This article is part of a series put together by the Total Mortgage marketing team that provides loan officers and other sales professionals with a crash course in marketing and self-promotion. To read other articles in this series, click here.
Want to jump ahead?
- How email management systems work for you
- Finding your audience
- Customizing your subject line
- Deciding what your content should look like
- Writing your email
- Adding a call to action
- Mapping out a campaign strategy
- The next steps
Right now, you’re probably sending your lead nurturing emails by hand, one at a time, from your outlook or gmail account. Heck, you’ve probably sent one, or two, or five already today.
If you aren’t juggling a large number of contacts and have a fairly steady supply of referrals, this passive approach to email can work just fine. But if you really want to up your lead generating game, get ready to re-evaluate your email strategy.
I’m going to walk you through the steps the Total Mortgage marketing team uses to create and send emails that get our loan officers noticed.
How email management systems work for you
Though this guide will definitely be useful for those who want to revamp just their email content, most of it will assume you’re thinking about trying out an email management program or CRM. If you’re sending a lot of very similar emails and find lead management a chore, you’re probably ready to upgrade.
These programs offer a whole host of benefits, including:
- Numbers on who opened your email and clicked your link
- An easy way to keep track of your contacts and segment your lists
- Design options that can help your email stand out
- The ability to auto-schedule emails and send in bulk
- A simple way to format emails across email clients and devices
- Protection from email delivery problems
Email management systems like Benchmark, Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, and GetResponse and CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Marketo are some of the most popular programs, but there are plenty out there. Take a look at all your options before making a choice. Some will be a better fit than others.
Finding your audience
At Total Mortgage, the marketing team (that’s us) puts a lot of effort into researching, writing, and designing custom email campaigns for our loan officers. But in order for us to get started, they first need to give us a list of the email addresses they want to target.
A good percentage of the time, that list is a mess. It’s a mix of realtors, old borrowers, new leads, colleagues, friends, neighbors, dentists, etc. Sometimes, they’ve even purchased a list full of strangers.
Many sales people think it’s good to cast a wide net when it comes to email. This strategy can work great in other arenas, but when it comes to inboxes, the opposite is actually true. Email is personal. Done wrong, it can feel invasive, and once you lose that trust, it’s incredibly difficult to get back. Not only will this whittle away at the efficacy of a marketing campaign, it can get you banned from all the major email management systems.
Know your goals
Before you even decide what’s going in your email, you need to know who you’re sending it to and why. Referral partners you want to hit up for leads, for instance, are a much different audience than past borrowers who may be ready to refinance.
Next, decide what message will appeal most to them. This is the true beauty of a targeted email list—you can tailor your pitch, increasing your odds of getting a bite.
Avoid buying lists
They’re rarely worth it. Most email marketing software companies refuse to use purchased lists, which leaves you without a reliable way to use what you paid for. Plus, for-sale emails are often low quality—there’s a chance they’ve been sold in the past and spammed, which means your message may fall on deaf ears.
Plan ahead
As marketers, my team and I have all kinds of ways to collect opt-in emails that we can then use for our loan officers, but when you’re building a list strictly from a sales point of view, it’s all about the long game. That means keeping organized, segmented lists of your contacts, so you can email those people who bought a little starter home with a 5/1 ARM again in five years.
Customizing your subject line
Just because you send an email doesn’t mean the recipient has to open it. Most don’t, actually. The average open rate is only 10 to 25%, depending on the industry. You can, however, up your odds with a carefully crafted subject line.
Common sense tells us to think of the subject like a label, telling readers what’s in the email. This is great for emailing your coworkers or your mom, but when you’re playing the marketing game, the rules are different. Your job is now convincing people they want to open your email.
There are tons of strategies out there for writing subject lines that do just this. Here are a few to get you started:
Keeping the loop open
You’re probably familiar with this strategy even if you don’t realize it—this is how clickbait titles sound so, well, clickbaity. The goal is to begin a story but not to finish it. To see the whole picture (that is, to close the loop), readers need to open the email.
You need to see this
We just did you a favor
How-to
This is a simple one, but it works—people like to learn things that will benefit them.
Rates are rising: how you can beat the clock
How to land the lowest interest rate
Use more than words
Numbers and special characters tend to stand out in a sea of letters. Try finding a creative way to work some numbers, ellipses, dashes, etc. into your subject line
5 things you should know about your mortgage application
Psst…rate secrets inside
Personalization
Another perk of email management software? The ability to pull personal information from your email addresses and automatically insert it into your subject lines. Adding in a personalized detail like a name works great with some of the other strategies we’ve discussed.
Sandra, have you seen these rates?
This one’s for you, Bill
Again, this is just the tip of the subject line iceberg. For other options, try this post by Jared Kimball or this one by Tom Ewer.
Deciding what your email content should look like
No matter what you want your email to actually say, there are a few things you need to keep in mind while writing it.
Make it about the recipient
Listen up—this may be the single most important thing about email marketing. Before you even start outlining your email, you should ask yourself one question.
What’s in it for the reader?
Emails aren’t ads. They’re personal. So if a potential client opens your email and is faced with 500 words on why your company is awesome, don’t expect to hear from them again.
Regardless of what your goals are, an email should be useful to the recipient. That means including at least one of the following:
- Useful information or FAQ
- A deal or offer
- A case study or testimonial
- A recent update that can benefit them
Keep it short
Even though there’s still something to be said for the sales letters of old, most of the time you’ll be best served by keeping your content short and sweet.
The reasoning for this is pretty simple: things move fast these days. Your average recipient is getting dozens of emails a day on top of updates and tweets and texts—she doesn’t have time to sit down and read 800 words about mortgages (nor, let’s be real, would she want to).
In 2015, we sent out just one long-form campaign. And we took a lot of care in tailoring it. In general, though, we aim to keep our emails under 100 words, including greeting and sign-off. That means making each word count—no repetition, no lengthy sales pitch. If you have a lot to say, try including a link to a relevant page on your site.
Structure matters
Let’s talk about what your email should look like. Your goal is pretty simple: don’t give the reader a reason to click away. In practice, this usually means that whatever the length of the email, your job is to make reading it as easy as possible.
For instance, a long block of text will turn most readers off before they even start. Instead, break up your text with spacing, appropriate headers, and bulleted lists.This makes all but the longest emails easy to scan.
Writing your marketing email
Half the time, it isn’t what you say, it’s how you say it. This is something that even the most savvy marketers struggle with, because it isn’t really a marketing skill at all—it’s a sales skill.
Tone can say a lot
You’re taught in 6th grade that business letters are supposed to be formal—no contractions, no idioms, no real personality. These days, it’s possible (even preferable) to be both professional and conversational.
An easy way to do this is to listen to the way you speak.
Think about the last formal situation you were in, like your last job interview. Did anyone actually bother to enunciate the “do nots” and the “we wills” or say “hello” instead of “hi” or “hey?” Maybe, but probably not. So why would you write like that?
Compare these two emails.
The content is essentially the same, but notice how the one on the right comes off stiff and unnatural. Personality is important when you’re introducing yourself to a new client. Ultimately, people respond best to people they can identify with, not computers.
Contractions: use them
A quick and easy way to avoid coming off like that 6th grader writing a business letter is to sprinkle in a few contractions here and there. Believe it or not, “it is” and “it’s” read much differently in people’s heads.
Contractions are one more major difference between the two emails above. To get there, try (again) to pay attention to the way you talk.
Give readers some credit
Borrowers these days are savvy. They can find the answer to any question they have with a few minutes and Google, which means they’re more likely to see through old sales tactics. Instead of promising readers things, we find that leveling with them—or at least writing as if we are—is a good way form a quick and trusting connection.
Take another look at that email comparison up there. See the aside in parentheses in the left example? It doesn’t look like much, but it actually serves several purposes:
- It gives potential customers a peek into the way we operate. A mortgage can look pretty inscrutable to someone not in the business. Knowing the way a system works is comforting to most people.
- It makes us seem trustworthy. This kind of openness sets a precedent for future interactions.
- It covers our rears. Asking customers to fill out personal information more than once looks disorganized and lazy—not the impression we want to give a customer.
But this strategy has its limits, especially in a complicated, number-heavy industry. Unless you’re planning a longer email, avoid getting mired down in too many specifics of the process, or risk turning the average person off.
Adding a call to action
In any kind of marketing textbook, you’ll come across the acronym CTA, or call to action. This sounds like jargon, but in reality, CTAs are very simple. They lay out a next step for the reader, often giving them a little nudge in your direction. As a result, they fit perfectly at the close of an email, just before you sign off.
A good standby in the mortgage industry is something along the lines of, “Think you’re ready to learn more? Download our free ebook.”
Remember—the point of a marketing email isn’t necessarily to lock in a new customer, especially in a high-ticket industry like ours. Instead, focus on making your lead comfortable enough to take the next step, i.e. learning more, asking questions, or offering up some additional information.
Mapping out a campaign strategy
You’ve probably had it happen: you give your email to the cashier at your favorite store or sign up for an interesting newsletter, and suddenly you’re getting emails every day, twice a day. By day one, you’re annoyed. By day two, you’re angry. By the end of the week, you’ve unsubscribed and decided never to visit that store or read that blog again.
You don’t want your leads to feel like that after getting your emails. That’s why you need to take special care in deciding frequency.
The single email
In many cases, you’ll only want to send a single email. We do these often for our loan officers, because they make a lot of sense in the mortgage industry.
For instance, with rates constantly changing and people constantly moving (no, really—the average American moves almost 12 times in their lifetime), we find that sending out the occasional interest rate update on behalf of a loan officer is a great way to both be useful and stay top of mind.
With these, you don’t have too much to worry about. A single email is easy enough for a potential borrower to ignore if the message doesn’t fit their needs.
The email campaign
However, there are plenty of times when a series of emails makes more sense. In the mortgage and housing industry, we’ve found that these work best after a customer has made first contact, but hasn’t made a commitment. There are other uses for a campaign, though, like sending out regular product updates or deals.
A brief but important side note—never add contacts to any kind of email campaign unless they have opted in or provided their email specifically for that reason. Otherwise, this sort of thing gets real unethical real fast. Best case scenario, your reputation suffers. Worst case scenario, you’ve actually broken some laws.
That being said, there are tons of recommended sequences out there; you just need to find one that fits your needs. This new customer nurturing campaign, for example, is similar to one we use:
Email 1: day 1
Friendly introduction.
Email 2: day 3
Factoid about what makes your company different.
Email 3: day 6
Link to a helpful resource your company owns.
Email 4: day 10
Fun fact or industry insider information.
Email 5: day 14
Rate update.
Email 6: day 19
Promotion or offer.
Typically, the longer this sort of campaign goes on, the less often you should be sending email, since the less likely people are to respond favorably (or even remember who you are) after a certain point.
Notice that even by email 6, we’ve already started to peter off. This way, people are less likely to report you as spam, unsubscribe, or go numb to your outreach.
The next steps
This has been a fairly comprehensive primer on email marketing for loan officers (if I do say so myself). But the thing about digital marketing is that there’s always more to learn.
There are a bunch of things I haven’t gotten into here that may someday prove useful to you.
Spam Filters
Spam filters happen. If your emails get caught in them, your chances of getting seen plummet–and no one knows all the rules.
For instance, we figured out that using the term “mortgage rates” or “interest rates” in the subject line got our emails marked as spam, but using simply “rates” doesn’t. This guide from Mail Chimp (aka one of the most popular email delivery systems at the moment) is a great place to get some more technical advice on how to avoid these traps.
Designing for mobile
Depending on the audience in question, mobile email accounts for between 15 to 70% of email opens. Wherever you stand, that’s a significant portion of the people getting your emails, and that means you need to construct emails with a short attention span and small screen in mind.
This blog post from Constant Contact is one place to start.
Decoding your results
One of the best parts about opting for an email marketing software is getting access to all kinds of data—the open rate, the click-through rate, the opt outs, the spam reports, etc. Of course, if you’re new to the email game, what these numbers mean and how to improve them can be a little confusing.
For example, a low open rate could mean you have a bad subject line, or it could mean that your list is the problem. A high open rate but a low click-through rate, meanwhile, could be a problem with your body copy or call to action.
This post (from Constant Contact again) is a good place to started if you have questions.
Want more?
You can learn more about what the Total Mortgage marketing team does for our loan officers by checking out other articles in this series, or by visiting our career portal.
from Total Mortgage Underwritings Blog http://ift.tt/1YvSA3L
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