Nevertheless, using only brochures in your marketing campaign will seriously undermine your actions and will reveal their drawbacks. To succeed in your business, you need to take into account other direct marketing tools, like email newsletters.
This article will offer you a comparison between long-term marketing campaigns using brochures and email newsletters.

For the beginning, let's take a look to the general characteristics of brochures and newsletters.

We'll take into account features such as costs, the possibility of fast, direct feed-back, flexibility and personalization, the capacity of  reaching the target and the of course the impact on the audience.

	Brochures	Newsletters
Reaching the target	People get a lot of mail nowadays and most of it is promotional material. If not distributed carefully, brochures can wind up in racks with other similar advertising materials.	People subscribe in order to receive newsletters. This ensures you recipients will be interested in your newsletters.
Personal approach	You cannot insert your recipients' names in brochures. Moreover, brochures cannot be personalized according to the specific characteristics of each target audience.	You can send different e-mails to each category of your audience. You can add your recipients' names in the title or use them inside the message.
Flexibility	Brochures cannot be customized very frequently because of the high costs involved in printing new batches.	Newsletters are highly customizable. You can change the layout and the content as often as you want for little or no cost.
Feed-back& statistics	Brochures have limited feed-back. Most usually, people will throw them away if they're not interested in and you'll never find out.	Newsletters usually have statistics systems that  monitor people's response.
Impact on the audience	People read more attentively printed materials comparing to the electronic ones. Brochures have a good impact also because of their souvenir value.	At their turn, newsletters represent a modern communication form that can possess an elegant appearance.
Frequency	Brochures are not distributed as often as newsletters, which can be sent even twice per week. However, you can give brochures at different events or as a follow-up.	Newsletters can be sent as often as you wish. You can have a constant communication with your clients and build up a trusting relationship.
Cost	Brochures have high printing costs. If you send them by mail, they will involve other costs along with production costs.	Free or very cheap.

You should keep in mind that good campaigns consume both time and money, and it can take months until you'll have obvious results. If you are a real estate agent who is just starting, the price factor can be very important.

In order to make your choice easier, we analyzed the costs using data from VistaPrint for brochures, and ConstantContact.com and NetRealinTouch.net for e-newsletters.

A farming campaign is efficient if an agent's contact list contains at least 1000 homes. So we've calculated the cost for 1000 brochures/ 1000 newsletters in the table below.

For VistaPrint, we used the minimum price for standard brochures, bi-fold, three-panel, measuring 8.5" x 11".

Please keep in mind while analyzing the data below that ConstantContact.com only comes with the technical platform and the templates for e-newsletters, while NetRealinTouch.net also provides the content.

	Brochures	E-newsletter - no content	E-newsletter  - with content
VistaPrint	$339.99
ConstantContact.com		$30
NetRealinTouch.net			$24.95

According to the 2004 NAR survey, people change their homes every 4,5 years on average. So if you want to become their agent, you need at least 2,5 years of ongoing quality contact.

Having this in mind, we've calculated the costs associated with farming 1000 homes for 2,5 years (30 months).

The price for brochures has been calculated for 1 brochure per month, whereas the price for e-newsletters was for 1 newsletter edition per week (4 per month), sent to 1000 recipients for 30 months.

	Brochures	E-newsletter - no content	E-newsletter  - with content
VistaPrint	$10199.7
ConstantContact.com		$3,600
NetRealinTouch.net			$2,994

A real estate agent has a commission of about 3% and a house sells for an average of $250,000, therefore an agent makes $7,500 per house.

If they want to constantly use brochures in their marketing campaign, agents would need to buy/sell one or two houses. They will not have any profit until the third house, whereas with an e-newsletter marketing campaign, agents will start having profit from their first sale.

A real estate professional sets up a marketing campaign taking into account his previous experience, his budget and the community preferences.

The best solution is to use multi-mix campaigns (printed materials, online promotion, TV, newspapers), like large companies do. For example, you can choose a weekly Farming newsletter combined with glossy brochures every time you have special news for your prospects.