Direct Mail Enjoys Resurgence in Omnichannel Mortgage Marketing

Direct mail flyers may seem like an antiquated notion in today’s largely digital-based mortgage marketing world. The reality is that postal direct mail doesn’t suffer from paltry open rates like email, and that’s especially true for postcards since there’s no opening involved.

In fact, there are even ways to integrate direct mail mortgage marketing with digital tools that can further expound on your message and bring new leads to your own inbox. 

COVID-19 Accelerates Omnichannel Marketing Demand

As the world opens up and COVID lockdowns become more of a memory, a large number of families will continue working from home. As the remote population grows, the value of direct mail is becoming significantly interesting to marketers again. Especially since the work commute is a short walk to the mailbox, bringing analog relief to remote employees working as digital nomads throughout the week.

With more people working from home, mortgage marketers should be looking at direct mail in the overall campaign mix. 

An omnichannel marketing strategy utilizing direct mail can create a seamless experience for mortgage lenders across multiple channels, helping lenders reach more families working from home. A complete omnichannel approach should include a mix of online and offline channels. A complete mix typically includes direct mail, online ads, social, TV, radio and email.

As a campaign tactic, direct mail is often centered around digital as the bookends. Direct mail marketing is most effective when sent to a targeted audience at the beginning of a campaign and as a final reminder piece near expiration. 

With any campaign, it is important to create a targeted audience and align with the right audience type. With third-party cookies expiring soon, and list rentals becoming less and less relevant, using a CRM as a first-party database and source of truth for customer address data, will become more important than ever – this data uniquely available to a specific lender.  

Why do direct mail flyers provide a better return on investment for mortgage lenders?

The amount of direct mail marketing pieces in one’s mailbox has declined. The advent and proliferation of email and other internet-based digital marketing have largely obfuscated the use of “old-fashioned” direct mail services.  

The common perception is that the cost and labor of printing, postage and fulfillment are far too great in comparison to click-and-send messaging. Yet when comparing the two, the physical presence of mortgage flyers or dynamically generated and highly personalized postcard that lands in the actual hands of your prospects makes it virtually unavoidable for an impression to be made. 

In contrast with an email, perhaps quickly deleted, or a rushed-past advertisement in the midst of a social media feed, there’s a clear difference and potentially significant advantage when well-targeted mortgage flyers trigger a prospect’s thought process. 

Believe it or not, even millennials like to get and will look at or read mail that arrives in their actual mailboxes. 

Thinking outside the mailbox, today’s technology can vastly upgrade what many marketers consider a direct mail flyer to be. Including customized printing with a prospect’s name in lights, written in the sand on the beach, or spelled out on a birthday cake in multi-colored icing is easy to achieve now. An image can even contain a QR code that will bring them to a full-featured and branded landing page that directly targets the opportunity you’ve identified for them. 

More personalization, especially when you’re appealing to basic human instincts such as loving to see your own name and information that’s pertinent to you, make a bigger positive impact and can easily result in a lower cost per active lead than generalized spray-and-pray type efforts that are simply too broad to appeal to much of anyone. 

How can your direct mail mortgage marketing pieces be customized to individual borrowers?

A well-populated database and a well-featured mortgage CRM system such as Surefire from Top of Mind Networks makes it easy. Surefire features print order options as one-off marketing or even built into longer-term campaigns. Client for Life programs make these efforts personal and all but perpetual too. Birthdays, holidays, annual review notifications, refi opportunity alerts, you name it. It’s all there. 

At the very least, including direct mail mortgage marketing flyers and postcards into any mortgage banker’s or broker’s plans can broaden your reach while also better targeting your message so it hits where and when it counts. 

Want to see how easy it can be to get started? Just click here to arrange a Surefire demo today!