Mortgage Direct Mail Marketing
Direct Mail is an important part of our marketing as a company. It took me years of research and trial and error to figure out a system that worked. When we first started using direct mail, we wasted tens of thousands of dollars on things that didn’t work. Direct mail is not a magic bullet, its simply a delivery system. This is the most important piece that you have to understand. Direct Mail is not a type of marketing it is one way of delivering your mortgage marketing.
Think about all of the ways you can deliver your mortgage marketing. You can use newspaper, radio, television, seminars, word of mouth, the Internet, direct mail and hundreds of other methods. What you have to discover and understand is the benefits and weaknesses of each method. No one method is best and in many cases a combination of methods exist.
To give you an example of what I mean lets take a look at Television and Direct Mail.
When it comes to Mortgage Marketing each of them has strengths and weaknesses.
One of televisions primary strengths is credibility. Most people feel that an offer of advertisement made on television carries more credibility than “junk mail”. You never hear anyone talk about “Junk Television” although that’s all commercials are. The inexpensive cost of entry into direct mail makes to too easy to send which hurts the credibility. I finally figured out a way to overcome much of the credibility issues with Direct Mail, but 95% of all mortgage direct mail marketing out there falls subject to this lack of credibility and or classification as mortgage junk mail.
On the flip side direct mail allows you to target much better than television. If you are distributing a message about refinance and you do so on television the message will be received by renters, kids, and all kinds of people who do not need your services. This will lead to unqualified inquiries which eat up time and resources and waste your advertising dollars. With direct mail you can target the type of person you want to market to.
You need to find a good list broker and find out what kind of selection criteria they have available to identify your best potential customer. I recently signed a very large deal with a national data service so I could bypass the list broker and we can now generate our own lists. This was a big step for us in marketing, but a very expensive step as well. I am now able to determine my own lists criteria and cut out the list broker making sure we are marketing to the best mortgage list possible for the type of message we are sending.
People have been telling me lately that I should package up my system and sell it as a marketing kit for mortgage companies. Afterall, the system worked well enough that I was able to generate enough loans to open my own FHA Direct Endorsement Lender at 28 years old. At this point my intention is to continue only using the system within my own company. This gives all of my branch managers and loan officers a competitive advantage by working for me - they get tons of qualified leads and never have to worry about where their next customer is coming from. I know there are people out there selling systems that don’t work half as mine well for crazy amounts of money.
At some point I think I may try to use the system as a way to attract new branch managers and loan officers as I expand the mortgage company into new areas. We’ll see, the one thing I am going to do is continue to share marketing tips here on my blog from time to time.