Mortgage marketing plays an important role in helping loan officers (LOs) and mortgage brokers nurture relationships and maintain a healthy sales pipeline. However, a mortgage marketer’s job is far from over after they click ‘send’ on an email blast. Comprehensive, accurate mortgage marketing reporting is critical to tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and can help prevent expensive compliance violations.

The mortgage marketing reporting capabilities that lenders need to track campaign performance (without sacrificing their entire marketing budget) varies widely based on factors like company size, target markets, marketing channels used and more. To ensure a fast return on their technology investment and to ease the time-consuming process of marketing compliance reporting, lenders today need to leverage a mortgage marketing automation system that is capable of meeting their unique reporting needs.

This article covers:

• The basics of mortgage marketing reports
• Tools for measuring marketing performance
• Common applications of mortgage marketing reporting
• Mortgage marketing compliance measures
• Key features of industry-leading mortgage marketing reporting tools

Broadly speaking, a mortgage marketing report is a curated analysis of marketing data points and metrics that offers insight into a particular area of marketing performance. Marketing reports are useful because even though the most common marketing goal for lenders is generating loan revenue, boosting sales is not the only way to achieve that goal. Mortgage marketing campaigns can be used to re-engage past customers, build brand awareness, foster relationships with real estate agents and more. Marketing reporting allows lenders to see whether they are meeting these goals.

Because of how diverse mortgage marketing campaigns and their target audiences are, the success metrics that lenders should analyze vary greatly. That is why it is critical mortgage marketers understand which key performance indicators (KPIs) are most relevant for measuring their marketing campaigns’ effectiveness.

For example, marketing reporting for email mortgage marketing campaigns will often analyze common KPIs like successful email deliveries, opens, click-through rate, and unsubscribes. Measuring the effectiveness of telephone marketing and cold-calling efforts on the other hand requires insight into KPIs like contact rate, average call length and lead conversion rate. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to relevant KPIs.

While these examples only provide a glimpse into the mortgage marketing reporting possibilities, they also indicate the potential for reports that layer diverse datasets and performance metrics to provide deeply nuanced analyses of targeted marketing efforts.

Mortgage marketing reports can be generated manually or calculated in a spreadsheet. However, the sheer volume of customer and performance data — combined with the significant effort required to manage, compile and calculate marketing performance by hand — makes manually generating a timely and accurate analysis impractical.

That’s why many contemporary marketing automation platforms have built-in reporting capabilities, although the types of reports offered, and customization options vary from solution to solution.

Mortgage marketing is essential to any lender’s revenue-generation strategy, but it can also be a significant line-item expense. Therefore, being able to report compliance performance is a crucial capability for any mortgage marketing tool.

Considering the significant effort and funding that mortgage institutions dedicate to their marketing strategies, it stands to reason that lenders want to know whether those efforts are worthwhile. After all, mortgage marketing campaigns are only useful when they are applied effectively. That means getting relevant information to the right consumers at the right time via their preferred communication channels.

Mortgage marketing reports help lenders get the most out of their marketing spend by layering customer data and marketing KPIs to identify positive engagement, as well as gaps in campaign performance. And with the wide range of marketing reporting options available to lenders today, there are countless opportunities for lenders to leverage campaign performance analyses to improve communication processes.

For example, to learn whether or not an SMS text message mortgage marketing campaign is effective, lenders can refer to a marketing report that shows how many text message recipients opened an included link, how many messages resulted in a completed application and how many recipients opted out of text communications altogether. If a large portion of recipients opt out or do not click through to a loan application form, that may indicate an opportunity for the sender to enhance their text message outreach with more engaging content, such an interactive mortgage payment calculator or mortgage-related meme.

It is difficult to cast a wide net by leveraging only one marketing tactic. As a result, the ability to track compliance of omnichannel marketing communications in a centralized, comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) platform is especially valuable.

To stregnthen execution of an omnichannel mortgage marketing strategy, mortgage team leaders and compliance administrators must be prepared to report on content used in any of their mortgage marketing campaigns — from digital campaigns like emails and text messages to more traditional communication methods like phone calls and print marketing.

Depending on an organization’s needs, their compliance officer may only require the baseline marketing reporting options included with their mortgage CRM. In some cases, lenders may want to configure more complex reports or leverage professional service offerings hosted by their CRM provider by requesting customized reports. The amount of hands-on configuration required depends on how complex lenders need their mortgage marketing reports to be.

When a compliance audit occurs, whether it’s regularly scheduled or unexpected, lenders must deliver documentation that corroborates compliance for every marketing message sent within a given time. Being caught off guard by a compliance auditor can lead to costly fines for regulatory violations that could have been prevented with proactive marketing reporting.

To demonstrate compliance in the event of an audit, lenders must report what materials were sent to whom, when they were sent and who reviewed and approved them. For materials co-branded with a referral partner, lenders must also demonstrate that each co-marketing party has shared fair market value. In some situations, such as SMS text message compliance reporting, lenders must document that consumers expressly opted in to receiving communications.

Here are some of the most common mortgage marketing regulations lenders must adhere to:

• RESPA (Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act) – Prohibition of kickbacks for referrals of business and educating borrowers about settlement costs through disclosures about the loan transaction, value and cost-sharing.
• CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) – Requires lenders to give consumers the right to opt-out of emails or from receiving commercial messages. Each email violation is subject to penalties of up to thousands of dollars, so running afoul of CAN-SPAM can be costly.
• DNC (Do not call) Registry – Rules established by the Federal Communications Commission prohibiting commercial telemarketers from calling numbers on the DNC registry, with certain limited exceptions.
• TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) – Restricts and regulates the use of telemarketing calls, auto-dialed calls, pre-recorded calls, text messages and unsolicited faxes.

It is important to remember that these are some of the most well-known lender marketing regulations, but they are not the only ones lenders have to consider. For a comprehensive list of compliance requirements and strategies, read our mortgage marketing compliance guide. Be sure to consult with your legal or compliance departments for information on complying with applicable law.

Every mortgage lender is different and so are their mortgage marketing strategies. Whether a lender wants to track compliance performance with marketing regulations or monitor engagement, the combination and frequency of marketing reports required will be entirely unique to each organization’s needs.

Strong CRMs assist smaller-budget lenders to maintain mortgage marketing compliance by helping them meet the most common compliance audit requirements with readily available marketing reports. Lenders with a more substantial marketing budget may even have staff helping to fulfill additional, more in-depth reporting requests.

Smaller mortgage shops with limited in-house resources may only have the marketing bandwidth and tools to track common KPIs, like email open rates and opt-outs. Custom mortgage marketing reports can sometimes be requested at a lender’s discretion to monitor or compare more specific performance metrics. However, most local mortgage shops will neither need nor desire a fully customizable marketing reporting solution.

On the other hand, top mortgage providers that dedicate millions of dollars each year to broad-spectrum consumer-direct mortgage marketing campaigns will be accustomed to more granular reporting to substantiate campaign compliance and efficacy. These mortgage marketing giants, which we affectionately refer to as “The Billboard Guys,” are more likely to have a dedicated marketing department to develop and automate specific reports. These lenders may even want a solution with integrative capabilities that can allow them to pipe their marketing data into a business intelligence (BI) platform to be analyzed alongside other operational performance measures.

There is no one-size-fits-all mortgage marketing reporting tool or cadence. However, there is a solution that comes preloaded with the most universally used reports and even allows lenders to create their own reports, request custom-built reports and have marketing data flow automatically into the BI solution they use to analyze organizational performance.

Surefire^SM, Black Knight’s industry-leading mortgage CRM platform and marketing engine, has the right-sized reporting structure for any lender regardless of company size, budget or the type of marketing campaigns they use. Surefire administrators can automate omnichannel mortgage marketing campaigns and configure them to their organization’s ideal specifications, then schedule daily, weekly, monthly and annual performance reports for automatic delivery to selected users.

With these four options, Surefire can help support right-sized reporting for any mortgage lender:

Out-of-box reports

Surefire’s out-of-the-box reports, also known as quick reports, track the most commonly used mortgage marketing performance metrics such as email opens, loan anniversaries, client birthdays, contacts by source, text message opt-ins and opt-outs, compliance for co-branded materials and much more. Out-of-the-box reports are available immediately after implementing Surefire, so lenders do not have to perform any extra platform configuration to access them.

DIY reports

In just minutes, Surefire administrators can also create custom reports on the fly using the Surefire platform’s advanced user search configurations. DIY reports can be built for one-off use or can be saved and assigned an ongoing reporting schedule. Surefire’s advanced user search interface is intuitive, but if a lender ever needs additional support, a Surefire representative will walk them through the report configuration process at no extra charge.

Custom reports

Depending on an organization’s size or marketing needs, it may want even more nuanced reporting options that do not come pre-built in the Surefire platform. In these cases, lenders can simply request a custom report from Surefire. A Surefire developer will then work with the lender to determine necessary KPI inputs and outputs and schedule reports for automatic delivery to the appropriate recipients on a regular cadence.

Data Pipes

The Surefire platform’s data piping capability is specifically designed for organizations that have invested in a data warehouse or BI tool and would like to crunch their CRM data alongside other operational performance metrics. By folding information from their contact database and marketing engine into enterprise-wide BI analytics, lenders gain insight into how their marketing efforts align with their overall performance. This extra layer of actionable intelligence can help lenders identify ways to market their products and services more effectively.

Surefire CRM helps mortgage loan officers and brokers stay productive and relevant by facilitating streamlined communication with award-winning creative content backed by intelligent compliance controls.

From the most widely used, pre-configured marketing reports to deeply nuanced reports custom-built by users or Surefire developers, the Surefire platform can align with any lender’s unique marketing goals and budget.

Surefire is continuously enhancing its platform to meet the evolving needs of the mortgage industry and assisting mortgage professionals in:

• Monitoring mortgage marketing campaign performance and compliance with both out-of-the-box and custom-made marketing reports
• Automating the delivery of marketing reports to pre-determined recipients
• Identifying successful marketing efforts and gaps in marketing coverage
• Leveraging integrations that centralize marketing data with broader sales performance metrics