I’m not gonna promise 81%, but if you’re doing the hyper-focused list to a list that needs you, write data, write time, write message. If you’re doing that, you’re more likely to get up.
there on the hoppy stick curve. And that’s what’s important to understand, right? But the ideas of one hit wonders or this elixir, this magical thing, and I’ll send that one postcard and my dream will come true, it doesn’t exist, right? It’s not there, right? So anyway, success story, ⁓ send more or send less people more often instead of sending a lot of people time.
Erika (18:17)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, what you’ve built with Print Genie is really great. What would you say is next on the horizon? Are there, you know, new markets you want to venture out to? Are there new features you’re looking to add?Andy Detwiler (18:32)
⁓haven’t, we haven’t enrolled it yet, but, ⁓ we’ve been beta testing with two, large companies and so far it’s been amazing. And I’ll paint a picture. What if I said to you, Erika, you’re an investor or, ⁓ whatever an agent. And I said, Erika, as a, let’s call you an investor. ⁓ you like meeting people and you like whatever you’re doing right in your business.
but you don’t like to spend time marketing. Well, what if I said, well, okay, what areas do you market in? You know what areas you’re marketing? Yeah, okay, cool. What if I drew on a map the areas you like to market in, or you drew on the map the areas you want to market in, or you pick your cities, and then you say, cool, and then what life events would you like to track and monitor knowing that people with a life event are more likely to want to release their property, right? If they have a life event like probate or death or divorce or taxes or bankruptcy or things like that, when you like to market to them automatically when that happens within those three or four cities that you’re monitoring?
Well, that’s what we’re doing.
And so the exciting part is that we’ve finished the beta testing with these two large groups and we’re going to enroll it publicly in 30 days or less by end of October. And what that means is that anybody, investor, agent or small businesses that are looking for a specialty type of products or properties can just draw on a map and then turn it on and then walk away. And then you can set your budget and then pick your campaign and know that every time a lead falls into that list based on bankruptcy or tax liens.
they’re going to get the appropriate campaign. That’s ⁓ the forward thinking way of, once again, getting the monkey off my back. Because people should not be in a room sitting there marketing and figuring it out. They should just be out there doing their day job, right? But that’s the future of printchaining, aside from the AI components we’re adding in the next quarter. But that gives you some good insight to what I’m excited about. Sending mail, yeah. Making stuff, yeah.
all that stuff, campaigns, yeah, solving the mysteries of challenges that we’ve had, yes, but being able to automate it and then walk away and do what you’re good at, you know, your day job, meeting people, then that’s my home run, right? So that’s the future, at least at the short term anyway.
Erika (20:42)
Yeah, yeah, and that’s an exciting future, Andy. Well, before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, maybe they want to see firsthand what Print Genie can do. What’s the best way for them to reach you?Andy Detwiler (20:58)
⁓ So there’s a landing page they can go to and ⁓ it’s got a special invite from you. And if they go there, then they’re going to break all the rules of what we normally present publicly. ⁓ And they’ll have, I mean, we have subscription plans for better pricing and we have editing capabilities, sharing capabilities, affiliate programs, and we charge for that. It’s a SaaS product. I’m waiving all that. I’m giving everybody, if they want, this kind of maybe a 24-hour deal if they want to take a look at it.I’ll leave the page up, but it’ll give them instant access to get everything with no monthlies and our best print and mail prices. And it comes with everything that I gave. ⁓ Is that something you want to share? Or do you want me to share a screen? Or you want to go to a website? Or what’s the best way to share that? Just tell you what it is.
Erika (21:44)
Yeah, you can share the website link.Andy Detwiler (21:46)
So, well it’s www.printgenie.io forward slash investor fuel.And if you look at it, you’ll see ⁓ you won’t really notice. But the only way you’ll notice the value of what I’m sharing with your listeners is at the bottom. It’s got a pricing which shows anybody off the street versus anybody coming in through your link. And it’s a big difference. It’s a big difference.
Erika (22:18)
Well, that’s good to know and I hope our listeners here check it out. Andy, I appreciate your time, your story, your expertise in technology with real estate. We need more people who are bringing innovation to the space.Andy Detwiler (22:37)
Erika, I appreciate the time with you and I thank you for all the questions that you asked. I love sharing and I over share and I over talk, but it’s my passion. ⁓ I think that came across today. I just love what I do and also by the way, ⁓ my direct email is [email protected]. I am open to any conversation with anybody. I just do biz dev and conversations all day. So anytime anybody wants to reach out and have a chat and learn more, I’m happy to do personal assistance with them. Okay.Erika (23:09)
passion for this, it really comes through. And for our listeners today, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you’re subscribed to the Real Estate Pros podcast. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators like Andy who are out there building fantastic businesses. We’ll see you on the next episode.
