HEY, THAT'S SMART INTERNET MARKETING

It is hard to stand out among the tens, hundreds, thousands of internet companies available to potential mortgage customers. In this month's article, I am going to mention a few smart things that separate successful mortgage firms from their competitors.

I SHOULD BE IN PICTURES

My business partner, Robert, is a Wall Street Journal junkie. He is always reading about how companies do business online, then we discuss his findings and see what we can do for ourselves and our clients, if anything. Robert recently read about a company that converts those thousands of snapshots you have around the house into digital images. One of the companies mentioned, ScanMyPhotos.com, had an all-you-can-put into a box for $99 special. I purchased their box, filled it with the about 2,000 snapshots, dropped it in the prepaid box they sent me. Then, just four days (that is smart doing such fast turnaround) later I got the box back with all my pictures plus a DVD with the digitized images. Apparently they have some high tech machine that takes a stack of regular photos and converts them to jpg images. Here is where it got real smart...

HEY, THAT'S ME...

Out of all those images I included, they actually selected one that they guessed was my family, and took my family picture and put it onto a postcard coupon for 30% off. In fact, four postcard coupons, all with my family's picture, so I could send it to friends so they would receive a discount on their order. I even gave Robert a coupon since he actually found the company.

FLOWERS FOR MOM

This past Valentine's Day I ordered flowers online for my mother, as I always do. I typically buy from a company called GrowerFlowers.com because I first tried them quite a few years ago, and they always had performed.

There is a little lesson in this as well, as if your current customers had a good experience during their loan, they are far more likely to come back to you next time they need another loan.

Back to the GrowerFlowers.com story. As I was checking out, I remembered they always had a place where I could select what kind of card was to be included in the order and what I wanted the card to say. This year I noticed a few things different; and better. First, they had more cards to choose from and they had images of both the outside of the card and the inside text showing where what I typed would go. Second, they added a feature where I could select a digital picture from my hard drive, and upload it to be imprinted into the card. For a moment, as I was thinking that is a cool feature, I pondered sending that picture of my wife in that cute little negligee that I liked so much... but then I thought mom would prefer to see her granddaughter instead. After looking closer at the picture of my wife, it was probably a good call.

And GrowerFlowers.com does other smart things as well. They have "suggestions" as what to say in your card if you are creatively challenged. They offer a handy reminder feature. I could enter names, birthdays, anniversaries etc of people and then GrowerFlowers.com would send me an email a couple of weeks before so I could remember what to do... Try missing your anniversary -- that is not so smart.

I am sure a few other flower companies are doing this, but I am so pleased that I just keep going back... And, telling my friends.

CAR BUYING

I recently was buying a used car for my daughter and I wanted to try and find out about a car history so I ended up at VehicleIdentificationNumber.com. Normally pop-ups are a turn off, but this pop-up said, "VIN Number Available? If not, please leave us your email address and we will send you a reminder to you."

What was smart about this, is that many people don't have a car VIN number immediately available and this site sent an email reminder to me so I could easily return to the site when I had the VIN number from my car.