Speed to Lead: What A Minute Means to Your Online Mortgage Leads

Online mortgage leads expect speed to lead tactics in your lead generation process

Picture this for me.

Your next online mortgage lead is reviewing your website. Your site is so compelling they decide they want to fill out your form.

Do you think they stop there?

No, they’re likely going to go back to Google, or whatever source drove them to your site, to look at the next search ranking in line. If that website is half as good as yours they may fill out that form too.

Do you lose sleep at night wondering how many times this happens with your leads?

Will your competition respond more quickly to the lead than you do?

While you cannot know for certain if your lead is going to find an answer with another source, you can know for certain that you have the right system in place to respond to your lead as quickly as possible.

But to be clear, by responding, we’re not simply saying you have an automated thank you email that hits up the leads inbox. We’re suggesting quite a bit more than that.

Speed to Lead

Responding to your lead within the first 5 minutes means you’ll be 21 times more likely to convert the lead. If they have to wait more than 5 minutes, they 80% more likely to do business elsewhere.

Knowing those stats, surely you see the importance of setting up the best-automated system to respond to your leads as quickly as possible.

But, where do you start?

Let’s first look at your options

👉 Read our FREE resource "The Definitive Guide to Mortgage Lead Generation in 2020"

Responding with a Phone Call

If you’re like us, you just love picking up the phone to call someone. Okay, that was sarcastic if you couldn’t read between the lines.

We use our phones for other things besides actually calling or receiving calls. We’re not alone, 90% of customers won’t answer the phone. Further, only 4% of people think the phone ringing is not a disruption.

Not to mention, 80% of sales take 5 follow-up phone calls to close. But, if you want to reach the lead you have to try to call them. Right?

You most surely do, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Using Email to Respond

Responding to your online lead with an email is a great way to immediately contact them, but your leads get up to 121 emails a day. You want to ensure your email gets to the top of their inbox.

How do you do that?

You can build your subject lines to engage the lead, or nail the preview text or write for the web as Optinmonster suggests. But, ultimately, you just don’t know if your lead will open your email or if they’ll click to engage you further.

Relying on Your Chat Solution

Opening up your team to engage your lead while they’re online is a fantastic way to engage them. There are great stories of successes using chat, but they’re also pitfalls. If you believe all the hype, every website should have live chat set up, it is the end-all.

While we agree, live chat is a great option to ensure your web visitors have the means to contact you directly, we do not believe it to be the end-all. We use it, both for our sales efforts and our customer support.

Chat can leave opportunity on the table. You are often left without good user intent data and no way of knowing if they’re a good fit for your funnel. There are ways to create chatbots to engage your customers and try to get more data, but if you’re not into machine learning most of those experiences fail to provide an adequate lift at an affordable price point. Chat does provide value, don’t get us wrong, but it cannot be your only means to ensure you get to your leads quickly.

Now, we are not against AI technology and using solutions to automate your process. Actually, that is very far from the truth. We fully embrace AI technology. After all, it is what we built our solution on.

👉 Read our FREE ebook "Using Technology to Generate More Mortgage Leads"

Speed to lead with Structurely

Aisa Holmes, our solution, was built to respond to your online leads within the first two minutes after submission. She responds with empathy and humanlike tendencies to nurture and qualify your opportunities. She even throws in a typo or an emoji ? now and then to put the lead at ease and get over the “this is a bot” barrier to entry. She does this through text messages (and live chat) with your prospects.

65% of customers would rather text a company than pick up the phone or email. That's a stat we couldn't ignore, and we don't think you should either.

Over 1,600,000 total leads have been contacted by our Aisa Holmes with that number rising even during these times. Now, of course, we are very passionately biased towards the solution we built.

But, we firmly believe there are many ways to skin a cat. That is why we integrate with Mortgage CRM’s so we can be one piece of the speed to lead puzzle.

Your Plan B

The speed to lead battle is not won with one solution. Yes, we would love it if everyone signed up for Structurely to have Aisa reach out and qualify the lead.

But, what happens when the user decides they don’t want to text us?

Yes, that happens, although not that much.

When that does happen you have to have a plan B that includes the options included in this post.

You should send that follow-up email to thank the lead. You should try to reach them on the phone if possible. You should set up a nurturing option to ensure they continue to see your brand as often as possible so you do not miss out on the opportunity.

You’ve got to have a mixture of options available and you have to have a strategy. You also need to understand the attribution of those sources so you can see what is the most successful for you. Or, it is very likely your competition down the street will win your business.