Ah yes, the mortgage email campaign. Easily one of the most underrated and overcomplicated mortgage marketing practices that we see loan officers attempt to tackle or ignore every day. Working with over 100 top producing loan officers across the country, we get to see A LOT of successful lead conversions coming from mortgage drip campaigns.
Most mortgage companies provide some sort of mortgage email marketing platform for their retail loan officers to use while they’re employed with that company. If you’re a mortgage broker, UWM has some great free tools that you can leverage to create your own email marketing campaign. However, anytime you use someone else’s email content, you’re taking away from your ability to establish a voice for your brand. For some, this isn’t a problem and email marketing is just another way to stay in touch with prospects. However, if you’re interested in building out your own mortgage email marketing strategy, read on for some tips on how best to execute.
A few years ago, when I decided to create my first mortgage drip campaign, at first I searched everywhere for someone who could do it for me or who already had templates that I could buy. This proved extremely difficult as there really wasn’t a done-for-you solution, and every person I talked to about writing the emails for me wanted to charge an arm and a leg and knew next to nothing about the mortgage industry. After putting the task off for weeks, I finally decided to buckle down and write the emails myself using tips and tricks from blogs, ebooks, and whitepapers I had been downloading.
What I found was this:
Writing drip campaign emails was actually really easy as long as you were confident in what you were doing. In fact, most of the tips and tricks that I read were aligned with having a very personal writing style, which made writing the emails kind of like writing to a friend.
Remembering this process last week, while continuing to build out my own drip campaigns for Empower Funnels, I decided to compile some of the most powerful principles that I’ve followed in building out my drip campaigns compiled from hundreds of hours of writing and researching into 3 easy to implement keys to writing the perfect mortgage drip campaign. If you focus on these keys and nothing else, not only will you tap into the power of a good drip campaign, it’ll be easier and more natural than you ever imagined.
Key #1: Leverage The Power of “Short” in Your Mortgage Marketing Emails
I bet you’re going to like this tip the best. This is part of what makes writing drip email content so easy if you’re doing it right. Especially coming from someone in the mortgage industry, a drip email is not typically the most sought-after piece of literature in our email inboxes right?
The good news is you can still create content that is stimulating enough that people will open those emails, but you’ve got to respect your prospect/past client’s time and attention enough to recognize that your ability to keep them engaged is fragile. What’s the best way to do this? Keep everything short.
I’m not just referring to the email itself in this case, so pay attention and heed this advice. When you’re writing drip emails for your mortgage database, “short” needs to be a concept that is top of mind. Here’s what I mean:
Short words- Now is not the time to impress with your eloquent vocabulary. If a first reader can’t read your email, it’s probably too wordy. If a word can be replaced with a shorter, more elementary word and hold the same meaning, replace it. Also, avoid using industry jargon in your emails whenever possible.
Short paragraphs- check out my paragraphs at the beginning of this blog compared to the paragraphs after the title for Key #1. I did this intentionally to illustrate what I mean by short paragraphs. Getting rid of the habitual standard paragraph structure we were taught in grade school can be challenging, but once you get the hang of it you’ll find breaking your ideas into shorter paragraphs can actually be very beneficial to your ability to express yourself in writing.
Short email- This one is obvious. Yes, keep your words and your paragraphs short. Even when you have a lot to say, you should leverage these tips. However, most importantly, you need to make sure that you’re keeping your emails short and concise to show that you respect the time of your prospects. Doing this will condition your prospects to know that your emails will only take a minute to read, increasing your open rate over time and also ensuring the majority who open your emails will get to the point that you were trying to relay in the email.
Short CTA Fulfillment- Lastly, and potentially most importantly, you want your call to action to direct your email recipients to a very short action. Even better, highlight how short the action is.
“Book a time on my calendar, click here and pick a time in 15 seconds or less”
“Who do you know that I can call today and help with a home loan? Reply with their name and number and I’ll send them this message before discussing anything: ” On this one, you can increase referrals by eliminating the reluctance to give up contact information without first talking to their family member or friend. You eliminate the reluctance by writing a message about how the person who referred you was extremely busy but wanted to make sure the family member/friend was taken care of before asking for an appointment if the person referred would like to chat.
Whatever call to action you include, you just need to make sure that the action is short and simple.
Key #2: Make Personal Tone Your #1 Content Focus
This is a HUGE differentiator between someone who writes successful copy and someone who doesn’t. So many salespeople can speak amazingly well, yet have no ability to relay their charisma into their writing. If you want to write successful emails, you’ve got to get over this. The #1 way to get over this? START WRITING. Seriously, do it now! Believe it or not, the reason this helps you get over your writing challenges is not just because “practice makes perfect.” Don’t get me wrong, practicing writing will make you a better writer, no doubt about it. No, for most salespeople the thing that will help them write better is to stop thinking so damn much about writing.
Writing is very simply just recorded thoughts. You speak your thoughts all day long, writing doesn’t have to be any different than that. We’re all so mind-f*cked from writing in school that we overcomplicate what really is best left as simple as possible. The sooner you recognize that your best writing is the writing that sounds like YOU, the sooner writing will come easily to you and potentially could even become enjoyable. I know for me personally, recognizing this was the point that I discovered that one of my favorite things to do is to write.
Breaking up your paragraphs as we talked about in the last key will help here. Part of the reason shorter paragraphs are easier to read is that they’re more aligned with how we think and talk. Nobody talks the way we’ve been taught to write most of our lives, and therefore most people don’t engage when reading traditional writing as much as they do when the content is broken up and sounds conversational.
If you struggle with this, try speaking into a voice recorder, having that transcribed, and starting your emails by editing the transcription. If you speak better than you write, this can be a game changer. For me personally, that doesn’t work because I formulate my thoughts much better by writing than I do by speaking. From what I can tell though, most people feel the opposite.
Key #3: Always Include a Call-to-Action or Valuable Information
Every email you write should have some sort of purpose. In order to write successfully, you may need to “forget” about that purpose while you write the main body of the email, but you should always tie everything together with either a CTA or a piece of valuable information. Traditionally, marketers have confused this with the idea that every single email you send out needs to have value baked into it. This is what made educational drip campaigns so popular, but isn’t necessarily the best approach.
Making every one of your emails a “tip” or “market insight” or anything of that nature will ensure that the only people that open your emails are those that are currently interested in that particular subject. However, if you instead focus on having a personal voice in your writing, and making that writing easy to read, you’ll get far more people interested in reading what you have to say.
Once you have their attention, you want to either A) capitalize on it with a CTA or B) justify it with a piece of valuable information.
Capitalize on their attention with a CTA- This is where you include your call to a short action I talked about in the previous key. Want to get them on the phone? Include a call to action to a scheduler. Calendly is a great free one you can use if you don’t already have one. Want them to send you a referral? Include a CTA to send you their info! Want to create engagement? Include a CTA to ask their #1 home buying question right now. Most of your emails to prospects and leads should include a CTA.
Justify their attention with a piece of valuable information- Here’s the deal with “valuable” information: It’s all relative. If you get someone to open an email with the promise of value, you’re going to have to fight against the expectations you set for yourself for that person to perceive it as valuable. On the other hand, if you get them to open the email out of curiosity, or because they enjoy reading what you write, then you can get away with simply including a valuable piece of information at the end of your email and the person reading it will perceive it as more valuable, almost like a pleasant surprise. This justifies reading the email you sent in their minds and ensures you can continue to stay top of mind with your emails in the future.
Surprise Key #4 To a Successful Mortgage Drip Campaign
Ready for the biggest key to a successful drip campaign, more significant than any of the 3 keys I just mentioned?
HAVING DRIP CAMPAIGNS AT ALL.
Seriously, if I can boil everything I said in this blog to one crucial lesson it’s this: Drip campaigns are extremely undervalued and extremely overcomplicated. Just sit down at your desk, and start typing emails like you’re writing to a friend. I promise you, you’re not going to do any damage to your database that way. On the other hand, if you overcomplicate it and start trying to find the best service or put together the best newsletter, or anything along those lines, you might not be able to say the same thing.
We Help Loan Officers Working Through the Same Challenges You Are
If drip campaigns are something you’ve had on your radar for a long time and never taken any action towards implementing, don’t worry. You’re not alone. In fact, there are probably a few other marketing ideas you’ve thought about implementing that you haven’t been able to? Now we’re not a replacement for a marketing department, but we can create a steady stream of inbound business that frees up your time and energy to focus on scaling up your business.
Click here to check out our mortgage lead generation system.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you at the top!
Michael McAllister