In today’s highly competitive landscape of customer acquisitions, are you spending the right amount of marketing budget at the right place? Many of our clients begin their journey with a single source customer acquisition channel and they often start with online lead generators or ping trees.

Ping Tree

Ping trees works like an online warehouse where real time applications are being aggregated into a single location and lenders bid for these leads. The customers probably applied on one website but ended up with another website, worse their application is being accepted by multiple lenders and now the customer faces a very difficult choice.

Search Engine Management (Keyword Bidding)

There are other forms of online marketing, namely bidding for keywords and placing ads on search engines such as google, bing or yahoo. These can be an effective way to drive traffic and brand awareness to your website. It could also get very expensive if you are bidding for popular keywords or phrases that other competitors are also placing bids. These keywords can become very expensive and if your ads don’t appear on the first or second page, it could be very difficult to get click through into your website and you may end up wasting a lot of time and resources and getting outbid by your competitors.

Banner Ads

Placing banners in relevant websites is also an effective but unpredictable way of driving traffic to your website. It mainly services as a brand awareness and retargeting tool to keep reminding customers to come back to your side and keep your brand in front of perspective applicants.

Retargeting

There are re-targeting technology available and it works by tracking your customers browsing history after they have visited your website or your affiliate’s website. A small snippet of code being activated through the customer’s browser and uniquely identifies that customer. When that identification reappears online at another website which happens to be an advertising partner, they will then serve ads as a banner to that customer. Form a customer’s perspective, they might either be delighted or surprised to see your banner again on a different and unrelated website.

Direct Mail

There are other forms of offline advertising. The most popular one is Direct Mail. Direct Mail is used by many lenders to capture organic customers. This way of advertising requires a sizable upfront cost for mailing, printing and data cost. Some matured lenders are switching to this way of advertising and upstart lenders with only a small amount of advertising budget chooses to stay as the pay-as-you-go model from online lead generators.

Email Marketing

Once you have collected a few thousand or tens of thousands of customer emails, an inexpensive form of marketing is email marketing. There are some nuances when it comes to email marketing. Your don’t want to be categorized as a spammer and constant A/B testing of your creative, subject line etc are all part of a sounds management practice. Email could become a very cost effective way for you to get more loans, reactive your customer base.

SEO

And lastly, building a strong SEO or Search Engine Optimization program is probably the best and least costly way to drive traffic. SEO sometimes is called content marketing. Content or content marketing is well “liked” search engines. For example, if Google picks up one of the articles you’ve written to help some one get out of debt, Google will think that your website has unique information that no other site has and therefore want everyone else to know about it as well. There are many other reasons that your website will rank higher in google’s search results but having unique content definitely helps that effort. You could write these articles yourself or you can hire a team of writers specializes in topics that drives to traffic to your website to constantly write on your website.

TV / Radio

Television and radio advertising costs a fortune but sometimes it can be very effective to get the word out. It does require a big budget, commitment and patience to see results but it will pay off in the long run. It does require a team of media placement experts to work with radio stations (terrestrial or satellite) to place ads at different time of the day. It could take years to dial in your TV or radio campaign.

What’s really practical?

At MaxDecisions, Inc. we help our clients to get with the basics to stabilize their portfolio. We have helped our clients to send millions of pieces of direct mail that resulted in low cost per funded loan and low default rates. We also follow up with Email marketing campaigns to get more from the direct mail campaign. The combo works great for some of our client’s portfolios.

Please leave a comment below, we would like to hear your experiences.

• Direct Mail: Direct mail campaign by far is the most measurable and controllable marketing channel to date for lenders across the board. Prequalified (Pre-selected) Direct Mail offers is also a great way to avoid third party fraud and seek out customers with ability/willingness to pay. MaxDecisions, Inc. has helped our clients to deliver over 100 million pieces of mail. Our custom risk and response models is our competitive advantage. Our iterative approach is unique in the industry. We look at each campaign and its performance individually and collectively. Leveraging learnings from prior experiences to refine subsequent direct mail campaigns.
• PPC / SEM (Pay Per Click / Search Engine Management): MaxDecisions, Inc. has capabilities to optimize keyword bidding process. We’ve analyzed and optimized from keyword to conversion for our clients across the board. We work with Google Adwords, Yahoo Gemini, Bing, as well as AdRoll and Criteo retargeting system.

• LeadGen (Lead Generator): Publishers/LeadGen/PingTrees are historically difficult to navigate. These channels are dynamic and if not careful, lenders could experience negative ROI on their marketing spent. Worse, unconstrained default/charge off rates. MaxDecisions, Inc. has experience in working with LeadGens and we have developed various fraud/conversion models to help our clients with their lead buying decisions.
• Email Marketing: Email is the fastest and cost effective. It could be a great follow up tool to your direct mail campaign. You can accurately track delivery, open and click through rate. It does require some effort to setup your email campaign and acquisition of IP addresses to balance the workload is essential. It’s easy to get your marketing message flagged as spam.