Joe:  Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast.

Joe:  How would you like to get paid doing direct mail for other people? Most people think direct mail is dead, postcard to dead. And honestly, that belief is costing them a lot of money. While everyone else is fighting over clicks, PPC, making money, leads, getting leads online, direct mail was making a huge, quiet comeback and is working insanely well right now. In this episode, I'm going to be interviewing a good friend of mine. His name is Luke Jaten. He has helped businesses, hundreds and hundreds of businesses grow using ugly postcards, not the fancy ones, the ugly simple postcards that are pulling in the best results better than internet marketing type of thing. Now, we're going to talk about why direct mail is actually getting more effective in a digital world. Why businesses are doubling down on direct mail right now and how some people like you and me couldn't be getting paid just helping these businesses run these direct mail campaigns. This isn't about working harder. It's about doing something simple that still works today and almost nobody is paying attention to it. So if you want a smarter way to market, or if you want real opportunity that you probably have not considered yet, stick with me. This is gonna be a great podcast. This is for you. Hey, what's up, guys? Joe McCall here. I'm with a good friend of mine. His name is Luke Jaten. I have made millions of dollars thanks to this guy, Luke Jaten. And he's a humble guy, super smart, one of the smartest guys I know in the marketing, direct response marketing business. And Luke has been become a friend of my over the years. And I'm excited to have him on this podcast. We're gonna be talking about how you can use a little bit of what he does to make a good side hustle, maybe even a full-time income. Being a… I don't know what Luke even calls it yet. He's been telling me about it. I'm really excited because this is different than anything I've ever seen before. But to kind of be like a consultant in the direct mail space, and there is a huge demand and a huge need for this as well. We are gonna be talk about howcan do what he's been doing for years and what I've been doing for years in your own business and accelerate and grow from there. This is going to be a great podcast. I, Luke, I so appreciate you. I first heard about you when you had a program called Postcard Profits. And in postcard profits, you were teaching people how to sell products and services with postcards, ugly postcards. And I remember thinking like, I'm sure you've heard a million times that ugly postcard will not work. This is a scam, this is a joke. No one's gonna take you seriously sending ugly postcards. And boy was I wrong. So even in the real estate space when we're sending postcards to get deals, houses or vacant land, by far and away, ever since I've been doing direct mail since 2006. So it's 20 years now, is that right? Holy smoke. Yeah, so that's when I started doing direct email for finding houses. Really got heavy into that kind of direct mail in 2009. And so anyway, every time I've tested it, ugly postcards always work better than fancy postcards with the graphics and the logos and the color images, photos and all of that. So you had this program called Postcard Profits. Fast forward, I don't remember, probably 10 years ago, you had a little promotion where you were selling the white label version of a program that you used to sell. I bought the rights to this program you used sell, so I could sell it as well myself. And I won't get into all the details because it's very personal. But there was a lady at church that needed a lot of help financially. And her husband was in a position where he could not help. And I will go into the details. It's just not important. But she needed a way to make money and to work from home. She had a couple of three small kids at home. And I remember this was right at the same time you said, hey, I'm selling this thing if you want the white label rights to it. I bought it from you. And then I gave it to this lady. And I said, I want you to start implementing this and this is, I'll pay you, I offered to pay her a very good hourly wage for, she worked between 30 to 40 hours a week. And the thing that I was selling, and we don't need to talk about the details of it because it's not important, but that thing that was selling was more than enough for me to pay a full-time salary for about two years, one and a half to two years. And she did other things for me as well on the other things in my business, but that little thing that I was selling with postcards, I think it was postcards or was it letters? Was it okay? That thing was more than enough for me to pay her her full-time salary, which was probably four or five grand a month at the time. This was a while ago. So because of that thing and because of you, I was able to help support a mom. Now she was working, it wasn't charity, she was workin' hard for it, but the money that came from those promotions that I'm selling with your postcards was enough to take care of her for about two two and a half years at that time then she transitioned into another role in another part of my business and then we stop working together on good terms because her husband became available to work again. So anyway, how are you Luke? Sorry for the super long boring introduction but I'm glad you're here, man, thank you.

Luke: Oh, I'm glad to be here. I didn't know that you were using postcards in real estate before postcard profits. So that's kind of cool. So when you saw it, the first thing, when you said postcard profit, what is this? Did you already have sort of the idea that like, well, I already use postcards. Maybe I'll learn some more things out of this. Was that kind of…

Joe:  Well, yes. I mean, I learned postcards from a guy named Richard Rupp way back in the mid-2000s, early 2000s. And he was using kind of ugly postcards and he was kind of a student of Dan Kennedy, I believe. And so I knew postcards worked for real estate deals, houses, and they were super cheap to do at the time. They still are. But your angle was using postcards to sell information products, services, consulting, things like that. That was mind-blowing to me.

Luke:  Well, not consulting at the time, if you'll remember. It's funny because it's kind of been an evolution for me. In those early days, I used postcards a lot, but almost exclusively to sell info products. And most of the time. In fact, up until maybe eight years ago, I had never really sold anything with postcards that was over 500 bucks. Everything was pretty inexpensive stuff. And my kind of claim to fame and what I really had done in that course was teaching a single method or one sales funnel, if you will, for using direct mail and using postcards and that was I called it the press one method because people would get a postcard, there'd be a phone number, give them a little pitch and get them to call a phone number. The phone number would have a recorded message. At the end of the recorded message, if they wanted to buy what was being pitched, they would press one on their phone or it would take them to a call center who would take their order and then we'd ship it out. So it was basically like, you know, it's an early sales funnel like, so common online now, but it was done all 100% through direct mail. And that was sort of the innovation that I brought to it. And lots of people started selling that way after that. But up until that point, or up until, I don't know, maybe eight years ago, I had never sold anything that was more than 500 bucks of postcards. That kind of came later. Wow. I discovered postcards maybe around, I don't know if it was maybe just a little bit earlier than you, it was 1999 or so. I had a sales floor, a bunch of sales people that we had phone room and I was selling at the time, I was telling health discount cards and also travel discount cards and there were these programs that were pretty popular back then. And I was using, I started off using classified ads because that's sort of like, I've done every kind of direct response you can imagine, but I was use classified ads and we got to the point where we couldn't buy anymore. We were buying everything you could buy in classified ads at the same time. And one of the, and at the we would run classified ads and we would send out a mail package and then that would generate a phone call. So I had a printer that I was working with, a good friend of mine, became a really good friend over the years, who would print those things that we mailed out. And one day I was at his print shop picking up printing so that we could mail things out. And I see over in the corner of his shop, you know, four pallets of postcards just stacked up on pallets and like, do those things really work? And I looked, I could see what was written on them and I was like, hey, that's, It doesn't sound like the person using them is selling something too far off from what we're selling. Do those really work? He goes, well, you see those four pallets? He orders those every week. And I said, oh, whoa, maybe I need to try it in postcards. And so I went back to the office. We had a system running that was doing well. It's kind of like these days, a lot of people will come to me. And the reason that they come to for direct mail is because they're already maxing out Facebook or YouTube or some other channel and now they want direct mail to be added Well, at the time, we had the Classified Ads thing running and I said, you know, but it would be really great if we could expand using postcards. Long story short, did a little bit of testing, finally got to a point where we had mailing lists and a postcard that would work and that tripled our business just switching from the printed ads, which we had to wait for and we had pay for ahead of time to postcards and it just exploded that business. That business turned into a monster. And that's how I learned how to use postcards, and it went through several phases where like we first used them just to generate a phone call. And then I was like, you know, have to do with all these salespeople. Maybe if I could do the selling in a recorded message, and then we could just have order takers because order takerare easier to replace than salespeople and yada, yada yada. Soit kind of progressed that way. At the time that you found me, I was sort of in the 12, like I had closed that office and was taking like, I always joke, I've taken probably seven or eight early retirements because I, yes, I'm going to early on didn't want to wait till I was 65 to retire. So like every three or four years I'd make some money and then I just, you know, take some time off. I was in between one of these times when somebody came to me and said, no, will you show me how to do what you do with postcards? And I said, well, yeah, guess and then I did a little rev share with them, I helped them set the thing up and then I did that for two or three guys and then one of the guys that I was working with we set up a complete system for him the way that I had run it and he had way more ambition than me. He ended up doing about $20 million a year by their second year strictly with postcards selling information products. And at that point I was like, you know, I've got these stories, I gotpeople really like doing this. Maybe I should do a course on postcards. And that's that course where we ended up meeting was from that.

Joe:  What, uh, what year did you create Postcard Profits?

Luke:  Ah, 2008. Yeah, and it was probably didn't really get into full swing marking it until 2009. So it's somewhere between 2008-2009. We ended up selling, I don't know, 30,000 units of that course. A three-deluxe piece, which is pretty, pretty nice.

Joe:  Very good, very nice. And then I'm trying to remember what you're, the program I was trying to deal with. Yes, the last.

Luke:  Basically, what happened is during that period of time, the people that I had set these different businesses up for, they ran them and then they ran their course. Some of them took their money and left and whatever and I had still retained the rights to all of those. So I had like four or five different, when I say program, basically I had a product, I had the recorded message, the sales pitch, and I a postcard that worked. I knew that there were mailing lists that worked for each one of these different categories and so you bought one of those, I had, I don't know, three or four of those different ones that I sold at the time. And I figured if I'm not gonna run them, I might as well just let somebody else do it. And I had five or six people like you that were doing the same thing.

Joe:  You know, I just found it here. I'm looking at my computer. I white labeled your manual. So we were sending a postcard, selling a little mini course on this process. I went window. It's not important what it was. Yeah. It was August, 2015. So, yeah, that's right. And 2015. And, um, I have the cover here. We were using at the time, Amazon, I think for fulfillment, like Amazon would, we would send out a post card, sending people to a voicemail. And I have a voicemail right here. I have. MP3 audio a while of it. And then the voicemail, I'd have to listen to it later offline, but I think, and we were using the name of the guy who originally wrote it. So my name wasn't even on it. It was a good program teaching people how to do something. I think we were selling it for $97.

Luke:  I think the voicemail, said it was like $59 books and $99 books and you know, I had a few different ones. So that sounds about right. Probably somewhere. I guarantee it was not $97, though I never use a seven. It's a poll. It wasn't. I'm wondering if this thing would still work. Pet peeves with the direct response world as everybody wants to use their sevens. I've had the privilege a couple of times of having products online where we were selling a couple thousand units a day of a product. And so I tested ending it in five, six, seven, eight, and nine. And there was a zero difference except for when you end with nine, I was collecting an extra $4,000 a day because I didn't leave the $2 off with the $97. So I never use a seven anyway.

Joe:  You know, I'm looking here in November, November 15, 2015. I just found a spreadsheet. We had sold 235 of these things.

Luke:  Oh, that's awesome. That's fantastic.

Joe:  Anyway

Luke:  Sorry, I love hearing stories like that. There are so many stories that end up with Facebook and social media these days, which didn't really… I mean, they existed back then, but they weren't being used at the same level. And so people will reach out to me that I haven't heard from in 15 years and they'll say, hey, Luke, I bought that postcard thing from you. You'll never believe what that turned into. And then they tell me this, go on to tell me, this crazy story. So, I kind of got away from direct mail around just not too long after that, around 2016 or so. Well, in 2014, I started a nutrition company and we were doing pretty well and I had a couple of investors come and pitch me on buying into it and I said, yeah, I don't think so. And I tried to shoo them away and the one guy I knew pretty well, he just kept pestering me. And at one point I said, well, okay, well what would that look like? One story short, I ended up closing that nutrition company, starting a nutrition company with them with a very, very similar product. And we were on a tear. I mean, I was just like, okay well this is going to be the thing. We've got a private equity group that he knew was going to buy the thing as soon as we hit these certain metrics and we were, you know, a year and a half in and hitting all the numbers we needed to hit. And the two investors, it was a couple, and they got into a squabble and ended of suing each other. They were 51% owners, I was 49. And so I basically was shut out. Her attorney basically said, I can't even email our customer. It was a nightmare. So this was 2018. And right about that time, I'm sitting there going, man, I thought this was my final thing and I'm done and I can just ride off into the sunset. And I'm sitting there, going, geez, now what am I going to do? And so one of the things I did is I sat down and wrote a list oflike, okay, Whatever I do that's going to replace this, as far as making money, I don't want this, I don't want this. I do want it to be this. And it was things like, I didn't want to run a team again. I had a team of people. Now, I liked working with everybody, but you know. I like being a solo operator, and so I didn't want to run a job, I didn't want to think about work 24-7, I wanted to have a life. So I made this list of like five different things that I was looking for. And as I'm sort of thinking about this, I had probably, I don't know, three or four months worth of money to live on at the level that we were living before I had to get serious. And so during that period of time, I'm looking at all these different things, and a guy calls me that I hadn't talked to in a long time. And he said, hey, do you still do direct mail? I said, well, we did some mail for a nutrition company, but I haven't done a lot of direct mail in five, six years. And he goes, hmm. Would you be open to consulting on a deal?” And he tells me that. I said, yeah. And I basically just threw out a number and he goes, all right, let me get back to you. And it was a client of his. And he said, well, can you get on a plane to be in LA on Friday? And this was like a Wednesday. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Give me your wiring instructions. And he set me the fee. Long story short, this guy asked me to create a postcard to help them expand what they were doing with Facebook at the time they had a giant face of budget on Facebook, but they were kind of maxed out as much as they could spend and they wanted to do direct mail. And so I asked him a bunch of questions about his avatar, who they were targeting, everything. Went back, created a postcard for that program and they were selling gold IRAs. So an IRA where you're self-managing a gold portfolio, right? So investments, we're not talking about something like I said earlier, where it's like under 500 bucks. These people are investing tens of thousands that like, you know, they'relife-savings. And I created a postcard, got the mailing list that we could test and put it all together, put everything into mail. And maybe a week into it, I get a call from somebody in their office and they said, hey, I thought you just might want to know how the direct mail campaign is going. And I said, yeah, sounds great. I didn't have any high hopes that it was going to work because I told them, I'm not sure this is going to for what you want to do. This is a bigger price point, blah, blah blah blah. So I basically just really downplayed the whole thing and they called and I said, well how many calls have you gotten? It was the first day that the postcards started hitting. He said, well we've only taken like six or seven calls so far and I say, okay, well how are they? What's the disposition of the calls? First call we took, guy invested $800,000. I said huh, from a postcard, okay. And that totally changed my perception of what you could sell with a post card. And now I'm going, oh, It doesn't have to just be for little info products Yeah, I mean real estate guys have been using them to find houses and stuff like that all the time But like I had never used them for anything, you know expensive like that So that was a big revelation and from there I started like I literally said, okay Well, then that's what I'll do instead of finding something else for myself to sell I'll just go out and hustle up clients and be a solo direct mail agency And I've been doing this since 2018 sold all kinds of things.

Joe:  Yeah, I want to talk about that, because that's the main point of this, but I know I can hear some skeptics right now thinking, postcards. Postcards, they don't work anymore. Nobody reads their mail anymore. What are you smoking? What do you say to that? Besides that they're stupidly wrong.

Luke:  There was a period of timewhere they probably would have been right, but it was long before that. For the last seven years, and I have stats on this, for the last 7 years, direct mail has gone up, up, and up, the more digital noise we get, our inboxes are full, we're getting inundated with ads on Facebook every day, the mailboxes are mostly empty. The only things you really see in the mailbox these days are things like if you're a homeowner, you get stuff from the pest control guy and somebody is trying to sell a roofing or siding or whatever, but for the most part, your mailbox is empty. You don't even get your bank bills in the mail anymore. You get them online. So when you show up there, you're stalling in a vacuum. There's nobody else there. You're not competing with all these messages. You've got something physical in their hand and it's a completely different animal than it used to be. So there was a time when you're right. That was true. The direct mail, oh, that's old technology, but they say the same thing about email and email is one of those things that's like the driver for most online businesses these days.

Joe:  Well, here's the deal. Bottom line, it works. I've been doing it since 2006. When I started into real estate, still use it today, right? Simple. And I think one of the reasons why it works is people still check their mail. And you could argue maybe the younger generation, people in their 20s aren't checking their direct mail right now. But I don't even know if that's true.

Luke:  I don't know if I'll do these but I will tell you the biggest demographic right now that loves direct mail and this is not me you can go look this up online is the millennials that which I so I’m gen x so i am just above the millennials and age but the generation right below me you know 20 years back 15 20 years back they love direct mail that is the biggest demography for direct mail right now and it used to be the biggest demographics was the old folks you know 60 plus And they're still good, but the Millennials are a bigger demographic, more responsive to direct mail. Yeah. They're interesting. A lot of them have kind of gotten over the online world. If you think about people, I don't know. How old are you?

Joe:  I'm 51. Almost 52.

Luke:  Yeah, so you're still Gen X too, right? I am. You're kind of right on the line. The people who are in their 40s, and I have some really good friends, people who were in their forties and late thirties, that group has almost, there's almost like a backlash of like, ugh, the digital online world. You see them leaving social media and all that stuff. They love direct mail. They love getting solicited that way because it feels less intrusive to them than something interrupting their YouTube video or something in their Facebook feed if they're still on Facebook. Yeah, I that that argument about like, you know, can it work? It really boils down to if you get your message in front of the right people There's basically just like any form of direct response direct mail has three big components You have to get right you have to give the audience which in direct mail we call it the list, you Know online you call it your audience. So you got to have who's seen it That's the number one thing that is the biggest piece that you need The second piece would be the offer what you're putting in front them or the mechanism if you're not making the offer in the mail piece. And then the third piece would be the creative, like what do you do to capture their attention? Is it an ugly postcard? And it's funny because ugly postcards are used to be the only thing I would use. And now because I am in so many different industries, there are certain industries that work. You can't use an ugly postcard. They will not work at the same level as a beautiful postcard. The biggest one that I deal with right now where we have to use pretty postcards is e-commerce. Lots of e-commerce sites, we're sending direct mail, and we want the postcard to look just like their email communication. It's got to have the same kind of image, especially if they're selling something that is visually attractive. Most of the time when I'm setting up campaigns for those folks, we are mailing to their existing customers. We're not doing cold mailing. We're doing mailing to the existing customers because most people don't know this, but e-Commerce companies, most of them, again, I'm generalizing here, but most of the do not make money on the first sale. You know, they get the customer, but it costs them money to acquire that customer. And they make money by sending emails to those people and getting them to buy more things, whether it's pants or shoes or whatever they're selling, jewelry, and or the affiliate products with us, yeah, or affiliate the X. The ironic thing is, if and most of the time when I ask them, unless they've got a top notch person doing this job for them, their open rates on emails like 20%. And so my question to them is, well, like you've spent all this money to get What about these customers? What about the other 80% that aren't opening the emails? Yeah, we just keep trying to get to them and say, well, what if you could get 100% open rate? They go, how do you do that? Send them a postcard. It's 100% open rate. And then all of a sudden, now the numbers they're getting from their email multiply and the amount they're spending for the postcard is offset by the multiple they're getting of the new business, if that makes any sense.

Joe:  All right. So I hope you get where we're going with this. I hope you're picking up what we're laying down here because there is an opportunity available for you guys to help small businesses use direct mail, not even small businesses, big businesses, medium sized, local brick and mortar, medium sized businesses. But there is so much opportunity. So many business owners are leaving money at the table because all they do is they focus on maybe Google ads, PPC, Facebook ads, organic content marketing, word of mouth, you know, and they're not doing anything with these leads after they come in the door. They're not following up with simple things like direct mail. And there's a lot of opportunities out there as well to find new business from direct mail. So, Luke, you've done something really interesting. You open and close these groups, and I just found the email. You were selling this white label thing that I bought November of 2014. I found the email here and whenever, listen, look at me real close guys and pay attention here. When Luke opens something and says, all right, I'm going to open the door here for a little bit and then close it. Luke is a lifestyle investor, entrepreneur. You know what I mean? Like you see, watch his Facebook. He's always climbing some mountain in Arizona, right? With some beautiful views and riding his bike around and he just doesn't like to be bothered. So once in a while he gets the itch to open doors and teach something or do something or sell something. And when he opens those doors, if you were smart, you will enter that. And whatever he's talking about, you need to listen and pay attention because Luke has made a lot of money in this business and he's helped a lot people make a lot money in this. So Luke and I were talking about some more direct mail that I want to do for my own business. First guy I thought of to call was Luke. And so we've been working together on some things and he started telling me, you know, I've done this, I'm doing this new thing. I've opened up the doors for a small group of people And we're starting to see really tremendous results. And I thought, man, this is a, and so I asked Luke, can I interview you on my podcast to talk about this? Because there's an opportunity here for real estate investors. We're talking to a real estate investing audience here. There's some opportunities here where you could do a little side hustle to help pay for your real estate deals or for the marketing of your real state deals or even do what I did with Luke's thing back in 2015 and turn it into a full-time income. And so, Luke, if you don't mind, would you share a little bit about this? So, just continuing what you were saying before.

Luke:  A little over a year ago, like I think it was November, October or November of 2024 was the first time I taught one of these classes and I had seven people in a class. And it was, and now I've taught it 11 times after that, like not every single month, but you know, usually a month apart. And it's like a six week class that I teach where I show people how to do what I'm doing without having any background in direct mail. Because most of the time I'm just like you just said I mean, maybe I shouldn't characterize it this way, but I'm just lazy. I don't want to do hard work, I want to smart work. And so part of what I've done in refining what I do in doing consulting for these direct mail clients is I don t want to anything where I have to write copy. I don't want do anything wherehave to figure out their marketing. I want take what they're already doing, I only work with and I'll show you only to work with and will target people who already have a proven process for selling what they sell. I'm not going to go in and help somebody sell their thing for the first time. I will go in and help people who are already selling something sell a lot more of it. And that's the easiest kind of work to do. So what I teach people how to do is target the right kind of businesses that need, they want to actually expand from just doing the digital to also here's another channel where they can bring in more income and I need to charge them a flat fee. I basically like what it looks like is I take their existing marketing. So let's say I'm working with an e-commerce company. I've got three current clients right now. Two of them are e-commerce companies and the one that's the biggest, she sells women's… I'm not going to get into the serious details of it because it's like a women's crane to help them with. Menopause some menopausal problems. Let's call it that huge hugebusiness andand their business is already super super successful They're spending over a million dollars a month on Facebook. Okay, successful. Yeah, that's a lot of energy by one She came to me and she said, you know the our business is going fantastic But we can see the writing on the wall. Our CPAs are constantly just going to get cost per acquisition is just going up to get a customer. She said I'd really love to explore being able to do direct mail. So I said, okay Well, you know, show me your campaigns. I want to see what you're doing on Facebook. And so the post, long story short, she hired me and the postcard that we created for her company is based on, I mean, I didn't write anything. It's literally based on their Facebook ads. I took their Facebook, ads from a postcard source, the lists, you know, we do the mailing and it's killing it. So what I'm trying to say is I don't want to go out there and try to find a business that needs help getting off the ground. I want to work with businesses that are already off the ground and there are hundreds of thousands of them. There's no way I can service them all. I don't want to with more than, you know, two to four a month. And so I teach this class that shows other people how to go out and do that exact same thing. I've got templated letters that we use for prospecting to these businesses. I show you exactly how to find the right kinds of businesses. You know, 2 weeks we spend on actually doing the service work for the businesses. It's basically boils down to 2 things. It's you know getting clients and servicing clients. And so we spend like four weeks on getting clients and two weeks on servicing clients because the servicing is super easy if you're getting the right clients. These clients pay anywhere from five to $7,500 to come in and set up their direct mail campaign. And you work with two or three of them a month, you can make a quarter million dollars a year. I don't know if you are going to do that, but it doesn't take that many clients to have a really nice little side income.

Joe:  Can you give some examples of some businesses you can do this for?

Luke:  Well, the funniest one is I tried to talk a guy out of doing this, who this guy came as a referral. I had not prospected him because in the past, I would have never prospected this kind of business. But he came as a refer because he's in a business group with a client that I did have that did come from my prospecting. And he called me and he said, hey, I need to help with direct mail. So and so referred me, you know, what can you tell me? I said, what kind of business are you in? Well, we install Windows and I just like immediately my brain just shuts off and says local business very small market, probably not going to work. And I didn't say it to him just like that, but I said, well, you know, I like to work with businesses that are doing nationwide business because we have a lot more availability in terms of lists. I like work with businesses who already have an established customer base so we can do things with their existing customer base. And I said I can give you a couple of ideas of where you can go do. I was basically trying to blow him off and get him to go do something else or do it on his own. And so there's a question that I use in the call out line that I do with these folks that usually will just cut right to the quick and the question was, what are you paying right now to get a customer? Like, what's the most you could pay to get a customer and be happy with it? And he said, I don't know exactly what we're paying per customer right now. I'd have to go back and look, but I can tell you what we are paying per call. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we're buying digital advertising right now and this agency is charging us per call, you know, for a lead. And I said well, How much have you spent with him? Well, we spent $50,000 in the last two months. They said, okay, so how many, like, what are you paying per call? He goes, I'm paying $1,300 a call. So then my mind opened back up. I said, oh, because I did some quick math, you know, to send 1,000 postcards cost you about 750 bucks. So basically, I can send 2,000 posts cards and match what you're getting right now? Yeah, I think I could do that. I said let's talk a little bit, and then we got going. Long story short, I created a campaign for him. Again, he did not have marketing. This is not the kind of customer I normally like. But here's what I did. I cheated. Once he became a client, I said, well, we need to do like a 45 minute call, find out a little bit about your customer avatar, blah, blah. And he said, Well, can I have my sales guy get on the phone with this? And I said yeah, that'd be fantastic because he knows what your customers are like. We went back and forth, back and fourth. I took notes. I condensed those notes, put them into my AI agent, said, write me three postcards. And this is the first time I'd ever done that. I didn't tell him I was doing this. Of the three that the AI created, I picked the two based on what I thought I knew, and we did an A-B split test. So we mailed 1,000 postcards of each one. So it's targeted.

Joe:  Let me rewind a little bit, what does this guy sell?

Luke:  He's a window installer, I'm sorry. I forgot to mention that. He installs windows locally. He's, you know, a contractor. Like, locally, only in one local market? Yeah, locally. Only in one market, Indianapolis. Okay, wow. Right? That's why I said, yeah, it's probably isn't going to work. Yeah, yeah. So, I knew how to source the list, which I teach in the class. I knew to source a list. We mailed the two postcards. One of them completely bombed, didn't get any sales whatsoever. The second one got $31,000 in orders from the first mailing. We mailed another mailing the next week, and so far he's up to $75,000 and sales on 2000 or 2500 postcards mailed. So like his scale ROI is insane. I also found out from him that the markup on windows is about 50% so he's making money on.

Joe:  Oh, trust me, I just got about, I don't know, 30 or 35 new windows about a year ago, and I paid an ungodly amount of money for these windows. But what's fascinating about this, and I hope you guys picked this up, how many other kind of businesses like this are there in every major city in the United States?

Luke:  Well, so there's those, but then there's also, you know, I mean, I'm going to give away all the tricks here, but how many different, how many e-commerce companies are using Shopify out of million? Most, there's a huge portion of those that are perfect clients as well. I mean there is, there is no shortage of clients, none.

Joe:  Okay. So. Let me let me ask another question because I'm getting excited about this. I'm thinking dang I could have my maybe there's something I can have my kids do good. Yeah. Okay, so this window company they already have a list of customers that you're mailing to or you went and go them?

Luke:  No, which is why I didn't want to take them. They didn't have anything that I normally have. They didn't have anything they'd use for marketing. They'd just been paying this online company. By the way, the $50,000 they'd spent in the prior two months with that company that rating leads online, 0-6.

Joe:  I didn't understand that, I'm sorry, okay, but say that again because I didn't understand, I'm a little dead.

Luke:  The day before coming to me, they had spent $50,000 across two months, so $25,000 a month with the online agency that was generating leads for them to sell windows, and they sold zero.

Joe:  Okay, wow.

Luke:  I know they spent you know 1,800 bucks or whatever and you know brought in 75 grand.

Joe:  So with that company, were you doing an ugly postcard or a? Yeah, that one was actually. Yeah, it was ugly. Okay, now what's interesting too is you're testing this. Just explain this a little bit because maybe somebody is worried like, and I'm gonna be spending thousands and thousands of dollars testing things. Are you testing small batches or big giant batch?

Luke:  Well, it depends who you think is going to be scared about them spending. I'm not spending a dime. The client is. This is no different than if I was running an ad agency and I created your ads for you or basically managed your ad spend on TV or radio or anything else. I'm now paying for the ads. You are. You're paying me a fee to manage the whole thing. So it's the same here. My clients pay a fee. They're happy to pay it once they see how the math works out. They pay me an upfront fee. They pay for all the mailing. And I don't pay for anything.

Joe:  Nice story. And so then is the goal then for you to be paid monthly from them to continue managing it for them?

Luke:  That's a really good question. I actually go into that in like a first class that we do. I do not prefer to have recurring income clients and the clients don't like it either. I found this out early on because when I first started doing this, that was the goal. I'm like, I can just get 10 or 12 clients that are paying me a couple thousand dollars a month to manage their direct mail. I'm home free. I can spend all my time riding my dirt bike and goclimbing on mountains. What happened is I would work with them And by about three, usually somewhere around three or four months, I'd get a call and they'd say, hey, this has been really fantastic. Everything's going great. You know, we're gonna cut some costs. We'd like to bring this in house now. Because here's the bottom line. Once they see how easy it is to do, they can do it themselves. And so at that point, like that happened three times in a row. And I finally just said, you know what, this is dumb for me to try to do it this way. So now I'm gonna do it different. And like the very next person that called from one of my letters, I actually pitched a completely different process and the process is this, I'm going to charge you a flat fee, we're going to get your mailing to work. It could take one mailing, it could take three to five mailings. It depends on, there was a few factors that it depends on. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pay you, I'm going to charge you an upfront fee, no recurring fee. You don't owe me anything else, but I'll stick with you till this campaign is working. Right? So it sounds so amazing to them because they're like, oh my God, all these agencies want to get me on the hook and, you know, charge me $3,000 a month, $5,000, like you've, you've paid for Facebook agencies. Haven't you? They charge pro, I still ascend right now and a percentage of the ad spend. I'm not doing any of that. It's literally a flat fee upfront. And I show them how we're going to make that back usually within the first successful mailing. Otherwise, we wish that we shouldn't work together. We do some math, and if it doesn't look like it's gonna work out, then we just, you know, I can't take them on as a client. They love it because they don't get on the hook, and I love it, because in most cases, if I'm working with the kind of client that I want, which is they already have creative and they already an audience, I'm gonna get it figured out in one mailing so I can be done with them in two or three weeks, and I got paid as if I did it for three months, because I'm charging what I would normally charge for three month. Nice. All right. So can you give us a little bit of an example? Is to keep the flow going where I've got, you know, three or four of those clients every single month. You know, I'm charging them anywhere from 75 to 7,500 out.

Joe:  Yeah, I was going to ask, what are your fees and what's your profit when you find a client like this?

Luke:  If they come as a referral, the profit's 100%. I mean, it's just the time I'm putting in to do it. I don't work more than six or eight hours on a client between all the clients together a week.

Joe:  Okay, so you're charging about how much per new client you get.

Luke:  7,500 bucks is my normal. All right. So somebody's doing like I have a client that I took on this month that I charged 15,000 because it was a bigger job, meaning they wanted more than one project done at a time.

Joe:  Okay. So if somebody about $7,500, you're going to do this for them and not you're doing it for him, but you're not paying for the marketing. You're just helping them come strategize about it. But then somebody who's new, they're like, well, you're Luke Jaten, I mean, you're good looking, you're smart, you've been, you've done this a lot. How am I goingbe able to do this?

Luke:  Finally, you may have a good ask. I would ask the same question. These people, I'm prospecting cold. They don't know me. I'm as green as you are to them. They have no idea. Part of why it works is because I'm not going in and sharing expertise with them. I mean, yes, a little bit, but that little bit you're going to get in the course that I'm going to teach you how to do that. You only have to know about this much more than they do and they know nothing. And the only reason we can do that is because we're going after people who already have marketing that works in place. We're not reinventing the wheel. We're taking their digital assets and we're adapting them for print. I mean, you and I are working on that project right now and basically you showed me what's working for you online. We took that, we did put it in a postcard format. We've popped it into the same funnel. If the result doesn't work, then we change where it went in the funnel so that we match up with exactly what you're trying to accomplish online. And that's not rocket science. I'm not coming up and going, hmm, I don't really like their hook or their angle. You know, I mean, I could do that, but that's work. That's like brain work. And that's also putting yourself on the line. I'm basically coming to you and you're saying, I'm saying to you, do you have a marketing campaign that's working? Yes. Okay. What's your best one? For example, an e-commerce company, a lot of times what I'm going to them with is I'm seeing, what is your best promo you've done via email? And they show me a bunch of them and if they're Shopify stores, which is one the ones that I target off them. All those stats are right on their front page. They don't have to be geniuses to tell me this. They can say, okay, this was our campaign that's working the best and here's what our cost per sale and every, and I basically just walk them through some math. The math looks like this. Your best promo. They show it to me. Okay. Fantastic. So that one you were super happy with. Yes. It brought in $15,000. Okay. How many people did you send the email to? 50,000? Okay. How many opened it? 10,000, okay. So what if the other 40,000 saw that message? That's what I'm bringing to you. We can take that other 40,000, we can mail them a postcard, and now all of a sudden, we have to do the same math. So if they convert at the same ratio that the ones that open did, then what would your, what would you're, instead of 15,000 now it would be, you know, four times that'd be 60,000. Let's cut it a little bit so you'd say it's only 50. Okay. The difference though is now we had to pay to send the postcards. So, let's take that cost out. We say 40 times 700 is 28,000. So, you would have brought in an extra $26,000 dollars. Now, when I show you that and you look at your costs to fulfill it and everything else, is that attractive? I just ask them, is it attractive? Because sometimes the answer is no. If they have a low margin product and we go through that exercise, they'll go, yeah, you know, that would be really cutting it close. And I say, well, you're probably not a good candidate for direct mail bid. And we move on. But for the ones who it is a good, that they are a good candidate. There's nothing, all I have to do is take that exact email and put it on a postcard, and mail to the people who didn't open it. It's pretty simple.

Joe:  Okay, so can you talk quickly about and I appreciate you being generous with your time here because we're almost at the end of it. Talk about what does a postcard send them to a phone number a QR code a website.

Luke:  It totally depends on their existing funnel. In most cases, like so for with e-commerce, which is one of the easiest kinds of businesses to work with, it's almost always a QR code, right? And I didn't invent this, by the way. There's a huge, a lot of the major, you know, the Fortune 500 e-commerce companies, they're already doing this internally, right. So we're just matching what they're doing for smaller businesses. They're only doing, you now, one to five million dollars a year, but QR code. I have clients from time to time. I worked with a client that was an agency and they had sale. Well, the window guy was an example of this. He has a live sales guy. So we used a phone numberwas thecall to action. So the call-to-action depends on what their existing funnel is. I'm not going to change what they're already doing. If they're using something where it's a click in an email, then we're gonna use a QR.

Joe:  Okay, cool. Are you using any postcards now to send them to a voicemail?

Luke:  I don't currently have any. That seems kind of old school. I believe that for some info products that would still work, I'm not sure it would work for most of them. Most of the clients that I'm working with now are more traditional business, if you will. I do have some info product sellers, but for the most part, it's either B2B. They're selling to businesses. So again, that's going to be either a phone call or a QR code or e-commerce, and that's almost always going to a QR Code. I did work with an e-commerce company that was selling hearing aids, had a fantastic campaign with them, and most of their customers preferred a phone call, so we used a phone number in that case. So, it kind of just depends on what they're already doing. I don't want to go and reinvent the wheel for them.

Joe:  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, um, well, I forgot what I was going to say. It'll come back to me though. Oh shoot. That was a good question. But anyway, regardless. So Luke, you're going to be doing a class upcoming.

Luke:  A class in February, if you want to get on the notification list, I think you'll put the link to it here in the show notes and you just click through there, opt in and you'll be on the notifications list to let you know more of the details about how everything works, what it costs, when the classes are, all of that good stuff.

Joe:  Yeah, and here's the thing, even if you're watching this after February or after it's already been done, when you click the link in the description down below or in the comments or whatever down below, we'll give you more information maybe to either how to get a replay or how to watch the next class if and when Luke does one. Yeah. So there'll be more.

Luke:  Hopefully we'll do six this year. Six classes, so if you missed the February one then just get on the list and I'll let you know when the next one is.

Joe:  Oh, okay, good. I remember what I was going to ask, do you have an example or two you could share of one of the students that you've taught this to and what they have done?

Luke:  Yeah, it's funny because one of the things that I, I don't know if I was, I wasn't going to say this on this podcast because who knows if I'm going to always do this, but for currently, I actually will help them close their first few clients. So why do you, they're prospecting when the clients call them, if they want to have me on the phone and just say, Hey, my colleague's here. I'll, I'll close the people for them. So I had a guy that we did that for. This was a really good one, and it's crazy because it's sort of in your category. The guy sells real estate education stuff. And without giving away too much of what he does, we identified a group of his customers. I didn't. The student did. He called me and said, hey, listen, I went through the first call with him, and here's what he's got. I said, okay, here's, what you should do. And basically, we identify a group of customers that he had that had spent $100 or $150 or something like that. But ultimately, he sold much more expensive things, and so I said, well, how many of these guys do you have? He told me how many. And so I basically walked him through taking the emails the guy was already using for that, structuring those into a sales letter, putting the sales letter. And so then this one wasn't postcards, this was an actual letter. They sent it. He sent a letter out. And again, I don't want to give away his conversion numbers, but it was his from mailing 2,000 pieces, the returns were in the six figures because he has expensive thing they sell.

Joe:  We should talk about this offline. I'd like to know what he was doing. But were you sending them to a VSL like a video sales letter?

Luke:  No, because these people already, they had already been through part of that process with him. Again, this is part of looking at what they've already been though and then saying, just like you would with email, okay, where would we send them? And so with these folks, we basically sent them to, they just texted into a person that was answering questions for them and they just closed and be attacked.

Joe:  I love that. And a lot of these businesses, it's so easy for them to just find the emails that have worked before, the emails that have the best open rates, that have most clicks. And you can tell from those emails, the good subject lines, the headlines, what are they sending them to? Is it an order form, straight to an order from, a long form sales letter, a video? It depends on what they're already doing, exactly. And the other thing I was gonna say, I remember, a lot these e-commerce companies, You might think in your mind, well, all you have is their name and email address, maybe their phone number. How do you get their address? Well, the great thing about e-commerce, Joe, well the great about ecommerce is you get addresses a lot of times when they're giving you their credit card and follow-ups and most things, you almost always get their billing address, which is their best address.

Luke:  Yeah, and without giving away too many of the tricks, we can do that with companies who are not collecting addresses as well. We can do data pens online with some of the tools that we use. So we can actually take if all we have is a phone number or all we has a phone number and email or all, we have as a name, phone number, email, or just a name and email, any of those combinations, we can go and get their addresses and we can get about a 75% match rate on that. So if you have a thousand names on your list and you don't have addresses, we you can get about 750 of those addresses that you can nail.

Joe:  Wow. Okay. So cool. Now the information guys, if you're interested in this, check it out. This could be a side hustle for you. It could be full-time income. Side hustle for you. You can use this to the money you make from this to pay for your real estate deals to either buy deals, lend money on deals, pay for marketing for your own deals. This is what I love about this multiple streams of income, cashflow type of stuff. And I'm just looking at all of the stuff that Luke helped me do 12 years ago. And this stuff works. It still works. I'm looking at this campaign we did 12 years and I could start it again probably. But thank you so much, Luke, for being on the call here again. In the description below this video or in the comments wherever you're seeing this will be a link to go get more information on Luke, his business, this next class that he's going to be doing. Even if you're watching this later, there'll be more. When you go to that link in the description, there will be more information about future classes that he is doing. So thank you so much, Luke. I appreciate you being on my podcast. I really do.

Luke:  Ah, thanks for having me. That was great, Joe.

Joe:  All right. We'll talk to you later.