For mortgage brokers or loan officers looking to generate their own mortgage leads online, choosing a website design company is the first step in establishing an online presence. This means that one of your biggest concerns is being able to generate the most leads possible by having the highest internet mortgage lead conversion rate possible.
If you are like most people, you may not even know where to begin in making such a decision as to what website may have the highest conversion potential and so it is likely that you will rely on the advice of mortgage website designers you speak to. One common theme you will see among mortgage website design companies is that virtually all of them tout their “Secure Full 1003 Online Application” as a benefit they can offer you, so it makes sense that you would trust this to be the best choice for converting your website visitors to leads. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and as such, the customers of such mortgage website design companies have two things in common: 1) They employ the Full 1003 Application on their mortgage website 2) they are unable to generate mortgage leads. Why? The Full 1003 doesn’t work. It’s that simple.
Full 1003 Mortgage Application + Mortgage Website = FAIL
The results of our A/B testing, feedback from hundreds of Mortgage Brokers, and my personal experience is that having a Full 1003 Application on your mortgage website will significantly reduce, if not eliminate mortgage lead generation on your website. Borrowers are not willing to take the time necessary to fill out a Full 1003 and are even more unwilling to divulge all of their personal and financial information until they have built a rapport with a loan officer or mortgage representative. In fact, as a mortgage broker, I prefer to have the basic short form mortgage application information so that I can get information about assets, social security numbers, detailed credit information, etc. when I am building a rapport with the client anyways.
The bottom line is that the Full 1003 is a proven non-starter. The most rewarding confirmation is when one of our clients calls us in excitement in their first week using an Ipagio mortgage lead generation website to tell us that they are generating leads for the first time in years. I always explain to them that our website is simply converting their existing traffic, which their previous website with the Full 1003 was unable to do. The implication is that if you are using a Full 1003 application, you are not only losing valuable leads from online prospects, but are losing leads you could be converting from your marketing activities in other mediums (direct mail, radio, flyers, etc.) when those prospects visit your website to build trust in and learn about your company and are not converted.
The Solution
If not the Full 1003 application, then what application should I use to generate internet mortgage leads? To find out which application obtains the optimal amount of borrower information while obtaining the highest possible conversion rate, look no further than the most successful lead aggregators in the world such as lowermybills.com, mortgageloan.com, lendingtree.com, etc. You will notice a common theme in that these companies have come to the same conclusion on what type of application converts the best as they all use a very similar, if not identical, 4 Page Short Form Application on their websites. These companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually driving traffic to their sites, so it is essential that their conversion rates are as high as possible.
It works for them, so why not you? The hands down, single most important change most mortgage professionals can make in improving their website lead generation ability is eliminating the Full 1003 application from their website. Do not follow the blind leading the blind in mortgage website design industry, make exclusion of the Full 1003 a top priority when you build or update your mortgage website.
Author: Trace Richardson is the CEO, of LeadPress.com a Mortgage Marketing and Mortgage Website Design company.
Trace,
Great article!
I cant agree more with your observations. For someone who dosent know you or your business practices to blindly give their life history is absurd. I drive my leads tooooo my website to fill out an app for their convenience. Short forms are usful though as a lead generator. Fantastic post!
I read alot about people instantly clicking off pages if they have a complex form to fill out and I know I’m not a fan of it myself so my advice is keep things simple, sometimes people just want a call or to be able to call you. For that reason we have a small box on the front of our site where you can ask any general question you want and get a call or email back. also having the phone number on every page is vital…. it breaks my heart when you go to a website and have to search high and low in order to get a phone number
Trace – excellent info, thanks. I will have to look into the short form and see if that works for my current business model. I recently dropped my full 1003 app in favor of a link to a web page explaining that all I want is a name and email to get the process started, that’s it. It has been a recent change, so I do not know how the conversion ratio will be to any degree of accuracy yet.
Thanks Trace! My semi-scientific studies concur with your above article but I didn’t quite trust the data due to seeing the big glossy Myers ads in industry pubs… I’d love to chat with those guys (i.e. people in Myers ads), I don’t dispute Myer’s data, but perhaps they’re positioning their site differently OR having detailed conversations before taking a 1003, then directing them to apply online to save time (??).
I cant agree more with your observations. For someone who dosent know you or your business practices to blindly give their life history is absurd. I drive my leads tooooo my website to fill out an app for their convenience. Short forms are usful though as a lead generator. Fantastic post!
Nice post here. It does make senses, appreciate for sharing.