We Empower Loan Officers to Take Control of Their Business
Empower Funnels is a marketing and technology company based out of Meridian, Idaho
that exclusively services mortgage loan officers/mortgage brokers. Our lead generation
service is best in class at helping loan officers build their purchase pipeline with high-quality
mortgage leads BEFORE they get to a real estate agent.
Why Was Empower
Funnels Created?
Empower Funnels Was Built By a
Loan Officer Who Struggled to
Grow His Business Traditionally
Meet Michael McAllister, builder of the original Empower Funnels system. Michael was 21 years old when he got into the mortgage industry. He started like many others, working inside of a branch for a large retail bank. Michael took to his role right away (or so he thought). While Michael thought he enjoyed originating loans, what he actually enjoyed was problem-solving, guideline-learning, and process/workflow-building.
Basically, Michael enjoyed processing loans referred to him from the bank or, those that he solicited via lead lists that the bank provided him. However, Michael failed to hit his income goal in his first full year as a loan officer. So he then spent weeks coming up with a plan to ensure that he crushed his goal the next year.
He knew that the only way he was going to make the income he was reaching for was to leave the big bank and have a steady stream of inbound business the same way companies like Quicken Loans did. After all, Quicken Loans was definitely not a fan favorite for real estate agents and yet their presence in the industry is undeniable.
He knew that at 22 years old, he didn't enjoy hanging out with real estate agents and they probably didn't enjoy hanging out with him. He didn't know how else to get business from them other than to beg or pull out his wallet, and he wasn't willing to do either. That's when he set out to reverse engineer the campaigns that made companies like Lending Tree, Veterans United, and Quicken Loans so much money.
We Believe The Real Estate
Industry As a Whole is Trying to
Squeeze Loan Officers Out
If you ask any mortgage professional what the most important piece of a real estate transaction is, it's not hard to predict that the answer would probably be "the mortgage." In fact, you could probably ask a lot of other professionals in the real estate industry the same question and get the same answer, depending on who you talk to.
Let's face it, loan officers do all of the work and get none of the glory. Mortgages are much more complex to understand, have more potential for unforeseen issues, and have more deadlines to meet/keep track of throughout the process. Yet, for some reason, you have companies like Zillow Home Loans and Keller Mortgage coming on the scene to try and squeeze the loan officer out first!
Why is that? Because the most valuable piece of a real estate transaction is the person who controls the referral flow. Which is most often the person who gets to the lead first. Trust is something that technology can't replace. In our opinion, there are a lot of other things that a quality local loan officer does that can't be replaced as well, but this is the outlook of those that are doing the lobbying, developing the technology, and ultimately determining the direction of our industry.
Empower Funnels is an attempt by the loan officer to fight back and gain some control of their business in an age where data and lead flow will soon become the most important currency in the mortgage industry.
The Empower Funnels Process
Create Google Ads Campaign
Based on Understanding of
Modern Search Psychology
Most loan officers and mortgage marketers don't understand the most crucial and fundamental piece of knowledge needed to launch a successful Google Ads campaign: What's going on inside the head of someone searching online for mortgage information?
Most people who attempt to launch a mortgage Google PPC campaign do so using strategies based on search behavior 15 years ago. Back when Google was much simpler than it is today. What would you do if you got in your car this morning and it wouldn't start? Would you call the first mechanic you knew? Would you search online for "mechanic near me"?
Or would you try and search your car's symptoms to get an idea of what you were working with before deciding what your next step was? Regardless of your answer, most people are going to pick the last one and the same psychology applies to mortgages. People aren't going online to find a loan officer to talk to. If they thought they were ready to talk to a loan officer, they'd ask their friends and family for a recommendation on Facebook.
Instead, they have questions that they want to get answered ahead of time. Questions like, "How much house can I afford?" "How much down payment do I need?" or "Can I use pension income to qualify for a house?" The best companies in consumer direct mortgage lead generation understand this psychology and position their ads where people are asking those questions. So of course that's where we decided to start at Empower Funnels!
Drive Traffic From the Ads to a High
Converting Mortgage Landing Page
Once the right person clicks on your ad, we need to do our best to get that person to leave us their contact information (or become a lead). We do this by following our own process and modeling successful mortgage lead generation campaigns before us.
By looking at what the top companies in consumer direct mortgage lead generation are doing on their landing pages, comparing and contrasting similarities and differences, and creating pages that take the best performing elements from each, we give you a great baseline for your mortgage lead generation campaign.
From there, we continuously are testing minor changes in an effort to improve our landing page conversion rate beyond the 20-23% that our pages currently average (20-23% of people who click on our loan officer's ads become a lead). In our live demonstration, we walk you through exactly what those elements are and show you a side by side comparison of our pages and the most successful landing pages in the mortgage space. Click below to learn more!
Take Extra Measures To Ensure Our
Clients Only Spend Time With Leads
That Are Worth It
As we discuss in our critique of Facebook Ads, one of the biggest challenges of marketing in the mortgage space is handling the tight rope balancing act between making your marketing appealing, but not making it TOO appealing to where you start to get too many leads that have no business having a home buying discussion.
One of the ways we ensure the value of the leads that loan officers generate with our system is by requiring that the lead fill out a 15 question lead form prior to submitting their contact information. This creates a layer of buy-in and engagement from the lead that didn't exist previously, making it more likely that the lead had the intent that you were chasing in the first place. It also gives us a way to identify which leads are most likely to convert in a timeframe that aligns with our loan officer's goals.
By tracking which leads close, and what they self-reported on the form when they inquired, we can adjust your campaign and mark leads in your CRM as low probability or high probability to protect the time you're investing in the system. In addition to this, we've recently implemented something we here at Empower Funnels call Field-Level Contact Validation.
What this does is it evaluates the email address and phone number that they provide on the form (one at a time), and ensures that they are indeed a valid email address and valid phone number before allowing the lead to continue with the form and submit their information. Obviously, this results in less "mickey mouse leads" or BS information provided to the loan officer, protecting your time even further.
Add Leads to Our Proprietary Lead
Management/Marketing Automation
System for Automating Initial Contact
Online mortgage leads inherently convert at a very low rate when compared to other lead/referral sources. We know that there are compensating factors with mortgage leads that don't exist with other sources, but only if you can ensure that you're maximizing the use of your time, and not chasing leads that don't want to talk to you.
For this reason, every lead we generate we add to EmpowerContact, our Lead Management/Marketing Automation System exclusively available to Empower Funnels clients.
In this system, we send text messages, emails, and ringless voicemails to the lead, trying to get them to engage and identify themselves as a quality or non-quality lead (either via their response or the data they filled out on the form). Instantly we're able to take a pool of 100 leads where there are approx 3 deals to be closed in the next 4 months, and immediately eliminate 65-70% of them either by their lack of response, or their response identifying themselves as not being worth your time, energy, and attention.
From a time investment perspective, this effectively reduces your workload by over 35% as the system is completing dozens of follow up actions to try and get the lead to engage upfront. Our scripts and campaigns are proven to get the results of the expectations we set for our clients upfront, so you can rest assured the system truly is "plug-and-play."
Use More Automation and Regular
One-on-One Coaching to Ensure
The Highest Possible ROI w/ The System
One of the biggest differences between working with Empower Funnels versus a traditional mortgage lead vendor is going to be the full-scale partnership that exists at the point that we're working together. From the day you sign up with us, you'll be introduced to your marketing team here at Empower as they help you get set up and ready to receive leads.
We perform a "Go Live Call" that is an hour of walking you through the technology, marketing, and best practices for converting before you ever receive your first lead. From there, we're setting up one-on-one conversion coaching sessions with you every 2-3 weeks for the first few months that you're with us depending on how much support you feel like you need.
We meet with every one of our clients at a minimum of once a month as even once a loan officer gets the hang of converting leads, we want to keep you up to date with the latest tips, tricks, and best practices. By meeting with all 100+ of our LOs every 2-4 weeks, we are able to get a better insight than any other marketing company in the mortgage industry into what the best practices are for converting mortgage leads and growing your mortgage business with digital marketing.
We work with top performers from large companies, and small broker shops alike to build a database of the best conversion and digital marketing practices in the industry today, and share that with our other clients across the country. Most loan officers have no idea how to convert internet leads when they start working with us. You may have generated leads from Google previously, or bought leads from expensive lead vendors, but you've never worked mortgage leads the way that we'll have you working mortgage leads. Consumer direct mortgage marketing has never been so rewarding.
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