PLAY DEFENSE - RETAIN YOUR ACCOUNT HOLDERS
In our previous blogs about Open Internet and Competitive Digital Advertising, we showed you that your competition is advertising, and you should be too. 2020’s low interest rates brought on a surge of refinance applications, this has slowed only slightly. Experts are predicting 2021 will be a high refinance year.
Here are a few strategies* to help retain your account holders in this competitive season:
● Identify those who hold a mortgage with you with a high interest rate or have not refinanced recently. Target them with digital ads about refinancing with your institution. It may sound counterintuitive, but it is far better to keep them as a long term account holder, than risk losing them to a competitive FI.
● Account holders who have Competitive Mortgages, but use your other products: Cross-sell them with direct mail, email and digital advertising about your Mortgage Refi offers.
● Consider offering a free mortgage education class virtually or in person at your branch or a local library. This grassroots approach is excellent for relationship building and for building trust between borrowers and lenders. Many young people are eager to learn and be able to ask questions about mortgage types, rates, terms, debt to income ratios, ways to save, or any information you can share. Market this course online, by mail, through local realtors, and of course through your tellers.
● The moment someone contacts you for a pre-approval, the clock is ticking. In today’s aggressive real estate market buyers need a pre-approval to put in an offer. Since pre-approvals do expire, they may only request one when they already are seeing houses they like. Mortgage brokers like Rocket can turn approvals around in hours, make sure you give the attention required to compete in this area. After you send them a pre-approval, ensure you are checking in with them, show that you care about earning their business.
Your financial institution is sitting on a goldmine of consumer spending data. The problem most financial institutions have is that the data is messy, uncontextualized and not properly labeled. We help FIs every day to make sense of their data, build always-on and ad hoc communications strategies, build better relationships with their account holders, and grow share of wallet.
*Compliance Note: When marketing your FI’s products it is important that you are checking in with your local regulating body for the most current guidelines. Be sure you remain compliant so that you are not discriminating against a particular group. Note that due to this, some of our recommendations above may not be applicable in your area.