Mortgage companies have two gold mines that most are vastly underutilizing: website traffic from lookers and email addresses of previous customers.
What most mortgage companies don’t realize is that they can re-market via social media to the people who have visited their website, but have not yet converted yet (i.e. submitted their information to get a rate quote). Additionally, many mortgage companies don’t realize that they can use their existing list of emails from customer loans that have already been funded (and are still eligible to be re-marketed to because their loans have not been sold to another investor) to re-target on platforms like Facebook.
Why is re-targeting important? Because it allows your brand to get additional touches with your potential customer. Think of re-targeting as a follow-up phone call that is a little bit less intrusive and invasive. Marketing is all about getting as many relevant touch points as possible with your target audience and re-targeting is a great way to do that.
Interested on how you might be able to start generating more business from your existing email addresses and non-converting website traffic? Read on!
At Tobe we preach that regardless of industry, most consumers start their research process online. The mortgage industry is no exception to this. Many mortgage companies we talk to have an enormous amount of web traffic that goes to them. And this makes total sense, because most mortgage companies have tools on their websites that allow people to check on rates for that day.
These tools effectively act as a “Lead Magnet” to attract people into your website. So you’ve got the first part down, which is to attract and get attention on your site, but is all that attention converting to a lead? Probably not. On average, a decently designed website will convert at roughly a 2% rate (i.e. for every 100 people who visit your site, you’ll get an email address for 2 of them).
So what happens to the other 98 people who visit your site and left? You’ve already got your brand in front of them, doesn’t it seem like a big waste to just let those 98 people leave without trying to touch them again?
So how do you re-target those 98 people who dropped off? You can do this by creating a “Custom Audience” on the Facebook platform, which builds an audience of all the people who have visited your website and then allows you to re-target that audience.
You accomplish this by installing a “Pixel” on your website. Facebook provides the code for this Pixel and once installed it starts to collect data on all of the people visiting your website. As people visit your website, the Pixel accumulates data on them and sends it back to the Facebook Ad platform where it tries to match the Pixel data to actual profiles on Facebook. You won’t be able to individually see the people’s Facebook profiles (that would be an invasion of privacy and a little creepy), but Facebook will aggregate all of this into your Custom Audience.
After you’ve built your Custom Audience from the website/Pixel, then you can go in and place Facebook Ads that re-target the people who’ve visited your website. This is a great way to keep your brand in front of people who have already expressed interest in your company and to keep the discussion going without a phone call or an email (i.e. this is a totally scalable way to nurture strangers into leads and customers).
Mortgage companies accumulate thousands of email addresses a year as they bring on new customers and fund purchases and refinances. But many of these mortgage companies are failing to realize how much of a gold mine these email addresses are. They’re such a valuable commodity because you can re-target and re-market to your previous customers (i.e. a previous purchase customer into a refi customer).
With platforms like Facebook, you can take your list of emails, upload them to the platform and Facebook will go in and try to match the emails to profiles of people on the social media site (again, you won’t be able to see individual profiles due to privacy concerns). Then you can place ads on Facebook which are specific to your previous customers.
These ads are what we call “warm traffic ads” and they are built with copy and creative that resonates with someone who has done business with you before. For example, we may put together an ad which re-targets purchase customers with some copy that says “If you purchased your house with us within the last 18 months, it might be a great time to look at refinancing to take cash out of your home for renovations, debt consolidation etc” (marketing a cash out refi).
This ad only gets shown to people who were in that Custom Audience you built and thus that’s why we’ve built copy that is a little more specific to them being a previous customer. Our goal with warm traffic ads such as these is to improve your conversion rate by re-targeting people who have already had experience with your brand.
Another way to use previous customer email addresses with Facebook is to build a “lookalike audience.” These are people who are on Facebook who may fit similar profile characteristics of your email list. It's basically a way to reach people who are likely to be interested in your business because they're similar to your best existing customers.
This is extremely powerful because within the past few years, Facebook has partnered with companies like Acxiom, which collect marketing data on consumers to start providing more insights to advertisers that fall outside of social information (i.e.. what you like, share comment on) to getting more “deep” data on Facebook users such as income, net worth, etc. This has effectively expanded the type of targeting you can now do on Facebook, which only makes it an even more robust marketing platform for targeted, paid social advertising.
So what does this mean as you’re building a lookalike audience? It means that with something as simple as an email address, Facebook can build a lookalike audience of people who fit potentially the same income, net worth etc profile as the group of previous customer’s email addresses you just uploaded. This becomes an extremely powerful way to put your company in front of thousands (if not millions) of people who may not have heard your before, but fit similar characteristics to your previous borrowers.
Once you build this lookalike audience, you can start an Facebook advertising campaign and target this audience with informative content or promotions/offers to bring them in as a lead into your overall marketing and sales funnel.
Do you have a large database of email addresses from previous customers? What marketing activities are you currently doing to extract the maximum value out of this database? We’d love to hear from you!