U.S. First Funding came to us needing an updated website design and a strategy for marketing their services to mortgage brokers online. We created a new website, wrote 260 pages of unique, keyword-rich content, and deployed an email marketing campaign resulting in a 1,023% increase in website traffic and a 647% increase in web leads.
Requirements
U.S. First Funding is a direct lender in Southern California who’s target market was mortgage brokers in the state of California with difficult to fund loans. USFF came to us needing an updated website design and a marketing strategy to drive their potential broker customers to the website and, ultimately, to submit their loans with USFF.
Due Diligence
During the due diligence phase we considered a number of strategies to most efficiently generate leads for U.S. First Funding. We discovered the company had an email list that had been built up over the years of brokers they’ve met and worked with in the past; most of whom they hadn’t heard from in a while. We decided to target the campaign at that email list of brokers, but needed a website design and website content that would generate a large conversion percentage as well as increased natural search traffic.
We also had to make sure to target the correct keywords. Mortgage-related terms can be incredibly competitive online and require a good deal of research in order to target effectively. We ran a number of keyword and competitor analyses to figure out what keywords could result in the least cost and highest profit and what tactics USFF’s competitors were using that we could learn from and improve upon.
The Process
The original website wasn’t bad, it just needed some updating and code cleanup in order to rank well in the search engines. We edited the code to remove the tables-based layout the previous developer had used and completely scrubbed the code for maximum SEO effect on each page.
The original navigation menu was entirely JavaScript-based, which means USFF’s visitors without JavaScript weren’t able to go anywhere but the homepage; also, search engines tend to ignore JavaScript resulting in only the homepage being indexed in any of the major search engines.
We replaced the JavaScript menu with a CSS and text-based version to enhance accessability for users without JavaScript and enable search engines to properly index the entire website.
We also wrote and designed two different email templates to be sent to the client’s double opt-in list of mortgage brokers. The template text could be edited by the client so that the email campaigns could contain current information and news if necessary.
The email list was also fairly old, so to avoid spam reports and resulting campaign degradation, we made sure there was a clear notice at the top of the first two emails that went out reminding the recipient when and how they opted in to receive messages and that they could easily opt out with one click should they wish to. Subsequent emails had the standard removal notification at the bottom of each email.
Finally, 260 pages of keyword-targeted content were written in order to increase natural search traffic.
The Results
We saw about 2% of the list opt-out after the first message, which was better than expected with an old list. As a result of the email campaigns, website traffic increased by 1,023% and loan submissions by brokers increased 647% over the first 3 months of the campaign.
Natural search traffic contributed to this increase as well due the 260 pages of keyword-targeted content we created for the client’s website. Due to the site redesign and optimized navigation and page layout, conversions from natural search traffic increased by 231%.
