Mortgage marketing guide 2015 summers hottest lead generation tips Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this I d like to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about my background. My name is Caleb Guillory. President of TagQuest Inc., a direct marketing and business consulting firm based in Medford, OR. I ve been in sales for 15 years, Real Estate for 12, and Marketing for 10 years with my primary focus on the mortgage industry. This is important because I m going to talk about what s working in your business and how it works. I ll be talking about the secret sauce that can make or break your marketing efforts. I believe it s important that you know who your reading from. And hopefully I ll have a bit of credibility when we get to the good stuff. I grew up in a small town in Oregon called Eagle Point. With a BIG vision I moved to Seattle when I was 22. I spent a few years in the auto industry beginning at age 19. It s sort of like boot-camp for sales people. By the
time I was 24 I was in charge of the finance department. This is where I found my passion for finance and why I have enjoyed working with mortgage professionals. At age 26 I realized my BIG vision wasn t being fulfilled in the auto industry and that s when took the leap into direct marketing full time and I ve been working with professionals like you ever since. This summer there are new and very impressive ways to market your business and I d like to take a minute to introduce them to you. First I m going to run through the most common types of marketing and let you in on some of that secret sauce that most marketers don t talk about. With any luck you ll find value in these methods and be able to put some or all of them to practice. At the end I ll share with you what is the most effective mortgage marketing program I ve seen in years. I know compliance is more important now than ever so I m going to incorporate compliance and its effect on these top marketing methods.
Most common Marketing methods Internet Leads Let s get into some specific types of marketing. I m going to start off with one of the toughest ones, which believe it or not is actually Internet Leads. Internet leads can be a serious risk because we don t ever truly know where the customer went to get excited enough to give us their contact information. Think of a particularly large internet company (just think of the biggest one you ve heard of)? I m going to leave them nameless for obvious reasons. Did you know some of these top internet lead providers are licensed to write mortgages? Sounds like a conflict of interest right? The truth is they actually do, and they have to because they use interest rates on their banner ads and landing pages. It s pretty cool to get and internet lead that has already been scrubbed to your preferred credit score. And as you know, if you re going to talk about interest rates to a customer, you have to be a licensed mortgage broker. So in order to advertise interest rates you need to have an NMLS number. But the conflict between writing the loan or selling the lead seems ridiculous doesn t it? I know I would write the loan. But that s exactly why I m not licensed nor is anyone at our company. The goal of the lead provider is to provide leads. Not write loans.
Besides the giant lead companies a lot of internet lead companies offer all kinds of giveaways and different promotions to get people to submit their information. Then there are some of them that don t. These ones provide a quality lead but they charge an arm and a leg for them. If you re getting a cheap lead you ll never know where that lead fits as far as compliance goes. If you re spending a lot of money for your Internet leads, there is a chance that they are a higher quality and probably more compliant. The biggest problem with Internet leads is what s called coregistration. This is when a customer goes to submit their information, let s say a customer goes to my website and they submit their information to me. Right before they hit the submit button, I m going to ask them a couple of questions. I will ask them if they re interested in a re-finance or a purchase, if they re interested in buying a new car or a boat, or whatever else I can sell as an internet lead to someone else. Now I have a lead for myself, and I ve got a lead that I can sell three to five times to somebody else. Now I can actually make money on leads that I m producing for myself.
So, who do you buy from? You have to be careful who you buy Internet leads from and make sure you re working with a reputable company. Don t just jump on the cheapest one that you can find. Some of the Internet lead companies have been around for a long time, while some of them are brand new into the business. And don t forget that there several large companies outside the US that produce internet leads. These companies do not follow US guidelines. Be careful who your buying leads from and make sure you ask how the company compiles those leads. Ask them if they use co-registration. If the answer is I ve never heard of co-registration run! This means your dealing with someone who doesn t understand compliance in the mortgage industry and they put in harm s way. And whether it was intentional or not you re the ones liable to the CFPB. Not them. Some of the best uses for Internet leads are for people who aren t really working in the office, or their only working in the office part time. If you re someone who doesn t have a lot of sales experience, isn t really comfortable making cold calls or dialing through the list, or some of the more salesman aspects, Internet leads may work well for you. An Internet lead is someone who has gone online and requested that a mortgage professional contact them for a refinance or a purchase. The tough part about Internet leads is that you don t know how many times they are typically sold. You can find them exclusively sold, but more times than not, they are sold to multiple people, so you re competing for the business. If you don t like competing for the business, you
may want to shy away from Internet leads. One of the other benefits of using Internet leads is that you can get started for a very low cost, just don t expect the world from them because some of the close ratios can be very low. One last thing to watch out for as far as Internet leads go is this. There is no way for you know what was offered on the landing page. I have never seen all the banner ads used for generating internet leads or all of the websites that they come from. That is tough, because there is no real regulating. Millions and millions of websites are out there and you don t really know where the customer went. As far as compliance goes for you, the mortgage professional, you need to know where that customer has been and what information has been put in front of them to make sure that you re compliant. Because you re the end user, it is ultimately up to you to make sure that all of those rules are followed. And though you ll never be able to actually see all the ad s and landing pages because they change them all time to keep up with current trends, just make sure you ask all the questions up front and work with a reputable marketing firm. Best uses for Internet leads: People trust the Internet. They re more willing to give us their contact information, now, even if they re not quite ready to move yet. In the old days of Internet leads, people were a little more afraid of the Internet so they wouldn t put in their information until they were absolutely ready to do something. From those days, it has definitely changed. Now days people are more confident on the Internet so they are willing to put in their information a little earlier in sales cycle. So the quality of
the Internet lead, as it used to be, has gone down quite a bit. To curb that we ve changed our strategies and how we go about acquiring the leads so you can still get a qualified, interested prospect, that wants to talk to you about a refinance or a purchase. Direct Mail marketing Everybody knows direct mail and how well it can work for the mortgage industry. Direct mail can be difficult for compliance sometimes because there are so many different parts of the campaign that have to go into it. Every single part of the direct
mail campaign has its own individual compliance issues. Here are all the aspects of the campaign: Different Aspects of Direct Mail Compliance Are: The Mail Piece- The Content The Disclaimers The Data The source The Select Criteria It s Use and Required Disclaimers on Mail Piece The Call Tracking Required Disclaimers Call Recording Regulations Call Center Scripting Licensing CRM Managing Customer Data Let s start off with the mail piece. The content that s going to get your prospect to pick up their phone and call you. If you re using pre-screened credit data, you have to make a firm offer of credit. That means you are required to have the small prescreened disclaimer on the front and the long form OPT- OUT disclaimer on the back. When you do that, in a lot of cases, it is going to lower your response rate. You ll want to be careful and make sure you test and measure to find out what is going to work. If you use and interest rate on your mail piece, you have to explain what qualifications are necessary to qualify for that interest rate. If you have payment amounts that are quoted on a mail piece it works really well to get people to respond. Example, you re going to go from this payment down to this payment if you call me today. You need to have the terms and disclaimer stating what qualifications are required for eligibility.
You can t, at any point with direct mail, impersonate any other lender, even if it is on accident. You can end up in BIG trouble. There is a fine line here between using a lender name on a mail piece for building credibility and impersonating that lender. In some states, you can t even use the lender name at all on a mail piece. You will want to check with the state that you re licensed in and find out what the rules are. You can go to the www.ftc.gov website and they will have all of the guidelines there for you to read. Some states won t let you use lender name at all while other states will. Using the lender name builds credibility, it s not about trying to impersonate that you re with somebody else when you re not. When you re sending out a direct mail campaign, if you know that the customer is already with this lender, you now know more about them so you now have more credibility. In a lot of cases, it will help increase your response rate too. You want to make sure that if you you re using a lender name it is compliant in your area so you don t wind up in any trouble. With direct mail you also have data, which we have talked about. If you re using prescreened data, you re going to have to follow those guidelines. At TagQuest we use a mortgage file. It s a mortgage specific file that is not credit data. It does have credit attributes, but it is compiled a little bit differently. What that does, is allow you to get out of using the prescreen firm offer language, which sometimes hurts the response rates but still allows you to target people who qualify for the loans that you write. Whether you re trying to go after HARP, FHA, VA, Conventional, or Reverse you can target those specific
people and not have to worry about the firm offer and prescreen guidelines. Call tracking, when the phone calls come in, a lot of companies like to monitor those inbound phone calls for tracking and training purposes and also to verify the response rate of the mail, but you have to be careful here. Who has access to those phone calls? Some of those phone calls, if they are recorded may have customer s personal information on them. Their social security numbers, personal income, all the stuff that is personal to that consumer. You can t just let anyone have access to that stuff. When you are doing these types of campaigns and using call tracking, like a direct mail that is a little more intricate with a lot of different areas in it, make sure you understand who has access to all aspects of the campaign and the information contained within it. If you re using a call center to screen the inbound calls, you have to know what is being said to your prospects. You have to talk about the scripting that they re using and what is going on. What questions are being asked? Again, if they re not licensed they can t be talking about any kind of loan specifics with these people. I don t know how many people are familiar with the acronym CRM, it s a Customer Relationship Manager. It s an online system that allows keep track of all your leads. And you can have it tell you when to follow up with your clients. Allowing you to work many more prospects than that pad of paper you ve been carrying around. If your direct mail comes with a CRM or if you are using your own CRM, do you know what
kind of information is being populated in the back end of that system? Some of the CRMs allow data to be uploaded in to them. In some cases if you re not careful, you can have personal consumer information, like their credit score, which is highly regulated by the CFPB and the FTC stored and available to anyone with a login to your system. The information can be stored in your CRM and you may or may not even know about it. You want to make sure that you are asking about these kinds of things before you get into these marketing campaigns. Buying tips on direct mail: Make sure you work with a company that tests mail all over the country. This will allow you to benefit from the knowledge of the current response rates with the specific knowledge regarding the type of loans that you re going after. Ask about the separate factors of the campaign that we just spoke of. Ask about the compliance issues for each one. Most people don t ask about it at all. I m going to go back to the ignorance comment I made earlier, ignorance does not hold up in court, and you can end up in a lot of trouble by not following the rules. You re better off asking ahead of time. Best uses for direct mail: Direct mail works pretty well for just about everybody. It is a little bit pricey, you re probably not going to be able to do it for anything less than $2,500 or so but you can do different loan types, you can pick FHA or VA, Conventional or Reverse, and even Commercial. You name it you can do it with direct mail. It works for people that are not the best at sales because the prospects have already gotten your message and
are already interested. And, they are calling in to you, when they have time to talk. Direct mail does not work if you can t be in the office Monday through Friday because you can t dictate when those calls are going to come in. You can t tell people when to call you, so if you re working part time, don t consider direct mail. It works very well if you don t want to compete with other people because the calls are specific to you. No one else knows your sending out the mail and maybe no else is targeting these prospects. This gives you a more responsive prospect, with less competition, that s easier to close. A lot of people ask about leads and how exclusive they are, if you re doing a direct mail campaign, they are always 100% exclusive. That also works well with compliance issues because if you re doing your own direct mail campaign, you get to pick the data, you know what criteria you re targeting, you know where its coming from, you pick the mail piece, you run the mail piece through your compliance department so you know its fully compliant, you record the phone calls if you want to and not allow access for anybody else to have them, you can monitor your people and use them for training purposes while still being compliant, and it produces an exclusive lead for you.
The Mortgage Trigger Lead Now we're going to get into what s probably the most controversial lead to ever be introduced in the mortgage industry. If you ve been in the industry long enough you ve either used them, knew someone who s used them, or completely despise their conception. I m sure you have heard about them. Because they are so controversial, I am going to try and make this quick, but whether you love them, hate them, or whatever side of the trigger lead scenario you re on, they are a force in the industry and are worth mentioning. First off, what is a trigger lead? Trigger leads happen when people have their credit pulled for a mortgage refinance or purchase. Once the credit is pulled, the information is flagged at the credit bureau. Since we re talking about a tri-merge for the mortgage industry, you get it for all three bureaus. All three credit bureaus have the trigger leads available to them. The next day, 12-24 hours later, the bureau sells the information to other people in the market so they can try and give the customer another offer. Some people call them, some
people mail to them. The information is coming from the credit bureau, so it s important that you understand you still have to follow the exact same guidelines you do with credit data. You still have to get set up with the bureau and you still have to file all the paperwork. When you originally got set up in the mortgage business, most mortgage companies that get set up, had to go through a process in order to pull credit on a consumer. When you re using credit data for the purposes of marketing, which also includes the trigger lead, you have to go through almost the exact same process. You re going to have to fill out the paperwork, you re going to have to do a site inspection. They need to know that you re a legitimate brick and mortar company. We re talking about people s personal credit information here, this is not something that is taken lightly. Trigger leads are probably the number one misused, noncompliant area in the mortgage industry today. I don t think most people understand that they come from the credit bureau. Because they re so cheap, there is a lot of people that are misusing them and reselling them, or one thing or another. Make sure that if you use them, you get set up and that you go through the proper channel. People call and mail to these leads all over the country, all day every day. A big part of that marketing that is done is out of compliance like I was talking about because the opt-outs that should be on the mail piece are not used. The firm offers and the scripting, those opt outs that I showed you earlier also have
to go onto any telemarketing script that is used if you re using credit data or a trigger lead for telemarketing. A lot of people are not using that out there right now. Those people are winding up in a lot of trouble. It s important that you fully understand the compliance that goes along with this type of lead. Remember, this is federally protected information. Ignorance is not going to hold up in court. You have to fill out all the paperwork, just like when you signed up originally to pull credit reports. If you use trigger leads or credit data, make sure you understand the rules and make sure the company you re buying them from knows the rules. Again, if you re going to go into this area, make sure you ask about compliance with the person you re talking to. If they understand what is going on, they will walk you through the process. It takes a couple of weeks to get setup, but once you re setup you don t have to go through the process again, so it s really easy once it s done.
CAUTION: If for any reason you talk to somebody who brushes over compliance with trigger leads, or says don t worry about it, or it s not a big deal, I would highly recommend talking to somebody else. These people could be setting you up for disaster and they may not even know it. Buying Tips for Trigger Leads: Make absolute certain that the company you re buying them from understands the compliance aspect of the lead as well as yourself. People have the tendency to skip over compliance. Trigger Leads come in several age ranges, 12-24 hours old, 1 to 7 days old, and also weekly, 8 to 30 days old. You cannot use trigger leads after 30 days. That holds true with credit data also, which we will get in to a little further along. Best Use for Trigger Leads: If you choose to use them, you should be someone who doesn t mind competition. If you re a person who likes to compete for business, a trigger lead is a great way to go. You will be competing for the business every time because they ve already had their credit pulled with somebody else. Trigger leads are inexpensive, so you can get started for just a few hundred dollars and work with a smaller budget. They work well for telemarketing and direct mail. They don t work well if you
have a moral issue with the lead itself and where it comes from. They also don t work well for telemarketing if you ve never done any phone sales or telemarketing before. It is still a cold call, they are not expecting your phone call, and you will be competing with somebody else everytime. Some other best uses for applying the credit inquiry into your marketing process is a product called Mortgage Insights. This is a process that takes your past customers and uploads them into the credit bureau s system for monitoring. It can be done with any of the credit bureaus. Once your clients are in there they are monitored on a daily basis. Anytime one of your past customers has their credit pulled for a mortgage (purchase or refinance), you get notified that they are out there shopping. Because you re set up with the credit bureau and offering your client a new loan, it is completely compliant. It is the easiest, cheapest way for you to stay on top of your past customers. A lot of people spend a lot of money on post cards, mailings, birthday cards and all this other stuff. It works, don t get me wrong, but it is expensive. If you use Mortgage Insights, you ll only pay to get notified when they are in the market and having their credit pulled for a refinance or purchase. This gives you an insight into your own clients buying cycles so you can retain their business for years to come.
Best Marketing Campaigns summer 2015 Now I m going to tell you about the latest and greatest marketing campaign this summer. What a lot of people are doing out there is direct mail. Everybody knows direct mail works. I didn t say it was the cheapest, I said it was the best. If you take a direct mail campaign, you can get the piece approved through your compliance department so it s completely compliant. You can use prescreened data or you can use a mortgage file so your data is completely compliant. You don t have to worry about anything. You can target any kind of loan types you want or any type of refinance or purchase loan products and it s all completely exclusive to you. Here is the kicker to the direct mail. Follow up the mail with a call or voice mail message! At least 10% of the data will have phone numbers that are not on the DNC (you can call them). Have one call/message go out when the mail starts to hit and another one as it s finishing up. This process makes your marketing extremely personal. The prospects won t know they are on a list of 10,000 people. All they know is that you are trying very hard to get in touch with them about their mortgage. Now, because of the DNC, there are not as many phone numbers to call. So direct mail is really the only way to market
to those people. But because response rates are up and you are personalizing your marketing effort, you stand out from the competition! Fantastic results. Inbound calls from people that are qualified and interested. You use data to verify that they are qualified compliantly and you can use a piece that goes through your compliance department. In some cases, we even work with compliance departments directly. Next, use a CRM that you can upload the data from the mail into. You can build credibility by verifying their information on the phone first. Just like when you call your credit card company and they ask to verify your information before they ll let you talk. You can do the same thing on the phone with inbound calls! Taking control of the sales process. From verification to qualification seamlessly. Then you can do what you do best and close the business. This is a triple play marketing campaign. First is the mail. then is are the calls/voicemails. Lastly is the way the inbound calls are handled. It s been tested over million times and I m here to tell you it works. And last but certainly not least. Web 3.0 is almost out of beta testing! What is going to do to the mortgage industry and how is it going to affect your marketing? What it s doing is giving us marketers and data masters the ability to combine traditional marketing methods like direct mail and telemarketing and add op-in data. This op-in is a consumer going online and opting to receive information from you. This now gives us the ability to call them or mail to them. Now I ll take it one step further. Once they have opted-in we can append the information to a data file allowing you to filter your
interested prospects to your own unique specifications. And I m going to take it even one step further, take this extremely specific data and use it for your triple play marketing campaign. Delivering a highly interested customer that s been qualified to your specifications, on the phone and wanting to talk to you. Good luck and success to you. I m always open to taking calls so feel free to call or email anytime if you have any questions about the compliance of your current marketing or future marketing plans and/or general questions. The cost of maintaining compliance can be expensive, but the cost of being non-compliant is even greater. Caleb Guillory President 711 Medford Center STE 240 Medford, OR 97504 p. 541.734.0943 c. 541.690.8036 f. 541.858.4340 www.tagquest.com caleb@tagquest.com