The number you will be given is thirty-six. Three touches a month, twelve months, and the neighborhood is yours. Sometimes it is twenty-four, sometimes it is “eight to twelve plus digital,” and in every version the unit is the same: a count of times your name lands in front of a household, with a postcard at the center and everything else listed as options.<\/p>\n
That is a print budget with a goal attached, and the goal is wrong. Households do not count touches. They notice reasons. A postcard that says “just sold on your street” is remembered because something happened on their street. A postcard that says “thinking of selling?” for the ninth month running is recycled before it reaches the kitchen. The touch plan that works is a calendar of reasons, and the channel each reason travels through is chosen for the job, which is the part the counting versions leave out entirely.<\/p>\n
Every transaction inside the boundary is a reason. A listing, a closing, a price change, an open house, a new build permit, a road project, the school rezoning. The farm you chose by the numbers<\/a> produces somewhere between one and four transaction events a month, and each of them belongs to the farm whether or not it belongs to you, as the no-listing piece<\/a> covers.<\/p>\n Once you have the reason, the channel is a matching problem. Three channels do three different jobs, and asking one to do another’s job is where most plans quietly fail.<\/p>\n Mail carries the rhythm.<\/strong> It is the only channel that can reach every household every month without wearing out its welcome, because a postcard costs the recipient three seconds. Its job is to make the name familiar and to deliver the street’s facts in a form that survives on the refrigerator. It does not build trust and it does not produce conversations. It makes the other two channels land.<\/p>\n The phone carries the events.<\/strong> A call has to earn its interruption, so it goes out when something has happened: the circle call<\/a> around a closing or a listing, and the second call to the households that took the note. The farm size article<\/a> puts the tolerance at two to four calls a year per household, and the events supply exactly that many reasons if you choose the nearest homes for each one rather than the whole farm every time.<\/p>\n Showing up carries the trust.<\/strong> Door knocking the twelve homes around a new listing, standing in the community open house, sponsoring the block’s event, being the person who is visibly present when the neighbor walks the dog. Two or three in-person touches a year per household is a strong farm. They are expensive in time and they are the only channel a homeowner cannot mistake for a mailing list.<\/p>\n The calendar below assumes a farm of eight hundred to a thousand homes, a monthly mailer as the floor, and transaction events at roughly the national pace. Adjust the event rows to what your boundary actually produces. Yours will differ.<\/p>\nThe year<\/h2>\n