Why Some Mortgage Marketing Drip-Campaigns Do More Harm Than Good ... And What To Do About It!

No offense intended, but when it comes to past clients (unless they’re your mother), they probably don’t have your picture on the mantel of the home you financed for them.

The truth of the matter is that people tend to forget people they haven’t engaged with for a while. Don’t feel bad; this happens to all of us! Go ahead and scroll your contacts in your smartphone. How many swipes did you need to make before you found a name you didn’t recognize? Here’s a hint: many of these names are service providers from something like holiday seasons past. They did a good enough job to make it into your list of contacts … but you can’t seem to place a face to the name, can you?

This is happening with your past clients every day. The silver-lining is that we’re all slowly losing our minds, and we can look forward to watching all our favorite movies as if they were brand new again!

All kidding aside, many loan originators try to solve this problem with mortgage marketing drip-campaigns as part of their mortgage lead generation strategy. This strategy has proven to be a double-edge sword. It works fantastically if your content is relevant, useful, and well-timed. But for those sending out random emails or postcards every month or so, it’s likely to backfire. Many of your past clients will develop the Pavlovian response of ‘not interested,’ and click the delete button. Or rapidly deposit your postcards into the recycle bin. When the time comes that they need mortgage services, they may be irrevocably turned off by the bombardment of your untimely and irrelevant messages.

This Is Not Hollow Theory!

While it’s difficult to measure who’s opening and reading your snail mail, it’s not difficult to track its over time decaying response rates. Email behaves differently; we can analyze the data on who’s reading and engaging email very clearly. To effectively manage an email drip-campaign, we must understand two very important metrics: open rates and unsubscribes. There will likely be a group of people that will unsubscribe from your email campaigns just about every time you fire one off. Over time, you can lose 50-70% of your list.

Here’s the bigger problem: they don’t need to unsubscribe for your drip-campaigns to become ineffective. The simple act of ignoring your emailed messages will eventually train most spam filtering technologies to categorize your communications as spam. Your clients eventually won’t see them, and the opportunity to be electronically engaged … when they need you the most … will no longer be an option.

Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana?

To compound this filtering dynamic, consumers are constantly being bombarded with hundreds (if not thousands) of advertising pitches from one business after another. In a recent study conducted by the United States Post Office Inspector General, they found that the average U.S. household will receive 620 pieces of direct-mail marketing solicitations … sent with ‘standard postage’ … in a given year. That’s over 80 BILLION pieces of mail a year, going to 125 million households. Staggering!

Predictive Analytics and Mortgage Trigger Events

My wife is a Veteran, and we have a VA loan. We receive an average of 22 pieces of mail a month pitching us to do a 100% VA refinance. Currently enjoying a 2.75% fixed rate, and very little revolving debt, we’re really not a likely VA refinance candidate.

I’m not the only one with a super-low interest rate getting these credit offers. I know this because my profession is building predictive models from real-time marketing data. These models can define …

Who should refinance, and who should not;

Who will soon be ‘in-the-market’ for a home loan; and,

Which mortgage trigger is more likely to generate a response to a refinance vs. home purchase offer.

Once we’ve figured out who’s about to move into a bigger home ... or downsize … or who might benefit from a refinance … we’ll be dialed in on the top 5% of your data universe. These are the proverbial needles in the haystacks where you should focus your marketing energies and budget. Summarily, if you’re monitoring your past clients, and they had a great experience with you on their last transaction, you’ll definitely have a leg up on every other lender competing for their business.

The key to past client marketing is to reach out when they are likely in the market, otherwise, you may wear out your welcome.  MonitorBase will help you know when it is time to reach out.

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