Loan Officers: 5 Email Marketing Metrics That Make or Break Your Business

Good marketing for a loan officer takes a lot of time to perfect, and measuring email marketing metrics can mean the difference between having a great year or a not-so-great year. You have to have a continuous vested interest in it to see a return on your marketing efforts. The primary problem loan officers have when it comes to their marketing program is lack of access to the behind-the-scenes information that reveals the success or failure rate of each campaign.

Since you are a loan expert and not a marketing expert, you might not be aware of the metrics that are important to measure, or you might not know where to find them. That means you can’t track your success (or failure) rates, and you can’t make adjustments to your marketing campaigns to perfect your program. Ultimately, not being in the know or not having someone monitor these metrics means you’re missing out on opportunities to land new business, you’re wasting your marketing dollars and the return on your investment is poor (to say the least).

Here are five behind-the-scenes metrics you (or someone on your team) should monitor for your email marketing program.

1. Open Rates

When you send out a marketing email to your subscribers, you expect them to open it and read it. Open rates measure how many of your subscribers actually open your email campaign once it lands in their inbox. If you don’t know how many subscribers are opening your emails, you have no idea who is reading your emails and who isn’t.

You also don’t know which topics are enticing enough to get your subscribers to open the email to see what you have to say, and which topics are motivating your readers to send emails straight to the trash folder. When you measure and understand open rates, you can produce more hot topics and steer clear of topics that are not of interest to your subscribers. What’s important to remember here too is that even a good email newsletter topic is at risk of having a bad open rate simply because the subject line wasn’t compelling enough. The higher your open rates, the more opportunities you have to get in front of your prospects and clients.

The more opportunities you have to communicate with your audience, the more likely they are to contact you when it comes time for them to finance or refinance a home.

2. Click Rate

Your latest email campaign contains an excerpt of an article on easy ways to cut heating costs in the winter. At the end of the excerpt, there is a link to the rest of the article, which is on your business blog.

The click rate measures how many people click on the link in your email to take them to your blog to read the entire article. This is valuable information because opening your email is only the first step in measuring how intriguing your emails are to the people on your list. Getting them to open the emails is just the first part of the battle. Getting them to read the email and encouraging them to take action from your email is the next step.

3. Date/Time Sent

Your email campaigns always go out on Tuesday and Thursday, around 10 in the morning in your time zone. How do you know if this is the most convenient time for your audience to receive these emails? What would happen to your open and click rates if you sent your emails out on a different day of the week or at a different time of the day?

Study after study has been done to determine the perfect day and time to send out marketing emails. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer for the perfect time for emails to land in inboxes because it really depends on who your audience is. The only true way to know what works for your list is to track and test it. When you can track open and click rates based on changing the day of the week your emails go out, and then separately testing the time of day the emails go out, you can see when your open and click rates reach the highest and the lowest points. Once you have the answer, you know precisely when you should schedule your emails to your subscriber list.

4. Unsubscribe Rate

You send out regular tips, share articles online and send e-newsletters to your subscriber list. You assume your list is growing rather than decreasing and that your messages are being received, read and acted upon. If you’re not monitoring the number of people that unsubscribe from your list, however, you could be wrong.

Measuring unsubscribe rates helps you measure whether or not you are sharing the right information with your audience. Some of the top reasons people unsubscribe from your list are:

• Formatting issues
• Information is not relevant
• Emails do not engage customers

The best way to know why subscribers are bailing on your list is to conduct an exit survey as part of the unsubscribe process. Simply ask them to answer one question: “Why do you no longer wish to receive emails from me?”

5. Bounces

Your weekly newsletter goes out to your email list. You assume everything is hunky-dory. People are reading it. They are gleaning helpful and useful information from it, and they are picking up the phone or shooting you an email when they need mortgage financing help. If bounce rates are not being monitored then you have no idea if this is reality or fiction.

Bounce rates measure the number of emails that are rejected by your recipients’ server. Bounces fall into two categories: hard or soft. A hard bounce is an undeliverable email because the email address no longer exists. A soft bounce is an undeliverable email due to a temporary problem with a subscriber’s email server.

Either way, hard or soft, the intended recipient doesn’t receive your email and therefore doesn’t have the chance to read it, so it’s important to keep your bounce rates as low as possible. Monitoring these rates ensures that your list is up-to-date, that your email address and IP address are in good standing and that your subscribers are receiving your emails.

Assumption Junction

It can be easy to assume that your marketing campaigns are always a smashing success. You can assume that your list is of high quality and that people are consuming the information in the emails and engaging with you and your company. This is all easy to assume because you are busy doing what you do best—offering financing to customers and helping them find the money they need to buy, refinance, or remodel their homes.

The problem is, as a loan officer, you often lack visibility into your marketing programs. When these important statistics are not visible to you it is a flaw in your business, which directly equates to a potential loss of return on your marketing investment.

While you likely are not a marketing expert, you don’t have to be. If you or someone on your team monitors a few basic metrics for your email campaigns you’ll always know if they’re as effective as you want.