In today’s digital world, where more and more people gain access to the internet, email communication is quickly becoming the norm. The number of emails sent per day has been rapidly increasing since 2017, with Statista reporting an estimated 320 billion emails sent per day in 2021 and that number is predicted to jump to over 376 billion by 2025. Based on these numbers, as a loan officer, it is essential to include mortgage email marketing in your overall marketing strategy. Here we take a deep dive into mortgage email marketing, how it can benefit your bottom line, and some tips for creating a successful marketing campaign.
Key Takeaways
- Mortgage email marketing is a way for loan officers and mortgage brokers to engage with their target audience, current clients, and real estate referral partners.
- Benefits of mortgage email marketing include a higher ROI, direct engagement with contacts, the ability to track results, expanding your reach, creating custom content, and staying top of mind with clients.
- Types of mortgage emails include newsletters, check-in emails, application updates, community news, industry news, event invitations, holiday emails, and mortgage drip campaigns.
- 10 tips for creating an effective mortgage email marketing campaign include maintaining a current contact database, knowing your campaign goals, creating a strong subject line, always including a strong call to action, keeping your message short, eliminating industry jargon, making it mobile-friendly, considering timing, and tracking your success.
What is mortgage email marketing?
Mortgage email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that provides a way for loan officers and mortgage brokers to engage with their target audience, current clients, and real estate referral partners to build a relationship. Email marketing can include a variety of options that allow a loan officer to educate potential borrowers, provide updates on the current mortgage process, and help keep your name out in front of potential borrowers regularly. Remaining on the mind of clients helps to maintain a relationship and earn repeat and referral business.
Benefits of mortgage email marketing
Email marketing, when done correctly, can be a powerful tool to help you grow your business. An effective email marketing strategy can provide a wealth of benefits that we explore here.
1. Provides a higher ROI
As you develop a marketing strategy, your goal is to find strategies that provide the best return on your investment, or the highest ROI. Experian reports that email marketing has an average ROI between $5 and $51 for every $1 spent. Implementing an email marketing strategy allows you to keep your marketing costs within budget while receiving a beneficial return.
2. Allows you to engage with your contacts
Unlike other marketing strategies, such as social media engagement, email marketing allows you to send a message directly to a contact, giving them the ability to directly engage with you on their timeframe. While you may think many of your prospects simply delete your email campaigns without ever opening them, the fact is open rates for email campaigns can be as high as 40%, giving you the ability to directly connect with your contacts.
3. Allows you to track results
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is the ability to track its effectiveness, especially when using a quality CRM. From the moment you send out an email campaign, you can see how many emails are delivered and opened, what links within the email are clicked through, and even if the email was forwarded to additional prospective clients. With this ability, you can adjust components within your email campaign to increase your open and click-through rates.
4. Expand your overall reach potential
While your current leads and contact list may limit the reach of your direct email marketing potential, the fact is, email marketing makes it easy for your contacts to forward emails to their contacts if they feel it may be beneficial. This opens up the possibility of further expanding your overall reach.
5. Create custom and personal content
By including contact data within your email marketing campaigns, you can create custom content that helps connect you to your contact, builds trust, and further helps to foster a beneficial relationship that helps to move your prospect through your sales funnel. With email marketing, you can personalize every aspect of your campaign, such as personalized copy, imagery, targeted offers, recommendations, and much more.
6. Stay top of mind with your clients
As a loan officer, the goal of every marketing campaign is to help build a relationship with your leads and clients. Email marketing provides an accessible and affordable marketing option that allows you to make and nurture your connections regularly, keeping you and your business in the mind of your clients.
Types of mortgage emails
When it comes to mortgage email marketing campaigns, the opportunities are endless. You are not locked into traditional marketing ideas and marketing platforms and the type and content within each email campaign can vary greatly. Here we look at some of the top email campaign ideas for loan officers and the mortgage industry.
Newsletters
Sharing a regular newsletter, such as bi-weekly or monthly, allows you to inform and educate clients on mortgage industry changes, as well as changes within your company. Creating a consistent newsletter schedule lets your customers know they can expect a stable connection with you and your business.
Check-in email
A check-in email is a way for you to follow up with clients and contacts you may not have talked with in some time. The idea of this type of email is to let your prospects know that you are thinking of them and would love to connect and see how you can help them meet their mortgage goals.
Application updates
Marketing automation allows you to send emails throughout the application and loan process and is a great way to keep homebuyers updated throughout the mortgage process while also staying in regular contact. With automation, emails can be automatically sent out to customers when specific milestones in the process are reached.
Community news
In the mortgage industry, the community is an important factor. Whether you are sharing new housing developments in your community, a new business opening, or community activities you are a part of, sending out a community news email regularly allows you to connect with your contacts while showing them that the local community is important to you as well.
Industry news
The mortgage industry is constantly changing and can often be overwhelming to borrowers and homebuyers. Creating a mortgage industry news email campaign provides you with a chance to educate your current and potential clients and referral realtors about changes that may be occurring while also highlighting your knowledge and expertise in the industry.
Event invitation
An event invitation email can be used for a variety of different occasions. For example, maybe you are co-hosting an open house with referral real estate agents, teaching a course on repairing credit, or participating in a community event.
Holiday emails
The holidays are a great time to connect with potential, current, and previous contacts. Simply sending out a holiday email wishing them the best during the holiday season shows that they are important to you and your business and further work to build or maintain a positive relationship.
Mortgage drip campaigns
Regular mortgage drip campaigns create a steady flow of regular marketing content for your business. Creating emails that focus on a specific topic, such as credit repair, can provide current and potential clients with important information and can encourage engagement.
10 tips for an effective mortgage email marketing campaign
Once you understand how mortgage email marketing can benefit your business, it is essential to understand how to create an effective marketing campaign. The following tips can help ensure you create a collection of campaigns that can effectively work for you.
- Maintain a current contact database: A quality email is ineffective if your intended reader never receives it. Make sure you have current emails for all your leads and clients.
- Know your campaign goals: When creating an email marketing campaign, it is essential to understand exactly what you want your campaign to achieve.
- Create a strong subject line: The first thing a reader sees with an email is the subject line, so you want to make sure you create a subject that draws them in and encourages engagement. Keep the subject line to 65 characters or less to ensure the entire text is seen.
- Always include a strong CTA: When you know your email campaign goal, be sure to include a strong call to action that includes that goal.
- Don’t rely on images: Many email programs are set with a default not to display images automatically, meaning many readers may not see your intended image.
- Keep your message short and sweet: Time is money and many prospective clients and leads don’t have time for lengthy emails. Keep your content short and direct.
- Eliminate industry jargon: When creating email content, avoid the use of industry jargon and acronyms that may be confusing to the average borrower. Focus on basic communication and connecting with your contacts.
- Keep it mobile-friendly: A good number of readers access their email on a mobile device, so keeping your content optimized for mobile viewing is essential.
- Consider timing: When you send your email is just as important as the content it includes. For example, emails sent on Monday morning or Friday afternoon are less likely to be read than emails sent during the week. Think about your target audience and determine the best timing for scheduled email campaigns.
- Track your success: The most important step of an email marketing campaign is tracking. By checking out the open rate and click-through rate, for example, you can see what is working and what isn’t and adjust your future campaigns based on that information.
Make the most out of email marketing
When email marketing is done correctly, it can quickly become one of your most effective marketing tools. Taking advantage of the many different email options at your disposal allows you to better connect and engage with your leads and clients. Following these basic tips will help you create an email campaign that will help foster strong relationships that help boost your bottom line.
Drive more leads with us
A steady stream of new leads and contacts is essential to get the most out of your email marketing campaign. At Good Vibe Squad, we understand that mortgage loan officers need quality lead generation and our Unfair Advantage™ program is here to help you create the lead generation you need to achieve your goals. To learn more about how our program can help, book a strategy call today.
