Mortgage Business Tools

Today, I’ll talk about something which is a well known method for capturing leads online. However, despite its popularity among the internet marketing community, I talk to mortgage brokers everyday who are not aware of the benefits of landing pages. Landing pages are highly valuable not just with postcards but on their own as well but for now, we’ll stick to how you can use them with postcards.

In all your marketing efforts, you will have a call to action for a marketing message to be effective. You will want them to email you, or visit your website or perhaps call you? Of course you want to do any of this because you want to have the person as a lead which you can then nurture into a conversion over a course of weeks or months. Ideally you will want people to phone you right away with your mortgage broker postcards. Some people will do that but not a lot of people today will call you directly without doing any research on you or doing some research on your competitors as well.  Today, 85% of consumers will go online to find as much data they can about a company before making a decision.  To ensure you get a response on your mortgage broker postcards and for leads to be generated, you would want to use landing pages as a call to action from your postcards.

A good landing page aka squeeze page will convince your prospect to submit their contact information to you. The way it is supposed to work is that you will initiate a communication message with your mortgage postcard and you will direct the recipient to your online landing page where you will continue that communication. On your landing pages, you are to convince your visitors exactly why they should choose you over the competition and let them download valuable content that is highly targeted to the list that you had originally targeted with your postcards. The only thing to be required of them to do should be to give you their contact information. The valuable content can come in the way of Free consumer reports which can be found easily on the internet. Some are available on this website.

Let’s take a simple example to help you understand better. If you initially targeted a debt consolidation list, your message on the postcard should speak to your prospects needs and benefits of consolidating their debt into their mortgage and should redirect them to a landing page that you have designed specifically for only this list. When someone visits, you landing page, you will put forth your value proposition and offer them a free consumer report to be sent to their email/mailing address. Either way, you will need their contact information, which you will ask for to be able to fulfill your promise. I have done a simple landing page so that you could see the basics.

You can have a look at the sample landing page here. Please note this is a very basic page that I have done very quickly just to give you a basic idea on how its done. You would probably need to have more to your actual landing page.

Every person who enters their information is a lead for you which you can now contact via email and direct mail with your marketing messages and warm them up to yourself. Of course, you will eventually want to go for the close once you have built up a level of trust with your prospects.

That’s all for now. I would love to have any questions, feed backs or comments.

While using mortgage postcards for direct mail marketing, your headline message is arguably the most important element on your postcard. Getting this one sentence right can mean a good number of potential clients gained or lost.

Identify your market

While sending out mortgage postcards, too many mortgage brokers try to be every thing to everybody thinking that they will reach out to a larger audience and thus will get a better response. Unfortunately, that is not true. When you try to get everyone’s business, you end up getting none. Your message becomes diluted and no one feels its relevant to their situation.

First and foremost, you need to determine a niche – a target market for your mortgage postcard marketing and then create your message around that one particular kind of people so that it speaks to them directly.

Be the recipient

Try to assume the view point of the person who is on the receiving end of your postcards. In your head, try to be that person. Put yourself in their shoes. Taking a few examples, if you are reaching out to a list of renters you need to speak to their desires to own a home. Try to understand what they think and what their hopes and aspirations are, and then create a message that communicates to their aspirations. When you do this, you will sound very real to them. They will be able to relate to their message, they will be able to see that you understand what is going through their minds and that this understanding will convert into something tangible for them i.e. e the home that they desire. Taking another example, if you are reaching out to divorce clients, make your message relevant to their situation. It should speak in a way that it reflects your understanding of what they are going through and how it is that you can help them out to get a new mortgage. Also, you message should speak to each recipient. This mean you should make your messages in singular, not plural. The recipient should not feel that he is just one of the many that you are contacting though this mortgage postcard.

Using questions in your mortgage postcards

Asking questions in your message can be very powerful. A question continues communication. By asking a question, you initiate a conversation and the recipient is going to be compelled to answer that question. Even if from the time they look at your postcard, they are walking over to the trash with the postcard in their hand, they are going to answer your question in their head. That’s when they will begin to think and ponder over it. For example, Christmas might be coming up and you ask them “Are you giving your kids the Christmas they want?” or “How would you like a debt free Christmas?” Questions put in this way are very powerful and hook people in so make sure you include a few very specific and impactful questions in your copy.

You can also find about 18 free ready made postcards on this website.

I hope this helps you understand how you should create your messages for your mortgage postcards campaign. I would love any comments or feedback on whether you found this information useful or not.

If you have been doing some reading on how to improve your response rate on your mortgage postcards, you would know that it is very important to tweak different components of your postcards. Through this process of testing and tweaking, you would be able to arrive on a “winning” combination that gives you optimum response. One question that always follows this advice is “what do I tweak in my postcards and how do I tweak”. Therefore, I have explained four major components that you need to tweak in your postcard campaign.

Headline

You want to have a very simple headline that addresses a problem somebody is trying to solve. Nobody wants to see a headline ‘I’m the best mortgage broker in town!’ They’re not really interested in you, they are interested in what you can do for them. So you want to have a very direct and simple, not a lot of words, headline.

Image

You want to have a graphic image that supports that headline. This has proved to be very powerful. Having a relevant image with your headline helps the prospect to better understand your message and relate to the situation they are in. It does not necessarily has to be a very high quality image, relevancy is of higher priority here.

Offer on the Back

If you get the first two right, then you will have captured your prospects attention and they will then turn over the postcard to see what you say in the back. The back of the card should continue your communication where your headline left off. The transition should be swift and seem less. On the back of the card you want to list features and benefits of working with you, or the rate of the mortgage, whether you are going to save them from their adjustable rate mortgage, whether your going to get them to stop seeding a fat landlord. Whoever your market is, you are going to push the buttons just a little bit further, bullet pointed. A paragraph with a lot of type on the back of a postcard is not going to get read. People are too bombarded with promotional messages they need snippets, you know they need bullet pointed items.

Continue the communication

You should have some kind of an offer on the postcard. And I am going to tell you something now that not a lot of mortgage professional are doing. The ones who are doing it are reaping the benefits. You need to continue the communication with the postcard; you are initially starting a communication with a postcard. You then need to get the recipient to continue that communication by sending these prospects to specially designed landing pages where you give out free reports and guides in exchange for their information. Once you have their info, you now have a lead and you can follow up with them through phone, email or further pieces of direct mail.

Tweaking these four components in combination until you have an optimum response rate. You will know you have an optimum response rate when further improvements and tweaks stop having a positive impact on your campaign. Once you have the winning campaign, continue to send out the same message to the same prospects again and again and you will see results week after week.

For those of you wondering whether sending the same old message will work; YES it will work. It has been tested and proven… even if you continue to send it over and over again to the same list. After a certain point in time though, your response will begin to diminish. You should still keep on sending the postcards until it goes down to a point where you start getting negative returns. However, as you hit the point of diminishing returns, you should simultaneously start a new post card campaign. This will enable you to tweak your new campaign before you stop getting any returns from your previous one.

I would love to hear your comments or feedbacks. If there is anything you do not understand, just post a question and I will explain further.