Background

	“Jim seemingly packed about 4 years of work into the 2 years I worked with him. In addition to providing valuable insights into our overall email marketing strategies and driving the overall email marketing implementation he designed and implemented a very complex automated data transfer and messaging system that was at the heart of our program. I wish everyone I've worked with over the years was as helpful and diligent as Jim.” David Arnesen Director of Marketing iOwn

iOwn is an online mortgage broker. They also offer related services such as the capability to search for homes for sale that match one's specific criteria. iOwn's customers are people who are looking for a home loan to finance a purchase, acquire a home equity loan or refinance an existing mortgage. The home buying and mortgage process can be complicated and mysterious, especially to first time buyers. In addition to making loans, iOwn helps home buyers and owners answer questions such as:

• What is the pre-qualification process?
• Should I get an adjustable rate mortgage or a fixed?
• Is now a good time to refinance?

Problem to be Solved

Educate people about home loans and the mortgage process and turn them into iOwn customers.

Program Goals

• Drive customers back to iown.com.
• Increase iOwn share of mind.
• Help people better understand the loan process, home-buying and home-ownership.
• Convert prospects into customers by helping people through the mortgage process.
• Provide sophisticated tracking and reporting on email deliveries in order to assess the effect of the messaging program.

Strategy

Use email marketing to deliver real-time rate information along with pointers to iOwn's extensive web content regarding mortgages and home ownership. Personalize all email content (mortgage rates and other content) based on each recipients specific criteria.

	Click to see enlarged view

Solution

The RateWatch program was developed to generate personalized mortgage rate information for each subscriber, which is then sent out via email. All rate information is generated specifically for each RateWatch subscriber, based on their personal criteria such as purpose of loan, type of loan (e.g., fixed or adjustable), desired loan amount and points, and location.

The most up-to-date rate information is delivered in real time to subscribers who desire it. This is made possible by an automated real time data transfer between the RateWatch application, hosted at iOwn, and the Email Marketing application.

In addition to mortgage rates, the messages include personalized content based on recipient's particular situation. Messaging streams were developed that provide sequenced content that will, over time, educate recipients about the mortgage process and about issues related to their particular situation. Content streams were developed for first time home buyers, consumers looking to buy and sell a home at the same time, consumers interested in home improvement, and mortgage holders interested in refinancing. Sophisticated content management enables the content of messages to be based on prior content received by each recipient rather than a "all refinancers must receive content X this week" approach.

Subscribers are put in control: through a password protected registration form, they can adjust their preferences to control the content they receive as well as the message delivery frequency.

Tracking and reporting capabilities were put in place to track not only overall results but also the results associated with the specific content delivered to each type of consumer.

In addition to RateWatch program the HomeWatch and SalesWatch message programs were also created, to keep subscribers informed, respectively, about homes for sale and recent home sales. As with the RateWatch program, message content is personalized based on each recipients specific criteria, such as geographic locations of interest.

Results

• Business grew by 20% in one year.
• Email subscribers grew from 80K to 130K in one year.
• Click-throughs varied greatly based on the specific tips and cross sells, from single digits to over 20%. Detailed click-through analysis enabled informed adjustment to future messages.
• Ease of program management: program was implemented with a single message "template" that was used to generate the messages for each particular user. By using a single template the development, testing, and maintenance of multiple messages was not required.
• iOwn was bought by Citibank.

Back to top