6 Tips on How to Build a Successful Email Campaign

With so much talk about generating mortgage leads from organic traffic, paid traffic, and social media, you might overlook one digital marketing tactic that’s one of the most effective.

Email marketing for mortgage leads.

Email marketing continues to have one of the highest ROI rates in marketing — 4,300% according to the Direct Marketing Association!

We’ll show you exactly how to build successful email campaigns in just a minute, but first, let’s talk about the sign-up.

When a prospect signs up for your email list, they are giving you permission.

Permission isn’t just good manners; it may also be a terms-of-use requirement from your email marketing platform.

Permission also:

• Lessens the chance that your email will be chucked into the spam box
• Increases the chances that your email will be opened.
• Increases the likelihood that the prospect will click over to your site, contact you, or apply for a loan.

Steps to Create a Mortgage Email Campaign:

I. Build Your List

You might already have a healthy list of emails if you’ve been in the lending business for some time. But your list should never stop growing!

Don’t worry too much if your list is on the shorter side. Building it up is not as hard as it sounds –especially if you do it passively from your mortgage website.

Doing it passively from your mortgage website is as simple as including a lead capture on your homepage.

You can also add a sign-up at the end of blog posts and other pages on your site as the primary call-to-action.

Make sure it’s noticeable without being annoying.

Make your lead capture more appealing by offering something in exchange for their information. One of the most popular offers in the mortgage industry is a “Quick Quote.”

Other offers to consider are free eBooks downloads, blog updates, or an email series (e.i. 7 Ways To Fix Your Credit and Buy Your First Home).

2. Use a Reputable Email Marketing Technology Platform

Permission is one part of preventing your email from getting flagged as spam. The other part is using an email marketing platform that takes steps to prevent your email from looking like spam.

Though it’s not fool-proof, a good email service provider can help your email score well, essentially marking your email as one from a “friend.”

Also, the most coveted place to be for email marketing is in the prospects address book. You can ask the recipient to manually add you by giving them instructions to do so at the top of your email.

3. Make Your Emails Look Clean

Keep your emails as uncluttered as possible, using short paragraphs and attractive photos relevant to the content.

Use bullet points or blog post excerpts for people that like to skim through emails and ask the reader to “click to read more.”

This “click-through” tactic is especially useful for getting traffic over to your mortgage website if that’s your goal.

Use images sparingly as some ISPs see images as markers of spam. Remember that images, including logos, should add to your message rather than take the place of your message.

4. Include a Call To Action

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you know that we’re BIG on CTA.

To create a compelling call to action,  be clear about what you want the action to be. The goal of most mortgage email marketing campaigns is to get the prospect to apply for a loan.

How can you accomplish this? If you are using our SmartApp 1003 as part of your lead capture form, you can invite the prospect to continue the loan application that they already started.

You can also direct the reader back to your site for more information, ask them to call or email for immediate action or start a new loan application if they haven’t already.

5. Make it Mobile Friendly

At the moment, consumers are still more likely to “buy” or convert from a desktop read email. However, emails are overwhelmingly read via mobile!

The table above shows that the financial industry averages 66% opens on mobile vs only 34% on desktop.

We suspect this number to be even higher now –and conversion from a mobile device is undoubtedly higher than it was in 2016.

So when you choose an email campaign manager, make sure that the email templates are mobile responsive!

Your mortgage website, landing page, digital 1003, or any other site that you link to your email should also be mobile-responsive.

6. Test and Track

Check that your emails are working correctly by sending a few test emails to colleagues. Ideally, send test emails to Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook email addresses.

Also, check the email format on different devices. Make sure that the text and images appear correctly on every device and every email provider.

Studies show that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings have the highest open rate. However, you’ll want to track the open rate of your campaign to see if these days and times are true for you too.

After every campaign, check your open rate and click-throughs. Many email platforms will also tell you where the recipient clicked –whether it was on a social media link, link to read your blog or link to your mortgage website from your logo.

You can also check the web traffic that your email campaign is creating by integrating it with Google Analytics.

Tag your emails with “custom campaign tracking,” and you’ll be able to see precisely where your prospect went after clicking over to your site PLUS where they clicked after.