How Are You Marketing in the Google Age?

I have a question for you. When you're looking for information on any topic, where's the first place you turn? If you're like most people, you use Google. When I was a teenager, doing research on the Vietnam War I used the Encyclopedia Britannica. Not anymore, encyclopedias have gone the way of the dodo. Search engines have become part or our everyday lives, like it or not. It's what I call a brutal reality. You can ignore it, but it doesn't change the fact that it exists.

Let me ask you another question. When someone is looking for information on a mortgage, what do you think they do? Pick up the yellowpages? Go down to their local super market and pick up one of those free real estate magazines. Use the Sunday newspaper? You see where I'm going. They use Google to search for information. Would you say that people will use search engines less or more in the future?

This leads me to my final point. It's called "profound knowledge" - what you know in advance you prepare for in advance. If the brutal reality is that people will turn to the Internet more and more to find information about the services you provide, doesn't it make sense to change your marketing strategy and adjust it to focus on the areas where most of your customers are "hanging out".

On December 13th, I'll be doing a free webinar on "Search Engine Secrets of Mortgage Lead Providers". Please take time to attend. I'll discuss how mortgage leads providers use search engines to create mortgage leads.

December 13th - 10am E.S.T. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/472384070

December 13th - 2pm E.S.T. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/897488291

Who's Interested - Help Them!

Recently, our aging TV finally died. It was one of those huge 52' projection TVs given to us by a friend that was downsizing. The following weekend I was soooo close to driving down to Circuit City and getting a new one. One of those impulse buys. I wouldn't call it a true impulse buy because I actually need a new TV, but there was definitely a strong impulse to get one. What made that "feeling" go away? Life's distractions. Ultimately, I know I need to get a new TV, but the distractions of life come in and that impulse takes a back burner.

Where am I going with this? Well, at Astonish I get the opportunity to look at statistics. Namely, email marketing statistics. One thing that I've found is that many of our customers will have email recipients that open their emails 3,4,5 or as high as 20 times! The point is this. Someone may open your email several times and NEVER call you or apply on your website. Why? They're obviously interested in your message. My theory is that they know they need to do something, but the distractions of life get in the way. Getting a new mortgage is much more important than a new TV. People procrastinate. It's your job to find out who's interested and help them.

This is why email marketing is so important. It helps you gauge interest. It's like using a fish-finder when you're out on the lake. It doesn't make sense talking to people who aren't interested. Focus on the people who've opened your email and help THEM.

BE SURE TO REGISTER FOR MY EMAIL MARKETING WEBINAR!

To register for the 10am-11am E.S.T Webinar Click Here
To register for the 2pm-3pm E.S.T Webinar Click Here

Major Lender Looking for Email Marketing Manager

I ran across this job posting on Craigslist recently....

Email Marketing Program Manager (financial district)


The email program manager is responsible for the success of all email marketing programs for XYZ Mortgage. The successful candidate will be a strong, hands-on leader able to provide strategic direction and leadership yet comfortable rolling up their sleeves and providing tactical support. He/she must have proven email and direct response marketing experience and a passion for quantitative analysis.

Responsibilities include:
• Managing the best-in-class email subscription service, xxxxxx, while consistently enhancing its features to exceed customer expectation, performance benchmarks, and be re-usable across designated business lines. Regularly perform subscriber analysis and competitive research and implement improvements.
• Designing innovative approaches to customer retention and acquisition email communication that drive results for all channels, online and offline, combined with flawless execution of such programs.
• Continually testing, analyzing and optimizing target criteria, content, landing pages, forms, etc. to increase open, click, lead, and application rates and exceed expectations.
• Integrating direct mail campaigns and targeting with email programs and other electronic promotions and communications.
• Enhancing customer and lead cultivation programs and campaigns
• Serving as the mortgage email subject matter expert, evangelizing the benefits of email and electronic communication, and promoting best practices for email communications
• Formulating and implementing email adoption programs to grow the emailable customer base
• Providing comprehensive tracking, analysis, and reporting for all email marketing efforts.

The point is, your competators are spending significant dollars, time, enegry, focus on email marketing. This lender is attempting to hire someone with an MBA.

This tells me that mortgage email marketing is and will continue to be a MAJOR focus of mortgage companies. If you haven't begun, it's time to get started...

The "Right" Way to Email Market

A recent Forrester Research webinar, "The ABC's of ESPs" presented some interesting findings.

The webinar stated that 26% of a marketer’s e-mail spending goes toward delivery, 22% towards creative, 11% to data management and 10% to analytics.

VanBoskirk said. “The focus becomes less on sending out as many messages as you can and instead on running analytics to figure out whom you should be sending messages to, or tech integration so that your e-mail program is better aligned with your customer service or your database marketing efforts.”

Many first time email marketers are tempted to take the "email blast" approach. Send as many emails out as you can and see what sticks. The "right" way to email market is to build a quality list over time, segment your list correctly and send each segment the right message. Your bounces and unsubscribes will go down and your open rates and "click throughs" will go up.

Marketing your mortgage company via email marketing is a great option, but you should take a long term approach versus a quick and dirty one.

Be sure to check out Astonish's webinar on email marketing November 15th at 10am and 2pm E.S.T.

To register for the 10am-11am E.S.T Webinar Click Here
To register for the 2pm-3pm E.S.T Webinar Click Here

Does Your Mortgage Internet Marketing Need 17 Laterals?

I ran across this video on youTube featuring the Trinity College football team. There was only 2 seconds in the game, it was Trinity's last chance to score. The video speaks for itself. I began thinking about how much this applies to life. So many times you may feel like giving up - it's hopeless. I began thinking about marketing in general. You may try something once, then give up. Maybe you put up a website, got no results and decided Internet marketing doesn't work.

I would encourage you not to give up. Find out why it's not working, make changes and move on. Marketing your mortgage company on the web isn't that complicated, but it does take persistence. You won't see results overnight. It's going to take time. Just don't give up.

Mortgage CRM Options

There are many mortgage CRM tools out there in the market today. I thought I might share my thoughts on what I feel is essential in a mortgage CRM tool. I want to begin by saying that just purchasing a mortgage CRM is only part of the picture. To have the maximum effect it needs to be integrated with your online strategy (website) and your follow-up strategy (email marketing).

Think about how your potential clients will FIND you (most likely on the Internet). Think about how you will SELL your clients (remember everything speaks, websites, emails, loan officer training). Think about how you will KEEP your customers for life.

As a single referral based loan officer you may be able to manage your past customers your self. But as a mortgage company owner, who wants to grow his/her business. It takes well thought out systems and processes that encourage loan officer Independence but promotes the company's brand.

A mortgage CRM that is integrated with your website and an email marketing platform can help you do just that.

Quality vs. Quantity - Growing Your Email Database

Ok, so now you've assembled your email database and segmented it properly. You've also figured out what you're going to send them and when you're going to send it (called frequency).

The next step is implementation. You need to find an ESP (email service provider) that will allow you to upload the list and send out your targeted emails.

I was recently speaking with a representative from Exact Target. I had a customer ask me why can't he just buy 500,000 email addresses and blast it out. The Exact Target rep. told me he has many people ask him the same question. The answer he gave really didn't surprise me. It's all about your reputation. Do you want your company to be associated with SPAM?

As a matter of fact many ESPs require that you verify the emails you upload to their tools are double opt-in. In other words, these people have explicitly asked to get information from you and were sent an opt-in link via email that they had to click on to receive information from you.

The reality is that even when someone has opted into your email campaign, they may still mark you as SPAM. It's just the nature of the beast.

So what to do? I prefer a balanced approach. Put processes in place in your organization to gather current and potential customers email. Ask them if they want to receive updates, specials and guides from you. As the same time, there are some reputable services out there that sell double opt-in email addresses of people who want to receive information about mortgage products. Once you get those emails you may want to consider running a re-opt in campaign. Introduce you're self and ask them if they would like to receive info from you in the future. This approach when combine with solid processes will build your database over time.

First Steps in Mortgage Email Marketing Campaign

Now that we've talked about some basic metrics for mortgage email marketing, the next question is how do you begin? Many of the mortgage companies we work with see the benefits of email marketing, but don't know where to start. Here are a few basic steps.

(1) Assemble your email database in one place and put a process in place to begin collecting emails addresses during customer interaction (i.e. when taking and application, on your website etc.)

(2) Segment the database in logical ways (i.e. closed loans, kick-outs, general contacts etc.) - The more segmented you can be the more targeted you can make your marketing efforts

Now that you have your database segmented, begin thinking about what your want to send your database. You may want to initially send a re-opt in campaign. Just because you has someone's email address doesn't mean they've explicitly opted in to receive emails from you...this may be something you want to ask them during the loan process. Create a script your loan officers can use to ask customers.

I'll have more steps tomorrow....

Mortgage Email Marketing 101 cont'd

Yesterday I started to look at some basic email marketing metrics and what they mean. Let's look at two more today....CTR (Click Through Rate) and Unsubscribe Rate.

CTR (Click Through Rate) is defined as the number of clicks on email links, search ads, etc. divided by the number of emails sent. You may send and email and someone may open it, but typically you want them to do something like click on a link to visit your website or click on a special offer you're promoting....

Unsubscribe Rate is defined as the number of people who have choose to not receive emails from you anymore divided by the number of emails sent.

That being said, what are "typical" open rates, bounce rates, CTR and unsubscribe rates? At Astonish, we have the benefit of measuring these statistics across many email marketing campaigns and for a specific segment of the market - mortgage email marketing.

I would suggest working with a company who understands the industry in and can guide your marketing efforts based on their past experience.

Mortgage Email Marketing 101

I recently picked up the Marketing Sherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2007. It's 323 pages packed with details regarding email marketing. It got me thinking about all that goes into email marketing and the misinformation that's out there.

For that reason, I thought I would start Email Marketing 101 to try to deal with the misinformation and help mortgage professionals as they begin to research the topic.

A good place to start is to look at email marketing metrics. One of the great things about this marketing medium is that you can actually measure your results with great detail. This is important for any marketer because there is a great deal of testing that goes into marketing. Email marketing metrics give you real world statistics on how well your campaign performed.

So here we go, I'll look at two metrics today, open rate and bounce rate.

Open rate is defined as the number of HTML message recipients who opened your email as a percentage of the total number of emails sent. So for example, if you sent 1000 emails and 100 people opened them. The open rate would be 10%.

Bounce rate is defined as the number of hard and soft bounces (I explain this later) divided by the number of emails sent. For example, if you send 1000 emails and 300 bounce (either hard or soft), the bounce rate is 30%.

Unlike other forms of marketing, you can get a good sense of how many people read your message and how many of your messages actually were delivered.