Optimizing Your Site for Mortgage Loan Lead Generation

Now that you’re establishing your expertise with high-quality content, optimize your site to make it easy for visitors to complete an action that gets them into your pipeline for follow-up. There are a few basic principles to follow in order to set yourself up for more success in converting traffic to mortgage leads:

1. Trim the clutter
2. Clear and obvious calls-to-action
3. Reduce friction

Trim the clutter

The concept of trimming, or altogether removing, the clutter is quite self-explanatory. Your site should:

• Be easily scannable
• Not have busy movements
• Not have competing calls-to-action on a single page

Every page should have a purpose and that purpose should be respected. Research has proven that you have a very small window of opportunity (a few seconds) to “not lose” the attention of a new visitor.

If your site inundates someone with disconnected and seemingly random information, they will exit. If your site loads too slowly, people will exit before even seeing the homepage.Make sure a new visitor can clearly understand who you are and what you do within a couple of seconds of landing on your website or landing pages.

Clear and obvious calls-to-action

A call-to-action (CTA) is simply something that prompts your visitors to take action. It can be as simple as a line of text, button, form, or otherwise. To bolster the effectiveness of your CTAs, make sure they clearly describe what the action is that someone will be taking. This will eliminate the fear of what’s to come that causes people to leave.

CTAs should be highly visible. Particularly on your homepage, you want your primary CTA to be “above the fold”. This means that a visitor does not need to scroll down the page in order to see the CTA and take the desired action. Don’t let your CTAs get lost by choosing colors, sizes, and placements that are eye-catching.

Reduce friction

Reducing the friction of your CTAs is vital to achieving the desired result – mortgage leads in your pipeline. Friction is anything that makes it difficult or slows down the process of completing your desired actions. Make completing your actions as short and quick as possible for prospects so they have less reason to exit. The best example of this is the long form 1003 loan application.

If a prospect that you have no relationship with is presented with a full 1003 to complete, the odds of them actually submitting that information to you will plummet. Ask as few questions as you possibly can to get the person in your pipeline. Once they’re in your pipeline, follow-up to gather the rest of their info.

If you’ve integrated these principles into your website, you’ve got the beginnings of an engine to generate mortgage leads. Now that the base is solid, it’s time to take actions that increase the visibility and traffic to your site.

Tips for Managing Partnerships

Lists

This tip comes from an interview we had with The CORE Training Coach, Linda Rudd. Linda talks about how she uses segmented lists to track her partners and the activities within that segment.

The great part about this tip is that it allows you to stay flexible with your engagement programs. Realtors are interested in different things than builders, and their businesses operate much differently. By targeting segments and delivering value that is specific to the profession or relationship you can be much more effective and organized with your partner marketing campaigns.

Appointment Stacking

The concept and execution of appointment stacking is a tip that we stumbled upon while scavenging the internet for every piece of content we could find from loan officers. Loan officer Michael Mann describes exactly how he lines up face-to-face appointments with his referral partners in order to be as efficient as possible, extracting as much value as he can. If you’re struggling to find the time for these meetings, check out his post.

Social Media

In part 2 we investigated social media as a viable source of web traffic for your website, but that isn’t the only way to squeeze additional value out of the channel. Social media gives you a quick and free way to engage with your referral partners, celebrate their successes, and share their content with your followers.

Not only does this let your business partners know that you’re thinking about them and care about what they’re doing, but it also keeps you top-of-mind for when they have mortgage leads to refer or reciprocal content that could be shared.

Follow-up

This is the golden rule of all relationship building strategies, whether partners or former clients.

Always, ALWAYS follow-up.

You may turn off some possible partners by being, in their opinion, overly ambitious, but the payoff with everyone else will make the effort worth it. If a small handful of the potential partners you consistently follow-up with begin sending you just one extra mortgage lead each per month, you will be greatly increasing your production.