Cross-Platform Marketing Automation Can Optimize Your Email

Cross-platform marketing automation may sound like an unhelpful buzzword, especially if you’re a loan officer who has successfully used email marketing as a tried-and-true communication channel. In reality, cross-platform marketing automation will help you employ more digital marketing tools to optimize your email game.

What is Cross-Platform Marketing Automation?

It’s delivering your mortgage marketing messages across several different channels through an automated system, such as a mortgage CRM. Channels might include:

• Email
• Social Media
• Text Messaging
• Website/Blog
• Landing Pages
• Forms/Surveys
• Phone Calls
• Postcards
• Closing Gifts

These channels can be accessed through a strong CRM, and activities can be automated through workflows, rules, and recurring deployments.

How does cross-platform marketing automation support email marketing?

If your marketing strategy has included sending emails, you are definitely on the right track. Marketers report higher email engagement since the beginning of the pandemic. In fact, most marketers say they would give up social marketing before email!

Adding more channels to your automated mix can extend your reach to more potential borrowers while also making your email marketing even more effective. The borrowers you’re currently reaching by email (or not reaching, if they don’t check their inbox very often) will have the opportunity to see you on social media, in their text messages, in their mailbox, and even in their voicemail box. Having the same or similar messages appear in multiple places improves your chance of customer engagement.

Using the same system to automate all communications ensures your brand consistency (logo, licensing info, colors, voice). You can produce messages that build on and complement each other, too. For example, you can create a brief social post to highlight a topic, send a quick text with a link to a landing page or a form for more info, and send an email with more details included at a glance, no click

required. The message can also be teased in a postcard, which can include a QR code to send the recipient to a landing page for complete information and a response form that feeds into your CRM. When they see your name in different places associated with a topic that interests them, chances are they’ll start looking for your email and will be more likely to open it.

Of course, you don’t want to oversaturate your audiences, which could cause a drop in customer engagement. Automating drip campaigns across different channels will allow you to set an appropriate cadence. What’s “appropriate” will depend on your comfort level, the makeup of your target audience, and the types of messages you’re sending. Ideally, your marketing strategy will include general messages to post on social media about twice per week. For your direct messages to consumers, you’ll want to set timing based on their position in the customer lifecycle. Are they building their credit? Slow and steady works. Planning to buy in the next three months? Then you’ll want to reach out more frequently!

A strong CRM will optimize your digital marketing across devices, too.

When automating your digital marketing, particularly your email marketing, it’s important that your messages be optimized for delivery on mobile devices. More than half of email recipients use their smartphone as their primary device to check email. The numbers are higher for younger audiences.

And it’s not just the email itself that should be easy to read on a small screen. When they click a link from your email to an interactive landing page, mortgage calculator or response form, they should find it easy to navigate from their device.

When developing email marketing, landing pages or other digital marketing, look for tools to preview on mobile, tablet and desktop. Ideally, any digital content created within the CRM will already be optimized for various platforms.

The mortgage industry’s best digital marketing tools are a click away.

Do you want to get a good look at the mortgage industry’s best CRM for cross-platform marketing automation and mortgage marketing content? Schedule a Surefire demo today!