How Loan Officers Can Use Nurture Campaigns to Win More Business

If your prospect is already interested, they may not even need to be sold, just enlightened and made to feel confident in you as their mortgage loan provider. The best thing you can do is to identify exactly what they are interested in, to discover any hurdles, and then quantify the likelihood of doing business with them. Once you know what they want and whether or not you will be able to help them, then you can engage in a nurture campaign that educates your prospect versus straight-up selling or conventional email marketing campaigns.

Prospects that are made to feel informed and comfortable, rather than rushed or subjected to hard-sell closing techniques, are more likely to develop greater loyalty to you and your brand. Thinking of every prospect not only as a potential transaction but also as a future cheerleader and referral-maker for you is where steady business can lead.

Think of it as a conversation vs. a sales pitch.
It’s really that simple – or it should be. By answering questions and providing helpful information, you can help lead your prospect toward the right decision for their needs. There’s no need for pressure. Keep your conversation friendly, yet professional. Engaging your prospect with informational content, coupled with other communication in tune with the prospect’s preference, be it text, phone or email, will go a long way toward developing a mutually beneficial business relationship compared to solely chalking up another transaction.

Keep it genuine.

While this is still contact marketing with the goal of doing business, it shouldn’t be disingenuous. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes, and remember that this may be their first time financing a home. It’s easy to forget that what we as loan officers, mortgage brokers or marketing administrators deal with every day may be completely foreign to a prospective home buyer. The more genuine you are in your effort and intent to help them, the better.

Don’t think in terms of your typical email marketing or automated marketing campaigns. The more you customize your approach and engagement to align exactly with your prospect’s needs, the greater the chance that you’ll both get what you want in the end.

A nurturing campaign can take place over a broad range of times.

When we utilize our mortgage CRMs to conduct more typical email marketing campaigns, we may choose a campaign of a set length – thirty, sixty, ninety days. These are often distributed based on habit, rules, content or better, by identifying the prospect’s intended time period for purchasing or refinancing a home.

The concept is not entirely different for a nurturing campaign, yet the goal is best set based on the information the prospective borrower needs instead of when they intend to act. Since this is a prospect that has already engaged with you, and your sense is that they will do business, it’s just a matter of solidifying that relationship with a more personalized approach. Some prospects will just have a few questions and then be ready to go in a matter of days. Others can take months or even years.

Don’t discount the tire kickers.
While it may seem like some prospects are interested yet still never commit, don’t write them off as a lost cause. It’s entirely possible that even though some folks will take what seems like forever to act and never run out of questions in the interim, they may still be singing your praise to their friends, family and coworkers.

Referrals are referrals, and they aren’t any less valuable coming from someone who hasn’t yet done business with you. In fact, it’s pretty impressive to have someone refer business to you if they haven’t yet experienced anything but your pre-transaction treatment. Consider that kind of success to be a compliment and celebrate your achievement.

Your mortgage CRM is your friend.

If it sounds like more work than you’re prepared to offer to nurture warm prospects into application status, it doesn’t have to be. A great mortgage CRM full of award-winning content like Surefire from Top of Mind and Black Knight can and will make the process easy.

Granted that there’s more handholding to go with proper nurturing, but the rest of the process can be handled by educationally focused workflows dedicated to the needs of your prospects. Just add your contact and trigger the appropriate content stream. You can even intersperse those important check-in calls in a pre-scheduled manner.

The flexibility of Surefire’s mortgage CRM enables you to either select readymade content and workflows or to easily create your own. Why not take a look, and click here for a Surefire demo today?