Following the 2023 Mortgage Industry Marketing Awards, Barcadia Media’s Andy Shields got together with three of this year’s winners – Gemma Reid of MPowered, Leah Brunskill of MFS and Savannah Dewhurst of Coreco – for the first in a series of mortgage marketing panel discussions, chaired by awards sponsor and industry marketing expert, Jeff Knight.
In our fourth installment covering what our speakers discussed in this session, we dive into what our marketing experts had to say about the world of email marketing – is it useful for mortgage advisers? How do you write a good subject line? And how do you get clients to open an email?
Email marketing refers, as the name would suggest, to marketing your services via email to your clients, or potential clients. As Jeff Knight notes, it’s “so important for mortgage brokers to stay in contact with existing clients” – and email marketing can form the basis of that ongoing contact. But there are many factors that affect the success of each email campaign – so where should advisers start?
Tools of the trade
Step one is finding a way to send emails to your clients in bulk – and our experts recommend trying some of the lower-cost, easy to use mailing options available.
Gemma Reid recommended: “Start with something like MailChimp which is low cost. […] There are so many to choose from when you look online – and lots of them have free or ‘kind of free’ options.”
If you’re more experienced, however, or have more budget available, there are other options which give you the opportunity to link your email marketing platform with your CRM (customer relationship management) software.
Brunksill notes: “If you can link your email marketing with your CRM, you’re going to be able to pull that data [about campaigns] so much quicker. So it’s whether the financial input is going to be worth the time you’ll then get – because you’re not constantly changing lists and moving them, you can just pull them straight through and ping [an email] right out.”
As easy as A/B testing
Once you’ve got your chosen email marketing system in place, you’ll need to put campaigns together. But how do you know what will work?
Savannah Dewhirst recommends categorising your client base into different segments – such as recent first time buyers, buy-to-let mortgage holders, and so on – and tailoring your email campaigns to them. She adds: “If you categorise those and make them really personal, you’re going to get a better response than a generic email.”
She continues to say that broader content can work, too, suggesting notifying clients if you’ve published a blog or other website content to make the best use of your data.
But to really drill down into what content works for each group, consider using A/B testing – which, simply put, is splitting your data in two and sending different content to each group to see which email performs better.
Reid notes: “A lot of email providers now give you the option to do A/B testing – so you can look at one variation of the subject line, and something slightly different, and think, ‘which one is going to get my audience to open it?’”
But Knight goes on to caution that, with smaller sets of data, A/B testing can be less valuable – but continues: “There are other ways you can test something – just sending [campaigns] and seeing which ones work.”
Brunskill agreed, recommending that brokers can just try changing subject lines to tweak campaigns and see what gets better results – with all our experts recommending short, snappy subject lines.
The personal touch
Brunskill continues, referencing a statistic showing that people are 68% less likely to engage with content that feels automated: “If you haven’t got that many people [to send emails to], you can personalise throughout the email, as well as the subject line, talking to that person – mentioning their name, talking about their business.”
“Personalisation is the way that you’ll get your emails opened and whether you’re doing that through an automation or because you’re typing it then and there, great.”
Knight agreed that going beyond the basic personalisation options would yield better results, adding; “Yes, say, ‘Hi Jeff’ etc – but if you’re making reference to what the client’s done with you in the past and you know they’ve done a buy-to-let or bridging case, make reference to that. And that’s how you get that really good personalisation.”
Email marketing doesn’t have to be daunting – starting small, with personalised emails, will yield good results.
As Reid puts it: “It’s shown to be one of the best returns on investment of all forms of digital marketing. And you’ve got the power to reach your customers in a place they visit every single day, which is their own inbox”.
To hear what else our marketing experts have to say, watch the entire webinar on the Mortgage Industry Marketing website.
Our marketing experts’ advice for email marketing:
· Think about your subject lines – short, to-the-point, and specific
· Make use of A/B testing to try out different things
· Personalise as much as possible to avoid your emails feeling too robotic
· Start with low-cost tools like MailChimp or Dot Digital
