Your Mortgage Emails May Not Be Reaching Your Customers!
Frequently, we hear from mortgage companies complaining about poor response rates to their emails. A typical company will say, “Potential clients will email our agents and then we respond promptly, as our revenue depends upon internet customers. But it seems like we can’t get any more replies from the person… why not?”
The main reason we find for potential customers not responding to you (besides interest rates that are too high) is that your email gets deleted by your customer’s Spam filters.
There are many reasons why a Spam filter might tag your email:
You Are Blacklisted
You have been blacklisted by one of the major blacklist organizations that keep track of Spammers and exploitable servers. You can tell if you have been entered onto this list by checking the domain you use to send email. Go to http://www.whois.sc and enter your domain.
Another Company Is Blacklisted
Some web hosting firms have virtual servers which allows many different companies to share a single IP address (An IP address is like a license plate, it accompanies your email and tells them where you are from.) It is possible that a company that is sharing an IP address with you is Spamming and they have been blacklisted, meaning you too are on this list, as you both have the same IP address.
Your Customer Is Blacklisted
Your potential client may have been blacklisted. In example if you enter the company buydomains.com http://www.whois.sc/buydomains.com you will see that under “Blacklist Status” they are listed. In essence, if your mail server subscribes to this blacklist, any emails from buydomains.com will be filtered out and deleted before you ever see them.
In example, a receptionist might be seeking a loan and email you using her company email address, which is blacklisted. In this case, if your mail server uses a blacklist check, her email will not reach you. She will probably assume you don’t want her business and simply contact the next mortgage company.
How do you get un-blacklisted? You don’t. Your best bet is to buy a new domain and get a new IP address that is not on a blacklist.
Poor “From” Email Settings
Often replies from mortgage companies to their clients have the “from” address constructed in a manner that appears Spammish. That is, the return address might read “Sales” or “Info” at your company name. Because many Spammers use “Sales” or “Info”, you should avoid this. My sister recently sent me an email and my filters put it in the Spam folder. She had recently “updated” her email to read from, “Info” info@1stchineseherbs.com. The use of the word “Info” triggered a possible Spam alert.
My partner incorporates the following in his return address: Full name, clickable URL and case corrected email address, i.e., “Robert Farris – https://www.mortgagepromote.com/” Robert@MortgagePromote.com.
By showing his full name, and adding a clickable URL link for customer convenience, coupled with the easy to read case of his email address (i.e. not the hard to read, all lower case robert@mortgagepromote.com), Robert makes it more probable that his email will not get pick off by a filter and will be easy to decipher by the recipient.
Mortgage Related Words
Because there is so much unsolicited email today, with a fair amount of it centering on mortgages, it is possible that your valid email is picked up by a Spam filter because of the word mortgage or home loan. You don’t have a lot of control over this and it is a major problem for ethical companies sending emails on the net.
Unmatched Return Email Address
Some mortgage companies allow their staff to use whatever email address the representative wants. In example someone at our company should be using Kenzie@MortgagePromote.com, but she might use her personal email such as FishingIsBetterThanWork@hotmail.com.
Any business correspondence from your company to a customer should always match the URL of your company. Two major problems occur when you fail to monitor return email addresses. The first problem is that your email may get filtered out as Spam, or it may not get read by the recipient as they were expecting an email from MortgagePromote.com, but not from FishingIsBetterThanWork@hotmail.com.
The second problem is that you lose control of your customers. If Kenzie ever leaves the company, her leads will follow her as they have the email FishingIsBetterThanWork@hotmail.com, not Kenzie@MortgagePromote.com. You can easily redirect her old company email address to here replacement. If you don’t, the result is you lose business.
Major ISP Spam Filters
Major providers of internet access are now installing their own proprietary filters. Large companies such as MSN, Earthlink and AOL are routinely adding thousands of banned email addresses every day. If you offer a newsletter to your customer base, and mass send emails to one of these major providers with the words “mortgage” and “interest rate” in the subject or body, you will likely get flagged as a Spammer.
Difficult or Long Url.
If you have a hard to spell or exceptionally long domain name, this could be impacting your business if potential customers are mistyping the URL. Examples might be: tatummortgages.com (the two “m’s” together) or SanFranciscoValleyMortgageBrokerage.com (too long to easily remembered).
Sometimes the plural, or singular, version of your domain name might be more memorable to different customers. In example, if your company is called SanClementeHomeLoans.com and you see that SanClementeHomeLoan.com is available, you might buy the domain and redirect it to your main domain. In this way if your visitors mistype your URL, they still end up where they wanted to go.
A Final Suggestion
On our MortgagePromote.com web site, we switched from allowing clickable “email us” links to a form based method to contact us. This accomplished two goals; first it removed our email address from getting “spidered and collected” by Spammers and second it allowed us to be sure that we get email from all that wanted to contact us.
One other trick we did with the form was to make the “from email address” default to a special email address (something like Forms@MortgagePromote.com) and then all email from that address would automatically be accepted, not filtered, and put into a special filter. The person’s email address is contained in the body of our form.
Using these ideas, you can make email a revenue producing aspect of your online mortgage business.
For more information on these programs, please visit: http://www.MortgagePromote.com/logsoftware.htm
Rod Aries and Robert Farris are co-founders of MortgagePromote.com, a leading Internet marketing provider to corporate mortgage clients. On request, they conduct nationwide training seminars covering Internet marketing strategies, lead generation, web site development techniques and more.
Web site: https://mortgagepromote.com
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