Learning to get the most use out of your Internet mortgage leads can take some time, particularity if you have newer loan officers. Your loan officer is your first line of defense on lead quality. Your star Loan Officer’s opinion counts. Your best non-biased feedback will come from your top producers in your office. In many cases they are the most experienced and will give invaluable input on the lead quality. It was surprising for me to discover just how many brokers gave new Internet lead sources to their new loan officers, some who have never worked Internet leads before. We all are concerned with loan officer retention but in order for us to draw a fair conclusion on a new lead source we need to filter them through the loan officers in our office with the most experience in Internet leads. This brings me to the next subject.

Loan Officer History

How many of us at then end of the week or month know how many leads we gave our loan officers and more importantly what lead source it came from? Chances are if you are a large mortgage company your system generates these reports but if you are a smaller company you probably have to rely on verbal feedback. I have heard many situations of companies going through leads month after month without knowing anything about the lead, other than it was bad. Don’t rely on loan officers to give you all the feedback you are looking for. Tracking your lead quality and costs goes hand-in-hand with loan officer productivity on the lead source.

Let’s walk through the below example for June:


You spend a total of $10,875.00 on your leads. You just signed on Acme Lead Co. as a new lead source who sent you 95 leads for June. All your loan officers received leads from that source but one loan officer in particular received 75% of the leads from Acme. Would your company be able to identify that particular loan officer if you had this scenario? If you are able to identify the loan officer you can greatly decrease your lead costs and also identify your weaker loan officers. Let’s assume Terry received 75% of the leads from Acme. Now you are in a position to go to Terry and begin your discovery process. Also it allows you to look at Terry’s overall performance against his other lead sources to determine if, in fact it’s the lead source. Perhaps Terry is a newer loan officer. Reference Terry’s pervious months against June to determine any inconstancies.
Within your company you should be able to determine not only which loan officers are closing leads and from what source but also which loan officers are spending most of your lead budget. Determining your cost per funded loan per loan officer is just as important as determining your overall lead cost per loan officer. Now you are in a much better position to make an educated decision about the quality of a lead source

Successful Telemarketing Leads

If you are purchasing telemarketing leads, see if you can get a copy of the script or the questions that the customer is asked. This will determine if there are any incentive-based methods used to generate their leads. This is by far the most common problem we hear about telemarketing leads. “The customer would say, well I am not interested in a mortgage; I just wanted the free offer” or “I told them I wasn’t interested in a mortgage, but they transferred me anyway”.

If a customer only completed an application to get a gift certificate or some “Free Offer.” Chances are they are not going to be too interested in home financing. Also, see if your own phone number can be added to their call list so you can test the program for yourself prior to taking any leads. Make sure you know exactly how they are acquiring their phone list and that it is scrubbed against the do-not-call registry. You might also want to get a little extra protection and insist that their agreement specifically states that they are compliant with the do-not-call registry.

Lead Broker vs. Lead Generator

Make Sure You Know Who You Are Dealing With!
This is the single most important piece of information you need when looking for a source for your mortgage leads. Are you working with a lead broker or a lead generator? What’s the difference? A lead broker generally purchases leads from third parties (a lead generator) and will resell them to you. A lead generator, on the other hand, generates its own leads directly on its website through its own marketing efforts and sells them directly to you. With a lead broker, it will be difficult to determine how and where they are getting their leads. You should still try, even if it requires you to agree that you will not engage in business with their sources.

It is best to know as much as possible about HOW the lead was actually generated. This will clear up any questions regarding whether a company markets “incentive” offers to consumers. You also want to know when the lead was received and how many times the source sells its leads. If they tell you only four times test them out. Go to the website and complete an application. Sit and wait to see how many calls you get from lenders. Without this information, there is no real way of knowing if four companies or 15 companies received the same lead. Lead generators who wants to earn your business should have no problem giving you the details of their lead generation process. If they won’t, you might be working with a lead broker. Not that this is bad; however, if they are unable to provide you specific information, it does raise the question of the age of the lead and the number of times the lead was actually sold or resold. A lead generator by contrast manages its own website and spends its own advertising dollars to generate its own leads.

Submitted Greg Kazmierczak

How To Generate Your Own Leads

The fastest and most effective way to start getting quality traffic to your website is by using Pay Per Click Ads. Two of the most popular PPC (Pay Per Click) search engines are Google Ad words http://www.google.com, which are featured on many websites including the monster of all search engine GOOGLE and Overture http://www.overture.com, which shows your listings on sites like Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN, and more! PPC advertising offers you the best bang for your buck.

Here is how it works: You bid on specific keywords or key-phrases to have your ad come up when people search for that specific keyword. Take for example, when a person searches for "Refinance." If the person sees your ad and is interested they click on it and you simply pay your bid amount. You may bid $1.00 to get listed at the top of the search # result, but your competitor could then bid $1.05 and outbid and move ahead of you. Bids for the top positions vary from pennies to a few dollars, but most PPC search engines have keyword suggestion tools to help you find keywords and their search results to suit your budget. You may bid on as many keywords as your budget can handle. A general rule of thumb would be to aim for one of the top two positions for keywords with low bid searches and aim for top five for keywords with higher volume searches. You must be careful, though, to bid within your means! PPC’s are all about conversion rates. For example, if you bid $2.00 per click and get 10 clicks and one mortgage lead from those 10 clicks, this means you paid $20.00 for that lead and have a 10% conversion.

Be sure that if you are licensed in only certain states that you bid on state specific keywords, for example "Florida Home Loans" instead of "Home Loans." If not you will get tons of clicks for leads you cannot use.Finally, your ad should follow certain guidelines. You want to describe your product or service in your ad as precisely as possible. Remember, you are not looking for “random visitors” because you are paying for their click whether they become a lead/sale or not! Try to include keywords in the subject that not only bring in good prospects for you but also thwart "curiosity seekers" from clicking on your PPC ad.

You may reproduce or reprint this article if you include the following. This article is provided by TheMortgageWire.com Mortgage Industry News and Marketing Portal.

Submitted by Staff Writer WebMktgSolutions.com