Inside Real Estate Improves Response Rates by 5x with Personalized Direct Mail

In real estate, relationships are king—and multiple touchpoints are a must. But while new technologies have introduced new ways to connect, it’s impossible for mortals to nurture every relationship that ensues.

Back in 2014, the team behind Kunversion+, a leading real estate CRM and lead-gen platform, recognized that problem and engineered their way out of it. While using cutting-edge tools, they’ve built a family of products that ensure no lead falls through the cracks. Live chat, automated text and email features, mobile apps. If there’s an innovative way to engage home buyers and sellers, Kunversion’s using it.

Kunversion+ and Lob: Scaling Personalized Direct Mail   

Early on, though, that tech-savvy efficiency ground to a screeching halt when it came to sending direct mail. The Kunversion+ team knew that direct mail remained a crucial touchpoint—and a high-value way to reinforce messaging—so they handled postcards manually. First one and eventually multiple employees spent their days printing and mailing. Needless to say, that became a serious bottleneck as the company grew.

Enter Lob. The API approach was a natural fit with Kunversion’s mission to integrate technology all along the real estate sales cycle. Lob empowered Kunversion’s engineering team to build exactly what they needed. Naturally, we provided everything from extensive documentation to Python wrappers easily accessed through GitHub. The team built a custom in-house process that gave the company unlimited room to scale print.

Thanks to that quick development time, Kunversion+ not only scaled the outreach they were already doing, they incorporated high-converting, personalized direct mail into a series of innovative new products, too. There’s Listing Machine, a property valuation tool that collects prospective sellers’ information, then automatically follows up via text and postcard. And Nosy Neighbor, which sends real estate agent-branded postcards to recipients in a particular zip code any time one of their neighbors lists a home.

"Our decision to utilize Lob has proved critical to our business. We’ve been able to scale our current offerings and expand the products we offer without worry."

Kunversion+ leverages Lob’s flexible, on-demand printing in the two example postcards below, which were generated by the Listing Machine tool. Every detail is customized, from the customer-facing message to the agent’s contact information. (And the image you see? That’s not stock photography—it’s a Google Street View image of the lead’s address!) Furthermore, because Lob’s API supports HTML templates, there’s no new file to create and upload. Personalized direct mail pieces are automatically generated as soon as a lead submits the Listing Machine form, and in hand just days later.

Engineering Out of a Bottleneck

Kunversion’s smart use of technology gives clients a competitive edge, and they noticed. With targeted postcards hitting mailboxes for as little as 50 cents per card, Kunversion offers print rates that are hard to beat. And when customization is as simple as creating a single flexible template, it’s a no-brainer to personalize every piece. Due to this personalization, Kunversion’s postcard response rates rose fivefold over industry standards.