Reaching your prospects and customers with Automated Marketing Part 3

Part 3 (click here to read Part 2)

Readability (Continued)

A final word on readability – If I don’t see your email I won’t be able to read it. It’s that simple. This is a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know".

So after you’ve poured all of that hard work into your email templates; content, great images, etc. it’s hard to swallow the fact that all of that work is going to waste when you send that email and it never reaches your target’s inbox.

This happens for a number of reasons. While we don’t have time in this series to go into a lot of detail, just be aware of how this could happen.

Deliverability

Email providers (ie Google) typically use filters to determine whether or not your email will be delivered to any of its subscribers or sent to junk folders. Here’s a short list of the things they look at for this determination:

• From address does not match the actual sending domain – make sure that these match and stay away from using “info@” or “sales@”.
• Attachments - use a link to a document instead
• Subject contains suspicious words (ie words like “Free”, profanity, special characters)
• Sender Score/Reputation – your sender score is measured based on your sending history. The higher the score the better. We’ll cover this topic in more depth in a future article. To learn more about sender scores click here

Compliance

There are two areas of compliance to discuss. The first is compliance with rules and regulations for sending out commercial emails. The second would be conforming to the regulations within the Lending industry.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 – The “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing” Act was passed by congress in 2003 to set standards when sending commercial email. If you are sending any volume of emails you should become familiar with the do’s and don’ts of this legislation. For example, you must include an unsubscribe ability with any email that is sent. You must also provide a physical address.

CFPB, TILA Regulation Z and SAFE - Thanks to all of the massive changes in regulations for the lending industry, marketing and advertising to potential borrowers requires careful attention to details included or excluded in any marketing material – this includes emails. In addition to regulations related to misleading statements, marketing content needs to include all necessary contact and licensing information for the LO and/or organization including NMLS as well as state licensing disclaimers and links.

The key to compliance is to automate it. Make sure that your email marketing system manages and automatically inserts the appropriate content, disclaimers and other requirements in your emails so that you do not have to micro-manage it. Additionally, make sure that your CRM database tracks and manages all of the opt-outs and unsubscribe requests so that emails are not mistakenly sent to those who have opted out. It’s also a great idea to offer options for opting out. For example, provide an option to opt out of just the current campaign or a specific sender as opposed to offering only the option to opt out of any/all future emails.

As we conclude our 3 part series on Marketing Automation we hope this information has been helpful. If you want to learn more about this topic and how to execute Marketing Automation within your Mortgage company, please contact us!