Email marketing is still one of the best ways to grow your business as a mortgage broker. Once you have access to a person’s inbox, you can continue to deliver value, build trust and set the stage for new business (and repeat business) down the road.
But here’s the problem: many loan officers (LOs) don’t know how to use email well as a marketing or sales tool. They let their lists fail to the wayside and miss the opportunity to nurture potential homebuying customers.
In this article, we’ll share quick wins and strategies on the mortgage email marketing front. Implement these ideas today to start seeing results quickly.
If you want a more robust mortgage marketing and sales article, click here.
What is Email Marketing for Mortgage Brokers?
Mortgage email marketing is email communication between a broker and prospective clients that is intended to nurture leads until they’re ready to make a buying decision. A great email newsletter convinces homebuyers that you are the best person to address their unique goals when it comes to getting a mortgage.
You build this credibility by sharing relevant content, resources and opportunities. Your aim should be to send information that is so helpful and insightful that people forward your emails on to others. If you can motivate that kind of behavior, you’re on the right track.
Mortgage marketing emails are also a great way to generate repeat business with past clients. Your emails can serve as a regular reminder that people should call you first when they’re ready to purchase their next home.
Email marketing is one of many effective lead generation channels for LOs and brokers (to learn more about overall mortgage lead generation, check out this post).
You don’t have to have a newsletter to be a successful broker. However, email is still one of the best ways to reach people and serve an audience at scale. If people give you access to their inbox, they’re giving you a chance to win their business.
Mortgage Email Marketing Best Practices
Mortgage newsletters that are worth reading are consistent, high quality and useful.
Why Consistency Matters
Consistency in this context means a few things:
- Sending on a consistent schedule
- Sending with consistent formatting
- Sending in a consistent voice
- Sending with consistent topics or themes
These are all crucial dimensions for an email newsletter, especially when first starting out.
Whether you choose to send a daily, weekly or monthly newsletter, you need to stick to your schedule. Delivering value on a consistent basis is one of the best ways to validate someone’s decision to give you permission to email them.
It’s also important that your emails look, feel and sound the same. People don’t like change, and it’s easier for them to connect with you as an individual if you show up the way they expect in their inbox every time.
Having consistent topics or themes helps you establish expertise in certain areas for your readers. It also makes it easier on you to come up with content to send. Starting from scratch every month is unsustainable.
For instance, you could always include a section with rate updates or trends in the local market. Or you could position your email as a reverse mortgage newsletter and only publish content along these lines.
If you want to retain some flexibility, build a dedicated section for this purpose into your newsletter.
For example, you could have an “Educational Topic of the Week” or a “Customer Highlight of the Month” section. Or maybe you just want to save an area for general commentary. Feel free to do this, so long as you can keep up with the work.
How to be a High-quality Communicator
High-quality newsletters are clear, timely and relevant.
You don’t have to be a gifted writer. But you do need to communicate in a way that is easy to understand. If people are distracted by your poor grammar and writing, have someone else draft or edit your content.
Your emails should also address topics that are top of mind for readers. This shows that you pay attention to the outside world and can help people understand any implications when it comes to getting a mortgage. And the closer you can be to real-world events, the more people will value your opinion.
The Simple Effectiveness of Being Useful
Every email newsletter you send to readers should educate or help in some way. Otherwise, it’s just noise. Keep your self-promotion to a minimum, and stick to what you know your target audience needs.
This means you need to know exactly who is drawn to your email list. Ideally, this should align with your target homebuyer avatar, i.e., the type of person you want to work with over and over.
It’s easier to share useful content when you narrow down who you are “talking” to through your newsletter. For example, if your email list has every type of homebuyer on it, anything you write will either be irrelevant to the majority of your list or so generic that it’s not helpful to anybody.
If, on the other hand, you prefer working with single parents and only share content in this vein, you will become the ultimate trusted resource amongst this demographic. Sure, it’s a smaller group of potential customers, but you’ll win a much higher majority of the business.
A Quick Word on Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
Your email list will include people at different stages in the buyer journey. Some are just looking for answers to an initial set of questions. Others are closer to needing a mortgage. It’s impossible to know where everyone stands, and people can jump forward (or backwards) quickly.
In most cases, you should include CTAs in your emails for people who are ready to take the next step. Always give prospects the option to contact you for a consultation or get a quote. You won’t offend people who aren’t ready to move forward. And you’ll generate more opportunities to connect with warmer leads.
Design with Mobile in Mind
When designing your email template, it’s important to keep the mobile experience in mind. Four in ten people open emails in mobile apps today. If your emails don’t look good on mobile, you’ll turn off a big portion of your potential readership.
To be clear, your email newsletter doesn’t have to be expertly designed. It could just be simple plain text. It all depends on audience and how they want to consume information.
How Do You Grow a Mortgage Email Marketing List?
One of the best ways to grow your mortgage email newsletter is through your website. To encourage people to sign up, you should offer some sort of benefit or lead magnet. It’s not enough to just ask someone to join your list. You need to give them a compelling reason.
For example, you could send a first-time homebuyers’ guide in exchange for someone’s email or pass along the URL to a hidden mortgage calculator built specifically for the local market.
In-person events are also a great place to meet people who might be interested in your newsletter. Host lunch-and-learns or go to open houses where you offer some useful insight and then direct people to your email list if they want to receive that type of information regularly.
Another effective email list growth channel is social media. You can post short snippets of your newsletter content on socials and then invite people to join to see your full perspective.
Have your audience comment or react to a post to signal that they want you to add them to your list. You can then send them a direct message to get their email address.
(here’s an article on how to level up your social media marketing game as a loan officer)
Using Video to Level Up Your Mortgage Email Marketing
One of the best ways to increase email marketing results is to incorporate videos into your newsletters. People are more likely to open and engage with emails that contain videos.
Videos are more effective at motivating prospects to respond and take action. This is because they realize there is a real person on the other side of the email who took the time to send a thoughtful message. And videos enhance written content by infusing it with personality, tone, and clarity.
By following the principles outlined above and incorporating videos into your newsletters, you’ll create a newsletter experience that very few mortgage professionals have today.
This is how you differentiate yourself from the competition and build an email marketing function that continues to produce quality leads for your business throughout the year.
And using videos in your emails is valuable for many moments across the buyer’s journey. We summarize these moments and provide video explanations in this free Mortgage Action Plan that was written with mortgage brokers specifically in mind.
In this action plan, we show how you can use personalized videos to do things like:
- Respond to initial lead inquires and book more appointments
- Reduce no-shows and meeting cancellations
- Thank people for their business and ask for referrals
Download the guide here to get started.
And to give BombBomb a try, sign up for a free 14-day trial here.
