Mortgage Marketing?

Makk101

Hello,
I'm not sure if im writing this in the right place. But I needed some quick advice. I own a small but successful mortgage marketing company thats based in the US. I have a good friend in the UK that I am considering partnering with to bring some of our marketing products and leads to the UK.

I'm trying to do a little research first before we make the jump. My questions are:

Do UK Mortgage Banks buy leads for their sales team or is it usually up to the employee/rep to purchase their own?

Also, do you believe the market for UK mortgage leads/marketing to be good, saturated, bad?

Any help would be much appreciated

MortgageMamma

Makk101 wrote:

Hello,
I'm not sure if im writing this in the right place. But I needed some quick advice. I own a small but successful mortgage marketing company thats based in the US. I have a good friend in the UK that I am considering partnering with to bring some of our marketing products and leads to the UK.

Good Luck!

I'm trying to do a little research first before we make the jump. My questions are:

Do UK Mortgage Banks buy leads for their sales team or is it usually up to the employee/rep to purchase their own?

Yes and No. High street banks usually get their leads through name awareness and presence, and multimillion pound advertising campaigns on TV radio, etc
Private firms of whole of market advisors, i.e. those with access to all of the market, sometimes do buy in leads, but the conversion rates are generally very low, say around 1-2/10. Most firms get fed up with this (my own included) after a while and look for other ways to generate business as its expensive and the companies who sell the leads will often not reinburse for a dead lead.

Also, do you believe the market for UK mortgage leads/marketing to be good, saturated, bad?

I believe the market for QUALITY leads is bad. Youhave companies such as leadbay and PAA leads as the main distributors, but I personally don't like their policies, i.e. if you get a lead from someone who's been on unemployment benefit for 5 years looking to mortgage they won't refund your £40 or whatever. There are some companies that will get the lead and convert it into a sit down appointment for you, however they will not investigate if the customer is tied in to their existing mortgage, they just offer the customer a "free financial review". I personally have not used this method but I've heard its a waste of time.

Any help would be much appreciated

I hope this helps a little, and I hope this post stimulates more advisors to post their experience of lead generation companies, as I too would be interested to know their thoughts and experiences.

MM

dunstonh

Lead banks are a complete and utter waste of money. I wouldn't touch any with a bargepole. You tend to find that those that have used them are desperate for business and see it as a last resort and find that the success rate is tiny. I have never known anyone make any money from dealing with lead banks. Its the old Allied Dunbar approach and they failed big time.

You would generally find most of the decent firms wouldnt want to touch lead generation companies and you would find it hard to provide quality leads because the regulation involved with marketing mortgages would hamper you obtaining the information you need to provide a quality lead.

Remember you are not allowed to cold call mortgage business. So how would you propose to get quality leads if you cannot cold call anyone?

payless

Never been a route that has attracted me, although I do have friends who are managers in lager firms, in which they ( the firm or some of their advisers individually ) buy leads, and they say they are generally sucessful , although I find in the f/s industry there is a general over hype of how "sucessful" things are ( in terms of volume / buisness written/ profits) although with what been seen in some of the larger IFA salesforces , whats said is not always bourne out.

Makk101

Thanks for the responses. It seems interesting that there are only a few big lead providers in the UK. In the US there are also a lot of unscrupulous lead providers as well that wont give you a good bang for your buck. However, the few that do work have made a lot of advisors rich.

I work with a few of the Credit Bureaus in the states and built a statistal credit model (for data) that has been really successful for homeowner targeted direct mailers. But because of an angry old boss and a lawsuit I have to wait another year for my US Non Compete contract to expire. So I'm looking at other markets for a while.

So what types of regulations exist that are negative towards mortgage marketing? You can't do any cold calling at all? Or is there just a no call list like here?

Does anyone have any experience with direct mail? Is direct mail legal? Or PPC marketing?

Thanks again for all the responses.

Makk101

Also, does anyone know what the average take home profit an advisor gets in the UK when he closes his home on a remortgage or a purchase? It would really help me because I have to factor that into what would be considered a good ROI. Thanks!

Zoetoes

The company I used to work for provided marketing work for a leading High Street broker. This broker used leadbay and we were receiving hundreds of leads a day which we used outbound calling to try and generate appointments for their branch advisers.

We also used responses to lifestyle questionnaires from daily newspapers. Hidden in the questionnaire would be a question like "Are you interested in a mortgage service that offers you access to competitive deals?" Anyone who ticked the YES box and wasn't TPS got a call and we normally converted around 10% of these into leads for the branch. Wasn't classed as cold calling as they had ticked the box giving permission for the call.

I couldn't say whether this system worked or not but the broker we worked for kept coming back with more files of listing for us to call into.

MortgageMamma

Hi Makk

A good starting point for your research would be the financial services authority mortgage conduct of business rules. This contains all the information regarding what is and what is not acceptable marketing, and the mandatory information that should be in an advertisement. You should be able to local these on the financial services authority website but I don't know which bit as I have a printed copy. https://www.fsa.gov.uk. As for pay per click, I investigated this for my own company, and some words and phrases you will pay up to £15 per click for. It gets pretty expensive so I chose not to use it as it was not within our budget. It's really only the big firms of advisors and lenders that can afford this method.