The 4 Types of Direct Marketing Offers

In my last post, I outlined what an offer is and some common mistakes real estate agents make when crafting their offer. In this post, I’ll talk more about the four types of offers: soft, hard, negative and deferred.

Soft Offers

In a soft offer, prospects usually must provide some type of information in exchange for a free report. For instance, they may have to mail back a business reply card or enter their contact information on your website in exchange for a free home analysis or provide their email address in exchange for a free report and a subscription to your newsletter.

Soft offers give prospects a way to tell you “I’m thinking about it. I may be interested. Tell me more.” without having to worry about sitting through a high pressure sales pitch. These offers appeal to people in the information gathering (”just looking”) stage or people that do have an immediate need but want to learn more about you, your company and your services without speaking to a salesman. When they receive the materials, they can look through them at their leisure.

Why use soft offers? Because you get prospects to raise their hand and tell you they may be interested. Now, you have a list of people who are more likely than your average mailing list or readership to need your services in the near future - and provided you keep in touch with them and educate them with your marketing materials, there’s a good chance they’ll call you when they’re ready to move forward.

These prospects are much more informed than the people that might respond from a yellow pages or classified ad and they tend to be predisposed to you because they’ve been receiving your materials, your advice, and your information over time so they’ve already started to get to know and like you.

Hard Offers

Hard offers ask prospects for some type of personal contact like “call now for a free consultation” or “bring in this coupon to any of our retail locations for 25% off your purchase” or “send us a check and we’ll send your product within 24 hours of receipt”.

When selling your services, the main purpose of using hard offers is to get people to request a meeting or initial consultation with you because they have an immediate need and are ready to make a purchasing decision.

Why use hard offers? Because you get prospects to talk with you one-on-one. The people that do this generally have a serious interest in buying or selling a home and are likely to initiate the process in the near future.

Negative Offers

Negative offers are usually attached onto direct mail pieces. They usually state something like “I’m not interested right now because: _________________________”.

Why use negative offers? It may sound strange that people would respond to your mailing just to tell you they aren’t interested right now but a handful of people will. They can be extremely useful to test a new service, offer or USP via direct mail - specifically if you receive a very low response to your mailing. By looking over some of the comments you receive back, you may be able to figure out which part of your mailing isn’t relevant to your audience.

In addition, the people that do respond to your negative offer are telling you that while they may be interested in your services, they aren’t interested in the way you’ve described it or that specific offer - but they may be interested in something similar.

Deferred Offers

Deferred offers tell you that your prospect isn’t interested in your services right now - but they might be interested sometime in the future. They are usually stated like “I’m not interested right now. Try us again in __________ (month/year).”

Why use deferred offers? Deferred offers encourage prospects to respond even if they don’t have an immediate need - but may sometime in the future. You can then add them to your contact management system to follow up sometime in the future.

How Should You Use Each Offer?

Each of your advertisements and mailings should use a combination of the above offers. At minimum, you should include both a hard and soft offer - pick one to make the primary offer.

For instance, if you are offering a free report, your ad or mailing should sell the free report. Then, at the bottom after you’ve made your case for why prospects need your free report, you might say, “If you have an immediate need and wish to speak with a real estate agent, call 1-800-555-1212 to set up a free, no-obligations consultation.”

As with any successful advertising, you will need to test your offers to see what works best. I’ll get into testing in the next post.

For more on how to craft offers, check out CopyBlogger’s 58 Killer Offers: Raising Response and Lowering Risk.