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 - http://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.
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