As the market tightens and credit standards make it more difficult for borrowers to qualify your marketing needs to be fine tuned. This is no longer the days of everyone needs to refinance their mortgages for lower rates and better payments. This is a market centered around avoiding payment shocks, improving credit, securing equity, and stabilizing your personal balance sheet for a potential recession. Unfortunately, these customers are hard to find and most don’t even know they are headed for trouble.
This point was highlighted in this recent Forbes “Mortgage Meltdown” article, that cites a report by the FTC (PDF) commissioned by the Federal Reserve:
Of those surveyed, 25% could not identify the annual percentage rate of their mortgage, and 25% could not identify the amount of settlement charges. Half could not correctly identify the amount of the loan. Two-thirds were unaware of prepayment penalties that could be charged during refinancing. Three-quarters did not recognize that the loans included charges for optional credit insurance.
Not only does this spotlight potential past sins, but glitters as a significant opportunity. Let’s go beyond what this study may reveal about the past and look at the future. If you are running your marketing campaigns with calls to avoid payment shocks, ARM resets, and negative amortization equity depletion you may be shouting into the winds. Your customers don’t know they have a pending problem. They are getting surprised by their payment coupons and punting their homes to foreclosure. All the while wondering what happened, and never knowing they had options.
This is bad for the customer and for your mortgage business–so, let’s make some adjustments.
Create Your Financial Education Course
Obviously, financial education is the key, but how do you deliver? My first suggestion is to craft a little content first before you begin planning how to get it to your prospects.
Build a simple, brief whitepaper and an email campaign.
Start with your top five solutions for today’s’ market. This means assessing what you think, or have surveyed, as the top 5 borrower scenarios based on past loan programs, current rates, local housing market, and local jobs environment. Match these against the right loan program (solutions) you can offer. Now you are ready to write. Here is your outline:
- Overview of the current mortgage market. What is going on and why?
- Explain loan programs and economic factors that may signal a borrower’s need for a mortgage review
- Review 4-5 case studies (borrow scenarios) and solutions (loan programs) you can offer
- Wrap-up by offering a no-risk review or consultation, ask for them to opt-in to future reports, and don’t forget your contact information
Save your paper to a PDF and also break each of the four sections into four emails.
Educate Your Past Clients
Now that you have a mini financial education course created. You need to determine how to educate as many people as possible. This should be a truly important education series for a broad range of past and potential clients. Your first objective should be to educate folks that you are already familiar with, and whom you have current professional responsibility to keep informed–you past clients.
Take your client database, or parse your folders, and collect the emails of clients that are likely to fall into the scenarios you outline–ARM resets, neg-am’s, IOs–and email them your special report in an attached PDF. Also, inform them that this is an uncertain economic and mortgage market and request their permission to present them other special reports in the future.
Filter Your New Prospects
Now that you have covered you past clients ensure that you begin to touch your new clients with the same valuable information. However, since they are new to you and may be coming to you through a lead provider, referral, or other direct “buying” channel use your bite-size education emails. This approach will round out the value of your ongoing relationship, filter and nurture prospects, but not interfere with a direct path to a mortgage if that is their objective.
This type of email education is best facilitated by the email campaign tools within your lead management system or a separate autoresponder system. Again, ensure that you are asking each of these customers for their permission to continue to engage them with education material.
Use Financial Education to Pinpoint Current Borrowers
Building a program of whitepaper and email marketing will focus your prospective and past clients on the value of your relationship. Mortgage marketing has long been an impersonal and direct stingy attack on consumer, forcing abrupt decisions for a financial transaction that is more than current payment. Your refreshing approach of educating, and adding value first will win better conversations and more closings in a difficult market.
The added advantage your mortgage business is the filtering effect. Your mortgage education course is compelling your lead flow to self-assess and filter. Consequently, when you get calls they will be ready and educated to buy.
About Bill Rice
