Transcription
Everybody always wants to know, what's the best marketing channel for my business? And so today, I'm going to go over the good, the bad, the ugly for all the main marketing channels, and then how to know which one you should pick for your business.
If you're new to this channel, all we do here is we talk about the lessons of how to get your wholesaling business to $100,000 a month. We also talk about how do you actually train your team and run a multiple seven-figure business so you can start getting some of your time back. And if you're already subscribed, welcome back. As always, I have another killer video, whether you're just getting started or you're already doing multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
So, let's first just start out with some terminology so you know the difference between an inbound lead and an outbound lead. An inbound lead is going to be anybody that sees a piece of marketing material first and then they reach out to you. And so this could be an ad, this could be a piece of direct mail, this could be Google search, right? So we say search, or oftentimes we call this PPC, which just means pay per click. There's a million different ways people could come into you inbound. It could be abandoned sign, anything where they see marketing material, billboards, radios, TV. These are all inbound leads.
And then you have your outbound leads. Your outbound leads are going to be anything where their first point of contact was with a human. Now, generally, this is just cold call and then SMS. These are the main outbound channels. Now, obviously, some people do ringless voicemails and other craziness like that.
However, the main ones that we're going to be talking about today are digital ads such as Facebook, you've got YouTube, you've got, I don't know, I don't know anyone that's actually doing TikTok on a high level, so I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even count that. You've got direct mail, and we've got different types of mailers. We've got like check mailers, we've got yellow letters, postcards, all that. And then we've got PPC. Those are the main ones we're going to talk about, and we're going to talk about outbound as well, along with some outbound strategies.
Okay, let's talk about PPC first. That's pay-per-click. I love this marketing channel. I also use this marketing channel, but there are definitely some cons about it that are not talked about enough. So, we're going to talk about some of the pros and some of the cons.
Now, what are some of the pros with PPC? Number one, this is bottom of funnel. What does that mean? I'm going to do this and then I'll, I'll erase this. So, this is the awareness funnel. The lower they go on this funnel, the more aware they are, the higher intent they are, right? So, think about it like this. Lower equals higher intent.
Let's say that you're doing cold calling or SMS blast. You might get someone sitting in their living room that has no real reason that they want to sell the property, but you texted them and it's super convenient just to respond back to a message and say, "Yeah, I'd be interested in selling it or I would hear an offer." Right? This is going to be like your cold call. This is going to be your SMS. Sometimes it can even be direct mail depending on on who you actually target. They're going to be top of funnel leads. Right?
Another top of funnel campaign might be just doing some branded billboards or some, uh, some Facebook ads. Like these can be pretty top of funnel because they're distraction ads, right? People are scrolling and they just see you pop up and so they might not have a ton of intent, right? You could make it more intent. So you could do something like this. You can go direct mail and you can target more bottom of funnel by having a mailer. So, example, one of my buddies has a mailer that says, uh, "If you're in foreclosure, we'll buy your house and let you live there for the next 30, uh, next 12 months, actually, is what they promise," which is a really good marketing marketing message. He does direct mail and he's only targeting people who are in pre-foreclosure. Right?
Now, when they see this, they get this piece of mail, they're going to be more bottom of funnel here. And what I mean by that is these people are aware that they have a problem. They're in foreclosure. You can't get any more bottom of funnel than PPC. The reason why is these people are actively searching for ways to sell their house. Okay? They are already searching for ways to be able to to solve a problem that you can solve. So, they come in incredibly motivated. And the reason that I like a lot of these leads, the reason that I that I do like the PPC model is because if you can't close one out of eight to one out of 10 PPC leads, you have a problem, right? It's, it's they're just really high intent leads.
What do we like about them? They're bottom of funnel. Uh, they are typically more motivated in general than, let's call it like a Facebook lead or a YouTube lead because they're actively searching for ways to be able to sell their home. Another thing that I like about pay-per-click, if you are going into a nationwide model, you can get really cheap leads. So, if you're going into multiple markets, if you're in one market specifically, they can be pretty expensive, but you can, you can get a lower cost per lead if you go into a ton of different markets. And the last thing we're going to add is credibility. The reason that I add credibility is if you go to my website, for example, and you end up on it, what you're going to see is you're going to see a bunch of reviews, you're going to see things about our company, so people can do their research prior to ever talking to your sales team. Where if you're doing SMS, you're doing cold call, you can do it on direct mail, you can, you can put your website at the bottom. Um, but the Facebook ads, like generally, they don't go to a, a big landing page that has a bunch of reviews and testimonials and things like that. But a lot of times they'll go to like forms and so this is why I really do like PPC.
Okay, now let's talk about some of the cons because we have had to add on additional channels in addition to PPC for a lot of reasons. And with all of our students that do PPC, this is probably one of their biggest concerns is property type. You have very little control over what types of properties come into your funnel. You could get a bunch of mobile homes. So, like for example, we launched a pay-per-click campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, and that is not necessarily a pay-per-click market unless you're buying mobile homes, right? There's just a ton of mobile homes out there. And so, property type, you're going to get $5 million properties, uh, $500,000 properties.
Now, you can do things to combat this. And so one of the things that we did when we were specific in Southern California, right? We were doing seven figures a year and PBC was our, our main channel is we started filtering on our form. So you would go to our website, you would put your, your name, uh, your phone number and your address in first and then it would bring you to another page and it would say, "Is your property located in one of these four counties?" And we knew we could buy anywhere in these four counties. They would say yes. They could move on to the next one. Is it listed with an agent? They would say no. And they would move to the next one. And then the last thing it would ask them is, uh, is a price range of their property. And if they would put over $2 million, we would just exclude it because we just didn't do anything with those deals. Uh, especially at that time of the market, like '22, yeah, sure. '23, '24, then no one was really buying those luxury flips.
Okay. Another thing you're going to deal with, there's just no way to avoid it, is you are going to get listed properties. This really happens with everything. Uh, listed properties and out of market. So, the Google targeting geographically has not been very good lately. It was a lot better in the past, but for some reason recently, Google's targeting, uh, with with geo locations has started to get off. And so, you're going to see generally about 10 to 15% of all of your properties are going to be out of market if you're, if you have a good campaign, right? This is like a good tolerance. However, I have seen campaigns where people have like 30 to 40% of the properties that are out of market. Uh, they're listed on the market. They are mobile homes and things like that. So, you just don't have a lot of control over if you're going to get really expensive properties that you don't really want or if you're going to get like crack houses that you can't even sell. So, for example, if you ran a PPC campaign, uh, in, in Detroit, you might get a bunch of $12,000 properties that you just can't make any money on no matter how steep you get them. And so this is one of the things I don't like about pay-per-click.
Now the other part is more for if you're a newbie. Paperclick is a high barrier to entry. And so with paperclick specifically, um, if you are going to start using it as a channel as one of your first channels, I would have set aside $15,000 just to get into your market. And honestly, it can take a lot more than that depending on your market specifically. So, this isn't something that you can get into for, you know, I have a $3,000 marketing budget before I run out of money. It's just, it's not really going to do you any good.
Now, what I don't agree with is a lot of marketing agencies will say, "Hey, you need to do this for 3 to 6 months before you get a result." You should see if it's working within the first 30 days. Like, you should see that you're getting some traction, you're getting some contracts. You just might not make money for 60 to 90 days, which is why I would say have a 5K budget for at least 90 days, not to see if it's working after 90 days, but, um, to make sure that you have a runway that you can monetize before you go and reinvest.
So, that is our pay-per-click campaign. I'm a big fan. We still do pay-per-click.
Okay, let's talk about direct mail next. Okay, so we're going to go direct mail. We'll talk about, uh, different types of mailers as well. So, this is also a channel that my company uses. I have experience with this. And we're going to talk about some of the pros and some of the cons.
Okay. Some of the pros, my favorite part about direct mail is the targeting. You can target exactly the type of property that you want. You can target exactly the location that you want. I, I remember when we did direct mail as our primary channel. This was back years ago. And it was just the exact city that I wanted. Address after address after address after address. And it was the coolest thing looking at your CRM and seeing like, if you're going after Anaheim, Anaheim, everywhere, and you know that that's your best market. So the targeting with direct mail is, is bar none.
Especially, I'll go to the second part, which is this is still an inbound channel that has great targeting. And so every other marketing channel that you do, if you can target property specifically, it means you have to reach out to them, right? You have to have a person that initiates the contact. However, with direct mail, you can send them a mailer and then they call into you. Okay, which brings me to my next point is you have an extremely high contact rate. Why do you have a high contact rate? They literally called in. And so some of the problems with like YouTube leads, Facebook leads, even PPC is you can have a 50 to 60% lead to contact, meaning most people just never answer the phone. With direct mail, they called in. So as long as you answer the phone, you'll be able to talk to them and you can give them an offer on the spot. Okay?
Those are my favorite things about direct mail. The last thing I'm going to mention is this is infinitely, that's an infinity sign by the way, scalable. So with direct mail, if it's working, you can literally just spend more money and you can get the same exact response rate. You can just keep scaling it up. There's no cap where if you're doing something like PPC, you can't go from spending $100 a day to $1,000 a day right away and expect that you're going to get the same result. What ends up happening is your PPC campaign kind of has to learn. But if you're growing fast, for example, like my company, anytime we start want to ramp, we just grow really, really, really, really fast. And PPC can't keep up with us. YouTube hasn't been able to keep up with us. And what happens with things like YouTube, I, I'll demonstrate this in a second, is you start spending more money and you start lowering quality. Uh, and, and the same thing can happen with a lot of those digital campaigns. Direct mail, you can just take it and you, you, you're DMing direct mailing foreclosures. You can just go into a, a market right next to it. Direct mail foreclosures, get a similar response rate. You can scale this very, very, very fast.
Okay, let's talk about some of the cons of direct mail. This is honestly probably the one that has the least amount of cons. However, uh, we're going to talk about some of the cons that it does have. Number one is you need answering. Now, it doesn't mean you need an answering service. You just need to have a team that can sit there and answer the phone. If you're not answering the phone at a 90, 95% answer rate from the time a lead calls in, you're just going to get crushed with direct mail. Especially if you're like 60, you know, 50% of the time or you're a solo operator and you're trying to answer all of your own calls. You're also doing a million things going your flips. This is going to be a really hard channel, uh, to be good with because a lot of times people call in and then the call back is super awkward. It's like, "Hey, I got a missed call from this number. Uh, you called me on the piece of direct mail. Is that right?" And that, we have a script for it that it makes it smooth, but you can only make it so smooth. It's still relatively awkward. And so direct mail, one of the biggest cons to it is you do need someone to be able to answer the phone.
I'll talk about a con that I can debunk right now is that direct mail, you need to do it for a long time. That's not true. We turned on a, a direct mail campaign and we had a contract within our first drop. Like literally was spend, I think we were spending 10K a month and so the first $2,500 drop, we got a call in, we did a one call close, we got the contract. So, it doesn't have to be, uh, a long cash conversion cycle. I will, I'll just add that as a con that you guys might be wondering why I didn't add it. It's cuz it's not true.
Another con for direct mail, this is going to be specific to check mailers, but it really any mailer this can apply to, is the seller comes in with the improper frame. What I mean by that is when someone fills out a form on your website, the frame is, "Hey, I want you to buy my house." Whereas direct mail, the frame is, "Hey, you mailed me and you said you wanted to buy my house." And so we just have to flip that frame. We have something we call deframing. And this is one of the things that I teach all of my students. We have students that are doing, you know, three to $500,000 a month doing direct mail, a couple of them actually, and a lot of them do check mailers. And so what we do is we teach you how to flip the script in that sales call from, "Hey, you reached out to me and you wanted to buy my house" to, "Hey, we're not sure if we can buy it yet. We send out a bunch of those mailers. What we would need to do is ask a few more questions about the property just to see if it is something that we would actually want."
And if you want actual sales training and scripts for each one of these channels, listen up. We have an advanced group where we do five sales calls every single week. We have an ask me anything call. We do a phase breakdown where we break down every single step of the process. A role play, an objection handling call, and a call review where I will review your calls live, give you feedback, and tell you exactly what you need to do to get that deal closed on the next call. We also have scaling support. We brought in one of the biggest coaches in the country, somebody that built a business to $24 million per year. We have a dispositions call with my director of dispo, who's closed over $3 million in assignments by himself. We have lead manager calls. We have marketing calls. Everything that you need to be able to get your business to multiple seven figures per year and then how to remove yourself as well. So, if you guys want to check that out, I will drop a link in the description. Let's get back to the video.
And then lastly, you're going to get a lot of people that say, "Take me off the list." I don't really have a huge problem with this, but there are going to be people that call in and say, "Take me off your list." And you can also close a lot of those deals cuz especially if you're doing check mailers, some people are just mad about the number that you put on the piece of paper. And so those are still closable deals.
So we talked about pay-per-click, we talked about direct mail. The next thing we're going to talk about is actually, uh, wasn't mentioned earlier, but it is still inbound is PPL. This is pay per lead. Okay. Pay per lead is a great starter channel. We're going to talk about some of the pros and the cons to pay per lead. I actually, I love pay per lead. I hit my first, maybe my first million dollars, uh, primarily on pay per lead. We ended up doing some PPC later, but like PBL was a big pillar of, uh, what got me to my first million. And so, let's talk about some of the pros.
The pros is this is the lowest barrier to entry. You could have $100 and start pay per lead. Like literally, you could just go to Speed to Lead. I'll drop a description to Speed to Lead. Uh, drop a link in the description to Speed to Lead. So, you guys can literally go check out this website. You can get leads for $30 that are inbound that have just been bought by other people. But guess what? There's no such thing as an exclusive lead. They're all non-exclusive. They fill out multiple forms. So, super low entry. Uh, we are currently using Property Leads. I will also drop a link in the description there. Property Leads is a great channel if you're just trying to, uh, add on some lead flow to your existing business or if you're just getting started. Can also be a really good channel as well. And so, this you don't need a lot of money for and it's the only way you can get into inbound without spending a lot of money. So, if you go do like Facebook, PPC, YouTube, a lot of times you're going to have to pay an agency to either teach you how to do it or they're going to have to do it for you. Where PPL, they already do all of that for you. So, I really like that about them.
The other thing I like about them is that depending on the actual PPL channel is you can decide your CPL, which is really cool. Like, where else can you do that? So, like for example, with Property Leads, what we do is we know some of our markets we don't want to spend more than $150 per lead, so we'll just set that as our budget. Whereas markets like SoCal, we can spend $400 per lead. So I can increase my budget a lot there. Right?
In addition to that, perhaps my number one favorite thing about PPL is that you can get a refund. This is crazy, right? Imagine you could tell Google that the property was listed and so I'm not going to spend money on the ads for that one. Or you could tell USPS, "Hey, don't charge me for the postage because that was a mobile home," right? It's, it's crazy. But you can do this with PPL, which I really like. Most good PPL providers will refund the lead if it's listed, if you have tried to reach out to it and you haven't been able to get in touch with it, or most good PPL providers will give you a refund on the lead if you have tried to contact the lead. Typically it's like 12 times in the first 7 days, if it's listed, if it's a mobile home on rented land. Like these are all means for a refund. Those are some of the pros. I actually, I am in support of PPL. I think it's, I think it's coming back this year. If you guys are watching this in 2026, um, this PPL is, is making a comeback. Whereas for the last 2 years, people really hated PPL. But I think that, uh, PPL is, is making a comeback. And I think it's because everybody else isn't doing it again. So maybe I shouldn't make this video.
I'm going to talk about the cons now. Okay. The cons with PPL is it is wildly inconsistent. If you are trying to run a consistent business off of PPL, you are setting yourself up to fail. And so, for example, with my team, I know that I need to get every single rep about 24 leads per week. And those 24 leads are going to turn into two closed deals, right? Just like a, a number that I know for my business. Whereas with PPC, I can pretty much guarantee it. I could say we're going to spend, uh, let's say that it's, it's 24 leads and my cost per lead is $100, right? So, I have to spend $2,400 to be able to get those 24 leads. We can spend that pretty consistently week over week with Google. We can also do that with Facebook, with YouTube, and our cost per lead doesn't typically jump up or or shoot down unless we make any changes. It stays relatively consistent as well.
With PPL, you're bidding against other people. So, what might happen is a big dog like my company comes into your market and we just say, you know what, we're used to California leads that are $600 per lead and we see the maximum bid is at $250 in this market. I'm just going to go in and I'm going to do $300. And then I just took your entire lead flow. Especially if I have an infinite budget, if I can spend 70, 80k a month, they're going to feed me every single lead before you get any. And so then there goes your channel, right? I was going to add that. So inconsistent. You also have no idea how many leads you're actually going to get per week. That's another thing. You might get 50 leads per week. You might get five. And so it's really hard to build a predictable business off of PPL. Right?
The other thing is it's not reliable. Okay? With PPL, if you're relying your entire business on a pay-per-lead marketing agency, it, one, it's just a huge risk because a million things could happen. I, I have a, I've heard a horror story of one of the PPL providers that they just started screwing people. They increased all their prices. Uh, they, their lead quality went down a ton. I have experienced this with a company called, uh, Need to Sell My House Fast, where they were really good and then they just randomly just said, "We're not refunding any of your leads anymore. We're just going to, you're going to pay for them no matter what." I was like, "All right, well, there goes a marketing channel for me. Of course, I'm not going to use this." Because we had like a 60% refund rate with them because most of their leads were trash, but we were still making money on the leads that we would actually get and the ones we would pay for. We were ROI positive because we were able to get the refunds. When I say trash leads, I mean like homes we literally couldn't buy.
Okay, so PPL, super low barrier to entry, super stable CPL if you, you know, you use the bids properly and you can refund. That's what I love about it. I don't like that it's inconsistent and it's unreliable.
Okay, so there's two more marketing channels that we're going to cover. We're going to lump some of these in together. The next one that we're going to be talking about is digital. Okay, digital is going to be Facebook and YouTube. I don't really consider TikTok an actual marketing channel for wholesalers. I know people that are like, "Oh, I'm getting $3 cost per lead on TikTok." It's like, yeah, cuz you're getting a bunch of 14-year-olds that are filling out the form for fun. There's, uh, typically not a lot of our demographic on TikTok, so don't necessarily recommend that as a channel. We're going to talk about Facebook and we are going to be talking about YouTube specifically.
Now, these are interesting because YouTube is ran by Google and Facebook is ran by Meta. And so, as I talk about the pros and cons, I'm going to kind of highlight some of the things that Facebook does better and highlight some of the things that that YouTube does better. So, one of the things that I love about both of these channels, I've used them both inside of my business. We still do YouTube. We do it for retargeting our current PPC leads or anybody that gets to our website. So, we still do YouTube. Uh, we do not currently do Facebook. Not because it's not good. I just don't see a need to add another marketing channel. I have a ton of really good friends that absolutely crush it with Facebook. So, I'm not just going to sit here and talk about it. I think Facebook is a good channel. But, let's talk about some of the pros, right?
Pros is super low cost per lead with Facebook and YouTube. I'll give you guys an example with YouTube and my SoCal market. With YouTube, I was getting 800, sorry, PPC in SoCal, I was getting $800 cost per lead. And we were running an in-person model. Our average deal size was $50,000. So, we were still making money. We were getting about a 5.8x return on our ad spend from our PPC campaigns. And this was at scale. However, one of my buddies, uh, is a marketer and he has his own agency right now. I will actually, I'll drop that agency, uh, link in the description. He does YouTube for people specifically. I was on the phone with him and I was telling him, "Dude, my cost per lead is $800. Uh, yeah, we make money, but we are just converting like crazy. We're converting like one out of three people that actually has a property that they want to sell. We're like, that's the only way that we're winning." And so he tells me, "Dude, I can get your cost per lead down to an eighth of that, right? To like around $100." And I was like, "No way that that's possible." Lo and behold, he did it. And we had a 7.8x, 8x return on our ad spend within the first month. So, we spent, I don't know exactly what we spent, but I think it was like $15,000 and made 7.8x that, uh, in, in the first month of doing YouTube. Super fast cash conversion cycle, too.
With that very low cost per lead, I have another buddy named Chandler. You guys probably see me go live with him if you guys watch our lives on Friday. He runs a Facebook marketing agency and he also helps set it up for people. And they'll get like $30 foreclosure leads, which is absolutely insane for an inbound channel. So, both channels can have a really low cost per lead. What I also like about this is you could be hyper specific with messaging. When I was running YouTube ads in SoCal, I could say, "If you own a home in Northern Orange County and you want to sell it without having to wait 60, 90, 120 days listing it on the market, listen up. My call out can be so specific to who I'm actually talking about. If I wanted to get really specific, I could, I could literally say, "If you own a home that's in Anaheim, California, you're in foreclosure and you don't know what to do, listen up, right?" Like, I can target a foreclosure in Anaheim. And I will tell you, uh, let's talk about the differences between YouTube and Facebook. The Facebook algorithm does a better job at going after the right person based on what you're saying. So, there was a new update with Facebook last year called Andromeda. And basically with Andromeda, you can just talk to your avatar, call out your avatar, and Facebook does a good job with the AI and with their algorithm to get that that ad in front of the right person. YouTube can do that. They just don't do it as well.
Now, let's talk about the con or the, or the, uh, the advantage that YouTube has. With YouTube, you can find people that are searching "sell my house fast," "sell my house quick for cash." That would normally cost you, you know, $300, $400, $500 with a PPC campaign. And you could just put an ad in front of those specific people and get your leads for $100, $150. So, you can't do that with Meta because Meta does not have a search platform like that. Now, I do know that, uh, Meta does, like they have cookies and they are able to see what people are searching. So they, they likely do target those people, but I found YouTube will do a better job of you picking the audience and you saying, "Hey, I want to go after these people." Where Facebook can do a better job of actually going after the people that you're talking to. Both of them have about the same results when it comes to targeting. So you are still going to get all of the stuff that I mentioned with PPC, typically on a higher scale. So what I mean by that is out of location, listed properties, uh, real estate agents and wholesalers. You're going to get both of those. We're going to talk about those and the cons, but let me go back to the pros.
So, low CPL, messaging, and then specifically with these two with digital, what happens is you get better results over time. I'm just going to put overtime. So, your results over time tend to improve. I think Facebook does a better job with this as well. Not to say that Facebook's a better marketing channel. There's a reason why I'm using YouTube and not Facebook, but I think Facebook does a better job of saying, "Okay, we like these types of leads. Let me go and get more of these." Whereas YouTube kind of just gets you whatever, whatever's coming in, that's what YouTube's going to feed you. And there's been a couple of times in the last few years with YouTube where our campaigns have kind of spiraled out of control. So we start getting people that fill out the form that are our opposite avatar that we want and Google says, "Oh, well this is really cheap." And so they just give us a lot more of those. We have to restart the entire campaign.
Okay. So some of the pros of digital is super low CPL, really good messaging. You can get in front of the right people if you have the right ads and then you get better results over time generally, as long as you set up your conversion actions properly.
Now, let's talk about some of the cons. My students are not allowed to call any leads, retail leads. Why? Because our best students, or really most of our students, close those deals. Even when the seller doesn't have a ton of motivation, the house is fixed up, they still close them as long as they have equity because they know how to follow the right sales process. However, for a lot of you whiny babies that suck at sales, you're going to absolutely hate this because you're going to get what people call retail leads, right? Retail leads meaning these are properties that are all fixed up, they're renovated, maybe they're bought in the last 5 years and, uh, you're going to, you're not going to know how to sell them because you're not in our coaching program. So, you're just going to kick them off and then one of our students is going to be able to close them. And I'm not just talking about getting them to do a novation. I'm talking about actually selling them on why the novation is going to be the best case scenario and how to get them to actually see the value in that. And so you're going to get a lot of these. And so with Facebook and YouTube, you tend to have a slightly higher lead to contract than direct mail and PPC. It's not going to be nearly as bad as like an SMS campaign or a cold calling campaign, but it's not going to be as high as, uh, the, the low intent funnels like direct mail and pay-per-click. So that's one of the big cons.
The other con is something called pixel conditioning. This is why this is a con. Some people look at this as a pro. I don't think it is. Right. The reason why I think this is the con is a lot of times what happens with Facebook and YouTube is you end up having to start a new campaign because the campaign spirals out of control. So what ends up happening is you're trying to target people that are in foreclosure and then, and then let's say that, uh, somebody that's filing bankruptcy that doesn't own a home fills out your form and Facebook goes, "Oh, well that's interesting. I got that really cheap. Let me get another one and another one and another one." And then all of a sudden all your entire campaign is literally just people that don't own homes that are in bankruptcy. And Facebook hasn't quite figured out. You can't say I'm looking for homeowners yet. It just knows pattern recognition. Says, "Oh, this demographic fills out this form a lot." And the campaigns can spiral out of control. We had the exact same thing happen with our YouTube. And so, while a lot of people look at this as a pro and yes, there are 100% ways that you can try to counter this. So, you can put on your form, "Do you own a property?" and they say yes, it moves them to the next page and your pixel is on the last page. So whenever they actually get to the last page, it tells Facebook, hey, that's a lead. You can work around this. I have just seen a lot of times when you do that, it ends up getting the making the cost per lead super, super high and it's not always the most advantageous to, to do this in the first place.
And then the last thing is you're going to get a ton of spam leads here. Just going to happen. It's digital advertising. You're going to get spam leads. So, I would say a healthy range is 10 to 15%. You're going to get the listed properties, you're going to get the wholesalers, you're going to get the properties that were bought within the last year. You're just going to get a lot of these when you are, uh, working digital ads. So, higher lead per deal. But overall, I do like this channel. I think it's becoming one of the more saturated channels. I think people are, are getting into digital a lot more. And some of that is because it's improving, right? So, Facebook is improving a lot. Uh, YouTube is improving a lot. So, they are improving. It's harder to scale this quickly. So, you can't just double your budget every two days, uh, with Facebook and YouTube. You have to, you have to scale it slowly as well. Um, I don't have a preference necessarily with Facebook over YouTube. I think they can both be, uh, great channels. I think it depends on your specific market. And where I see these channels work the best is in markets where you have a really high CPL on PPL and you have a high CPL, which is cost per lead on pay-per-click and direct mail. So, in those markets, you just need to get in front of the right people. So, you're in like New York, you're in, uh, Miami, you're in Southern California, and if you can just get in front of people that actually want to sell the property and have the right properties for cheap, you'll crush. Digital is the way to go.
All right. Now, let's talk about the one you guys have probably all been waiting on. What are my thoughts on cold call and SMS blast? So, I'm just going to lump these in together, similar to how I did with, uh, with Facebook and YouTube. I'm going to lump these together with outbound. So, we're going to talk about the pros and the cons to outbound.
Okay. First pro, similar to direct mail, this is the pro to any, uh, sort of targeted campaign is you can get very, very hyper specific with your targeting. So, you could only target properties that are 12 to 1,500 square feet, 3 bedroom, two bath, um, that are in foreclosure if you wanted, and you could just cold call that list. So, I have a ton of students that spend almost nothing on marketing and they make six figures per month. When I say almost nothing, I'm talking about like sub $3,000 and they just go after foreclosures and they just hammer and hammer and hammer foreclosures, right? And so, this can be the only channel where you can pull that off. There are no other channels that I have seen consistently that you can put a really, really small amount of money in and get a huge return. Trust me, there are cons to this that I'm going to get into, but that is by far the biggest pro is you can get super hyper specific with your targeting.
What you can also do if you have your own cold callers in house. I am not a big fan of cold call agencies just because out of all of my students, I've heard so many stories of cold calling agencies that will literally steal your leads. Like they sell them to other people. And I think that's insane. But I've heard this over and over and over again and actual proof that that is happening. I, I don't love that model. However, if you have your own cold callers in house, you can get them very specific on qualified leads. So, if you want to, you can get your lead to deal with cold calling down to one out of 10. All you need is a really good cold caller that can go through basically an entire qualification process and make sure that the seller is going to be selling in the next 90 days. They're not like, "Hey, I'm, I'm going to sell 2 years out." Um, you could decide that you are going to filter anybody out that has less than 40% equity, right? Like if they only have, uh, 10% equity, you just, you don't even push them into your CRM. You can get really, really specific with the type of leads that you're going to take over.
And then the best part of this, uh, I guess maybe not the best part, but another huge con of this is super low entry. Similar to PPL, I think this is, this is actually even a lower barrier to entry than the, than PPL. You can go on PropStream or Batch Leads and you could pull a list of foreclosures for $100 a month and just start calling them yourself and you can close a deal off of that. Honestly, you could call for sale by owners and for free and close a deal if you have the right sales skills. Just understand that the lower barrier to entry, the better you need to be at sales because you're going to be competing with way more people. So, like if you do billboards, you're going to have the highest barrier to entry, but you're also, you pretty much get away with order taking at that point on your billboards because people see you. You have so much credibility. TV ads are very similar. You have so much credibility coming in. We're not going to talk about those channels because most of you guys watching this aren't doing those channels until you get plus $3 million per year, right? And so we're not going to talk about those, but this is super low barrier to entry.
Now, let's talk about some of the cons with outbound. This is a giant headache to manage, especially on a high level. So, a ton of people are in our advanced group that are doing six figures per month with outbound. However, it is a management headache for all of them and they all eventually want to start switching to inbound, even though their return on ad spend is like a 10x. The reason why is because if you want to really do this at scale, you're going to need to manage a cold call team. And then not only do you need to manage a cold call team, but then you need to have a setter team, like a lead management team that actually goes through to make sure that these people have enough equity to be able to sell the property, that are actually going to be selling the property in 90 days. Cuz generally all cold callers really do is call people and say like, "Hey, would you be opposed to having a conversation about selling the home?" People like, "No, I wouldn't be opposed to it." All right, perfect. We push that in the CRM. Then your lead managers qualify them. And you can work around that. That's another thing I do like about the cold call model is you can just cold call yourself and you can figure out what you consider a lead and what you consider not to be a lead. However, most of the time you just need a lot of overhead and a lot of management. It's a huge headache to be able to to to manage this on a really high scale.
The next con with cold calling specifically is you need a really dialed-in follow-up process. And the reason you need a dialed-in follow-up process with cold calling is because you are hitting people at such a high level on the awareness scale, right? So you're going to cold call people that may not want to sell the property right now. Most people when they fill out a PPC form, they're actively searching because they do want to sell the property right now. So, for example, out of everybody we speak to in our pay-per-click campaigns, we give offers to over 90% of them. That means that over 90% of them have a property that they would sell in the next 90 days. Now, I don't care about what their asking price is and things like that because I'm a real salesperson. I run a real sales team. I understand that that's my job to be able to get them lower on the price. However, there are going to be people when you cold call that no matter what you offer them, they literally are, they can't sell for another 6 months, 12 months. They have to wait till their kids are out of school. They have to have a lot of follow-up.
Now, with that comes generally a higher lead to close deal. Generally, this takes you more leads to get a closed deal. So, we did an end-of-year poll with all of our students. And the average lead to close deal for cold calling was one out of 30, right? With the inbound channels, depending on if it was, like a digital or if it was PPC, it was one out of eight or like the digital, it might be 1 out of 12, 1 out of 13, somewhere around there. But the, the cold calling and the SMS blast, you're talking about one out of 30, maybe even on the high end, one out of 50 if you're doing SMS blast and you're literally just talking to anybody that gives you a positive response. So, uh, when I consider what I consider a lead is just somebody that says like, "Yeah, I would consider selling the property." Not a qualified like, "Hey, I'm going to sell in the next 90 days. I have equity and all that stuff." This is just people that say, "Hey, I would consider selling the property." And so then your CRM starts to get really, really busy. You get a ton of leads. And so you just need to have the management in place to be able to do this on a high level.
Some of you guys are like, "Well, John, why don't I just outsource that and I'll just have a cold calling company come in and do it for me?" You definitely can. Some of our students do that. The problem with those cold callers specifically is they are incentivized to just give you a certain amount of leads and so they're just going to start calling people and a lot of times they just say, "Hey, would you want to hear a cash offer on your property?" And they're like, "Yeah, I want to hear a cash offer on my property." They're like, "Great. I'm going to set up an appointment with you." A lot of these people don't actually even want to sell. They just want to hear a cash offer on their property. This doesn't mean that they want to sell the property. So, you're going to have to be able to manage that. You're going to have to be able to filter through those if you have a real team and you have real acquisitions managers.
So, we covered outbound, we covered digital, we covered PPL, and then we covered direct mail and PPC. Those are the main channels. Now, there are some channels that we didn't mention today. Like, yes, there are TV ads. Yes, there are billboards. Yes, there are drive, you know, driving for dollars. I guess we get into outbound as well. Uh, there's a million different channels that some of our other students use. We have a student that did bandit signs and absolutely crushed it with bandit signs. Like all of those things can work. However, out of the companies that we train that are doing a couple million dollars a year, most of them are using these channels right here. They might start adding on some of the more expensive like radio, TV, billboards once they get plus that $3 million a year range.
So, if you guys like this video, make sure you like and subscribe. We post new videos like this every single week. So I will see you guys on the next one. You guys go out and you guys crush it.