Mortgage Marketing & Lead Generation Blog

By JC Kadii, Mortgage Email Marketing Services

Over the past 5 years, I have provided email marketing services to help mortgage professionals attract and convert leads. In addition to customizing email newsletter templates, setting up auto-responders, developing ezine content, and building subscriber lists, I also check open rates to recognize email response patterns.

One of the most surprising things I have learned is that the best time to launch your email marketing program is during a holiday season. It can be any holiday – Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, or the Christmas and New Year’s season.

Why? People cannot seem to resist opening an email with a holiday themed subject line such as “Happy Thanksgiving.”

The high open rates allow you to introduce your new mortgage email marketing newsletter to a receptive audience. That way, the next email newsletter won’t come as a surprise.

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Part of what I do as a virtual assistant to mortgage brokers includes providing Mortgage Website Makevoers where we do everything from improving search engine positioning to creating content to sprucing up website graphics.

Quite a few clients use the ala mode website. As a result, it’s been fun to poke around and discover shortcuts. One of my favorite is that ala mode allows you to do a global search and replace.

Want to replace a particular word or phrase? Not a problem. Here’s how ala mode handles it.

1. Log onto your alamode mortgage website’s administrative panel.

2. Click the XSite button.
   
   

3. Under the extra tools panel (on the bottom left hand corner of your screen), click Search and Replace.
   
   

4. Enter your search and replace phrases. Be extremely careful, this change is permanent.
   
   

5. Click the search and replace button.

That’s it!

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Would you like to send a marketing piece that:

• stays in front of your referral source for an
  entire year,

• reminds them of your unique selling proposition,
  and

• doesn’t cost a fortune?

If you answered “yes,” have I got the idea for you. It’s
called a mortgage tips calendar.

What is a tips calendar? It’s simply a
custom-designed calendar you send to your
prospects and/or SOI (sphere of influence). With low
cost print-on-demand options, you don’t have to spend
a fortune or print hundreds of calendars.

Sources for print-on-demand calendars include lulu.com, cafepress.com and vistaprint.com

Here are some examples:

• A calendar with a wealth-building tip for each
  month of the year.

• A calendar you send to your Realtor® partners full
  of low-cost, highly effective marketing tips.

• A calendar targeted to your first-time home buyer
  market, with tips to prepare them for home
  ownership.

Can you imagine the possibilities? Everyone who
uses your calendar will have your marketing message
at their fingertips throughout 2009.

Keys to making your tips calendar effective:

• Make it uniquely you,

• Create an attractive design,
• Send it out no later than November 5.

By JC Kadii, MortgageVirtualAssistant.com^SM

This change may not affect your Encompass system, but I thought you should know about it.

Here’s how it works. The first time you log onto Encompass after the upgrade has been installed, you’ll get a dialog box about a new feature. If you click OK, you are giving the software permission to add this feature.

As you save a client’s file for the first time, the system requests the borrower’s email address. You enter your client’s email address.

Your client receives an email from you, thanking them for their application and letting them know you are working on the loan. So far so good.

The email from you (which you did not write, but the LOS sends on your behalf) also recommends a website your borrower can visit to get resources to help them throughout the moving process. It offers membership in the program which is free (for the time being), and contains a link for your client to click through to the site.

Just in case this feature has been added to your version of Encompass, and you do not want your clients to get these emails, here’s how you remove it.

In Encompass

• Click the Settings Tab

• Select Personal Settings
• Click the Plus Sign
• Click the service name (the initials are HP)
• Click Manage Settings
• Uncheck the Box
• Click OK.

Of course, an alternative is to leave the email field blank when the box pops up asking you for your borrower’s email address.

By JC Kadii, MortgageVirtualAssistant.com^SM

After several people asked me for my non-existent twitter id, I finally took the plunge and signed up.

The jury is out right now. With barely enough time to keep up with my blogs, email marketing and other activities, I am not sure how I can work twitter into my schedule.

In the short time I’ve been on twitter, I’ve found a couple of AR members. Hi, Renae and Kim

Here are a couple of others I enjoy following.

4imprint.com – I’ve been a customer of theirs for years, and love their products and customer service. Every once in a while, they’ll tweet about a limited item sale. Act fast, to take advantage of great deals. I’m still in tears over missing this one.

CNET News – great for a news junkie like me. I get to see the headlines of tech news as it happens.

Oh well, I guess I’ll keep Twip toeing twu the twulips.

By JC Kadii, MortgageVirtualAssistant.com^SM

It is good practice (not to mention a sanity saver) to file your email in folders. It not only helps you stay organized, it keeps your inbox clear of clutter.

You can set up Outlook rules to automatically file emails in a folder based on sender, recipient, subject line or other criteria.

But what if you receive an email that isn’t automatically filed in the proper folder?

The old way involved,

• Opening the email

• Closing it
• Then dragging it to the appropriate folder.

There’s a quicker, easier way.
With the email still open, Type Ctrl + Shift + V. A dialog box opens, showing your available folders. Select the folder, then presto, chango, your email is moved.

How easy is that?

Want more Outlook tips? Stay tuned for my new webinar, Help for Mail Hoarders, full of quick and easy tips to help people clean their in boxes and organize their email.

By JC Kadii, MortgageVirtualAssistant.com^SM

According to this great post by Kim Wood, organizing your emails by subject is one technique you can use to quickly clean out your inbox.

What if you have an email without a subject, or worse yet, one with a subject that isn’t related to the email?

With Outlook, you can quickly change the subject of any email you’ve received (or sent).

1. Open the email

2. Highlight the subject line.
3. Type your new subject
4. Click File then Save or type [Ctrl]S to save the email.

By JC Kadii, MortgageVirtualAssistant.com^SM

One of my (unpaid) duties as a Mortgage Virtual Assistant is to stay abreast of all the current events about the industry.

I’ve been doing a lot of research over the past few days into the Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac bailout is an effort to answer the question: “What does it mean for American homeowners?”

The answer I’ve been able to come up with is simply this: “Time will tell.”
The prognosticators say that the immediate effect will be lower interest rates.

Here are some interesting links:

The Fannie And Freddie Bailout, In 10 Easy Links A good starting point. Reading the first paragraph brought to mind a song I remember from my childhood: “Who Owns Papa’s Land” by Sonny Okusons.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94393089

This article contains frequently asked questions about the bailout, answered by Treasury Secretary Paulson.

The following phrase was the most interesting part of the article. What effect will reducing the portfolio of mortgage-backed securities have on the market?

increasing Fannie and Freddie’s portfolio of mortgage-backed securities
through the end of 2009, then reducing them by 10 percent each year, starting in 2010.

Local businesses assess fallout of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac bailout
from the Washington Business Journal. This article provides an interesting twist on the bailout, exploring how the bailout may affect the Washington, DC economy. Did you know that close to 10,000 people are employed by the GSEs? Businesses that work for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are wondering how the government takeover will affect their contracts.

So, what do you think? What effect will this have? Do you have any interesting links to share?

So, I am playing the new cycle of Accountability Central. For those of you who haven’t played before, basically, you set up a spreadsheet to track your marketing activities during the week. You give yourself points for each activity, and post your progress to the group.

Highlights of the week August 11 – 17, 2008.

• I signed on another Mortgage Website Makeover client!

• Suggested additional training courses to another client, and they are very enthusiastic. I won’t know for sure until the beginning of the next fiscal year (October).
• Made connections with a couple of potential strategic partners

.
Now if I could only quadruple my results, I’d be fine.

• Quick links:

• The Accountability Central group (started by Todd Clark) is here.
• Mary Warren’s primer on how the point system works.

By JC Kadii, MortgageVirtualAssistant.com^SM

An important part of online marketing is managing information, so that you don’t suffer from information overload. Another important part is managing your online reputation. One way to do both is to set up a google alert, so that you receive an email when your name or industry appeals on a website or blog.

For you twitter users, there’s a service called Tweetbeep. You can use tweetbeep to know who is twittering about you, your industry, or any other topic you are interested in following. According to the tweetbeep website, you can check for mentions of your site, even if the link is shortened using a service such as tinyurl.com

Oh, did I mention it’s free?