Summary
This article focuses on the importance of referral marketing in the mortgage industry. Learn how to build and nurture relationships with realtors, financial planners, and other professionals to generate high-quality leads. By the end, you’ll know how to establish a successful referral marketing program that boosts business growth.
As a mortgage broker, referrals are a critical piece of the puzzle when trying to grow your business. Finding a power partner in your industry can really help with this. Teaming up with Real Estate agents, home inspectors or even contractors can all prove to be beneficial for both of you as you can refer clients back and forth, helping each other grow your businesses in ways that individually you may not be able to do as quickly. While having a power partner is a key accelerator to your growth, you want to make sure that the referral tools you have in place are updated as much as possible, making the barrier of entry to give you a referral and promote more referrals as low as possible.
Using Landing Pages To Generate Referrals
Unlike all the elbow grease involved in cultivating referrals manually for your mortgage business, landing pages are amazing because they are actually working for you, 24/7, even when you are asleep. A good landing page is optimized for conversion and it’s only intended to do one thing: Generate leads. So in essence, the landing page itself is the referral source, working overtime to generate as many leads as possible.
Take the above landing page for instance. It’s a highly optimized page geared towards first-time home buyers. It’s got a call to action with an item of value that any would-be home buyer would be interested in receiving. If for instance a real estate agent is a power partner and they met a young couple wanting to purchase a home for the first time, this is a fantastic page they could send them to so they could start learning about you and pass the referral along to you.
It’s also got a concise contact form that will only take a potential borrower seconds to fill out. If you were running a Facebook ad to first time home buyers and your landing page contained all these elements, this would be a fantastic source of new leads for your mortgage business.
Pro Tip: Create a co-branded landing page for you and your partner combined. Give it an easy to remember url/domain name that you and your partner can memorize and send potential clients to learn about the benefits of working with you both as a team. Make sure you use a CRM like BNTouch that can collect lead information right from your landing pages form so you can start marketing to them right away.
Make Your Landing Pages Lend Themselves To Virality
Sticking with the above example of a first time home buyer landing page, let’s look at ways you can use virality to help you generate more leads by having online users actually refer people to you. If you notice, the landing page shown above does not have a navigation menu. This is by design. Remember, with a landing page, we only want one thing to be accomplished. That is to get someone to fill out the form.
While the form conversion ultimately is the end all and be all, what about people your lead knows that might be in the same boat as them? Are there ways you can optimize your landing page to make it easy for them to share it with their friends, and then potentially their friend’s friends, making your page viral? There indeed are.
If you notice, at the top right of this example landing page there are social media icons. With the click of a button, a potential client can actually share your landing page out to their social media profiles so their friends can see it. They more than likely have like minded friends that are in the same stage in life they are (e.g. also renting and potentially looking to buy a home). If this were the case and they saw that their friend had posted on social media, it would be super simple and of interest to them to click on the link and also fill out your landing page.
Making your landing pages socially shareable is very important. Again, everything is speed and ease of use when it comes to technology. The faster and easier you can make it for someone to be able to share your landing pages, the more shares you are going to get and the more viral they will become.
PRO TIP: Most landing pages redirect to a thank you page that says something like “your report is being emailed to you”. If though you decide to embed the item of value (like a video or a button to click to download an ebook) directly into the thank you page that pops up after a lead fills out a lead form, make sure you DO NOT have social sharing buttons on that thank you page. You don’t want them to be able to share the actual content. You want them to share your landing page so you get the leads.
Using Automated Email Campaigns To Generate Referrals
Sending a regular, automated email campaign from your capable Mortgage CRM to your database is another low friction, high return way you can spark the generation of extra referrals for your business. It’s been proven time and time again that 80-90% of people that know, like and trust you in your database will actively try to seek out a referral for you. The trick to this is that you HAVE TO ask them to do so. So if you don’t ask for them, simply put, you won’t get them.
Set up an automated referral email campaign to go out to your database of power partners, past borrowers and even vendors at large is the perfect way to get this kick-started. Using the tool you use to build landing pages for your other marketing efforts, you can create a quick form that will allow people to simply click a button in your email message and then fill in the names, email addresses and phone numbers of people they know that might need your services. When submitted, these leads should enter right into your CRM, so you can quickly start marketing to and follow up on them. Make sure you always take a moment to thank the person that referred them to you.
Gamify Your Email Campaigns
Gamification is another great way you can get everybody involved in giving you more referrals. To do a gamification email campaign, you’ll follow the same steps noted above, but you’ll simply turn it into a contest. For instance, maybe you have a small vacation home within an hour or two driving distance from the marketplace you service. You draft an email with the same button that can be clicked to refer people to you, but tell them for each referral they give they get one entry into a weekend at your vacation home with their family and a dinner out in the newest local restaurant one night.
People love competing and the idea that every quarter they’ll get to play in a game like this and try and win is definitely enough to kick them into high gear and get them to actively seek out referrals for you.
Automate And Optimize To Grow Your Mortgage Business
The name of the game when it comes to online marketing and technology is speed and ease. While taking the time upfront to automate your referral processes may seem like a daunting task, the truth is it isn’t as hard as you think it is. Once done, you’ll have an optimized engine that is sending you referrals on a consistent basis, netting you more new business year after year than your manual processes ever could have.
Key Takeaways
- Leverage word-of-mouth for business growth
Referral marketing thrives on trusted recommendations, making it an invaluable tool for mortgage professionals looking to grow their client base.
- Establish referral programs to incentivize clients
Offering incentives for referrals encourages satisfied customers to refer friends and family, expanding your network of leads.
- Build strong relationships for ongoing referrals
Fostering positive relationships with clients ensures they are more likely to refer others and continue using your services in the future.
Commonly Asked Questions
- What is referral marketing in the mortgage industry?
Referral marketing involves encouraging satisfied clients to refer friends, family, or colleagues to a mortgage business, leveraging word-of-mouth to generate new leads.
- How can mortgage businesses encourage referrals?
Mortgage businesses can incentivize referrals through rewards, personalized follow-ups, and ensuring a positive client experience to increase the likelihood of recommendations.
- Why is referral marketing effective?
Referral marketing is effective because it leverages trust—people are more likely to trust recommendations from friends and family than traditional advertising.
- How can mortgage companies track referral success?
Mortgage companies can track referrals through referral codes, CRM systems, and follow-up surveys to measure how successful their referral marketing efforts are.
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