How to Pick the Right Mortgage Email Marketing Software

When it comes to planning mortgage email marketing for mortgage brokers and bankers, generalist marketers will find themselves entering a new dimension. Mortgage email marketing goes well beyond typical concerns about improving open rates with the most attention-grabbing subject lines. Mortgage marketers must think about compliance, the mortgage process, cobranding and more.

4 Top Considerations When Selecting a Mortgage Email Marketing Provider

First, email marketing for mortgage brokers and bankers must enable your company to meet the industry’s strict compliance guidelines. Any platform that can’t meet these requirements should be marked off the list right away since failure to comply could cost millions in fines.

• Your company should have the ability to control components of the email, such as the footer or signature block, to ensure that licensing, NMLS blurbs and any required disclaimers are applied consistently in every message.
• Recipients should have the ability to opt out of receiving email communications, per the CAN-SPAM Act.
• The platform should offer a system for reviewing and approving communications produced by loan officers or other team members.
• The system should enable the production of audit reports that may be required by regulators. For example, your mortgage company should have the ability to pull all email messages that were sent to borrowers in a specific state over a set time period.

Second, a mortgage email marketing system should provide multiple ways to deploy.

• Email Blasts: It should be just as easy to send an email to a large group as it is to a single contact. A system should allow loan officers to divide their contacts into groups based on type (lead, prospect, or past client, for example), interest rate, zip code — any parameter.
• Set-it-and-forget-it functionality: Many loan officers rely on automated workflows to send educational messages and reminders to prospective borrowers as they search for a home. Recurring deployments send emails at specific intervals, so there’s no need for a loan officer to remember to reach out to contacts with a holiday message or an annual reminder to check their credit reports. Rules-based deployments trigger an email after a specified action or status change, such as when a loan moves to the next step in the mortgage process, a lead transitions to an applicant or a contact submits a form.

Third, a mortgage email marketing platform should provide more content choices than you could possibly use. This will ensure that you have what you need when you need it and that your competitors aren’t sending the same emails you are. The content library should be both deep and wide, including:

• Evergreen educational topics
• Timely industry news
• Fun holiday and birthday themes (because who wants to talk about work all the time?)
• Interactive messaging, such as mortgage-related riddles or calculators
• Video animations
• Shareable mortgage memes

Fourth, referral partners are the key to many loan officers’ success, so mortgage email marketing systems should allow for co-branding.

Placing a referral partner’s contact information, logo and picture alongside the loan officer’s means contacts see them working as a team. If you’re concerned about compliance, you might also look for a mortgage email marketing system that addresses value sharing.

To be a truly unbeatable resource to real estate agents, and win their loyalty as a result, you must help them work as efficiently as possible. Email outreach should be curated to assist in the activities that will help them — and you as their teammate — grow their networks and close more deals. Here are a couple of ways to enhance your marketing emails with mutually beneficial, co-branded content:

• Single property websites feature photos and details about a home listing along with information like school demographics, amenities, commuting, loan program rates and payment calculations. Once a loan prospect clicks through from an email to a single property site, they can assess the property, schedule a tour or request to get pre-qualified — all from one centralized web page.
• Open house flyers have been a tried-and-true real estate marketing tactic for decades. With a powerful email marketing system, lenders can create co-branded flyers advertising for-sale properties and automatically distribute them to the appropriate audiences. By generating interest in a real estate partner’s listing, you’ll earn not only their trust but their referral business as well.

What’s your next step?

As you can see, simply deploying an email is far from the primary concern when mortgage companies shop for email marketing systems, and many will choose a full mortgage CRM system to handle the ancillary requirements.

You shouldn’t trust your business to a marketing platform designed for another industry or one that claims to serve many disparate industries well. Instead, you should look for a provider with proven results in the mortgage industry over many years and economic cycles — one with built-in systems for compliance and co-branding and a full library of mortgage-related content.

With the right provider, your implementation will feel easy and out-of-the-box and still yield out-of-this-world results.

Ready to get started? Black Knight’s Surefire CRM is the mortgage industry’s #1 most-used CRM , and we can deliver. Reach out so we can give you a tour.