This is the text from the Free For Life e-mail campaign I’ve been discussing in Advertising vs. Marketing below, you’re welcome to take advantage of this Special Offering if you like:

Get Mortgage Lessons with Free Lifetime Upgrades

Enjoy the freedom of a lifetime of learning and earning potential.

Our trademarked series, Secrets of the Mortgage Industry CD Lessons consist of nearly a dozen and a half, low-cost wide-ranging core instructional materials for the Mortgage Professional.

We now offer Free complimentary upgrades to all our students; just return the old one, and we’ll send you any updated version if you’ve done one since you got yours. Currently we’re on version 8.5.

Use Discount Code: xxNow Expiredxx & Save 25%

Hopefully I get stats from them tomorrow about the effectiveness of e-mail advertising, and bring you up to date on this MISTAKE I made.

Continuing on our latest theme Industry Checks & Balances … for those of you who entered our industry since the Fall of 1998 (the beginning of the last industry cycle that just ended), this will be important news for you especially.

Unlike the way things have been during your career to date, traditionally the wholesale lenders always would complete their ‘due diligence’ investigation to begin with, when a mortgage broker first asked to submit loans to them for funding. In your experience, if you had a loan, the wholesalers would accept it, and pretty much would care less who was presenting them with the customer’s funding needs. Although this may seem like a small barrier for entry to you, once proper investigation kept a lot of the riff-raft out of the business. A critical check and balance to safeguard the wholesale lender’s future. An essential ingredient which might have kept a hundred or more of them from closing their doors a short time ago.

Recently you may have become aware, many wholesale lenders, like Wells Fargo to name one, are starting to require certain production volume from mortgage brokers, or they will no longer do business with them … those that are ‘cut-off’ and new brokers will have to pay a fee to be reconsidered. This is one way to get rid of the deadwood, and leave a smaller population of producing mortgage brokers, but it doesn’t necessarily address the issue of having only quality mortgage brokers submitting transactions for consideration, it is a step in that direction, but a tiny one. However, this approach is another typical one at this point in the cycle for wholesalers.

All of them, requesting more extensive verifiable documentation from every mortgage broker before they can get approved to do business with wholesale lenders will be next, as they move through this industry cycle. Before long, gone will be the days when if a mortgage broker has a potential loan, then anybody would accept it … the consequence will be fewer mortgage broker shops, better customer/borrower loan portfolios, and a badly needed cleaner stronger more solid industry for everybody. A long overdue return to old-fashioned sound business practices.

 Since yesterday’s FREE FOR LIFE e-mail campaign at 10AM, I have spent almost four hours reviewing our web-stats and my own e-mail inbox activity, as they relate to the mailing. I think it’s fair to say, that I have gotten what was promised to me by the vendor, and I’d say my money’s worth too … in terms of my own education (not Mortgage CD Lesson sales, which was it’s intent BTW).

Hopefully by this time next week, I will be provided the stats on the actual number of e-mails SENT, the number of those which BOUNCED back to their server, and finally the number of CLICKS (to the links inside the e-mailed solicitation piece) which resulted from the Advertising campaign … naturally, I’ll know the final number of sales that were generated, since 95% of the ‘action’ that is likely to occur, will happen within the first week of the promotion.

What I learned yesterday from my Outlook Inbox, was that 40 were sent to bad/invalid e-mail addresses, 39 were sent to people who are no longer employed at that e-mail address, upwards of 100 e-mails were blocked by spam software (which required human extra-action to get them through), and finally, that more than 200 people had an auto responder on their e-mail announcing they were out of the office … pretty good out of an e-mailing of 50,000 or so pieces!

From our website analysis tools, I reaffirmed my own belief (for the 100th time) just how foolish an e-mail campaign (Advertising) is, as directly compared to Marketing one’s website via highly placed key word/phrases. Yestereday, the typical visitor to our first CD Lessons page (101 Lessons) spent exactly one minute eight seconds there (less than one third the time of somebody who arrives on that page from Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask, etc). Almost like they were only sorta kinda curious, not seriously looking for maybe an affordable CD Mortgage Lesson to pick up – even with our new Free Lifetime Upgrade Guarantee and the 25% Discount we offered them!

I  was also once again amused at the lack of sophistication mortgage people seem to have in generally understanding and navigating a website, a trend I have long noticed and still don’t quite understand BTW. For instance, yesterday morning 154 different people (produced thru Advertising) clicked thru to the 101 Lessons page, and in spite of a notifications both at the top and at the bottom of that page (that there are more pages than just one), only four (4) of them figured out that there are a total of 3 pages of CD Lessons, and clicked on to them … that’s right just FOUR individuals!

Search engine generated visitors (Marketing) to our site, reveals those potential new students normally view three or more pages each time they visit our site, in the case above, that’s hardly more than an average of one (1) page viewed.

And let’s remember, the oblgation of the vendor (both this e-mailing firm and/or even Google for example), is merely to get the message in front of potential future students/customers/clients – the number/percentage of ’sales’ relates to the quality of the original message and what they see/hear after they contact us/you.

 This is now what I suspect the people who work for the e-mail firm I engaged, are doing with our money. Thankfully I only rolled the dice with six hunded bucks.

Here’s what happened … because this ‘half-his-data-base’ e-mail campaign is going out tomorrow at 10AM (that’s 50,000 e-mails I was told if I remember correctly), and because I am so anal about stats, I call them today to innocently ask what the url is that I click, to see the ‘back-end numbers’ of our advertsing campaign (ie: actual # mailed, # opened and read, numbers that clicked this or that link embedded in our e-mail advertisment, etc.) the sort of usual and customary statistics which can be available from commercial e-mailing platforms. I get details like these on our own e-mailed newsletters from the outfit we use for that, and I study them carefully.

Guess what I’m told?  He’s going into the back woods on a boating vacation tonight, and will be ‘out of pocket’ for a while – be back in a week, when he’ll get the stats and send them to me (so I don’t get to view the actual raw data from the ‘back-end source’ myself).

I pride myself on how difficult it is to ‘get one over on me’, at this point in my life … but it smells like it’s happening tomorrow!

  For quite some time I have believed that Advertising is when I go to you, and Marketing is when you come to me … I feel the latter is absolutely best. The result of that, is whenever possible I have avoided ‘advertising’  like the plague, for many years. I’m about to go against my gut next Tuesday at 10AM.

Like many of you, I receive many dozens of inbound industry related e-mail solicitations every day, and therefore I spend time daily clicking DELETE DELETE DELETE. I normally don’t do it completely randomly, I frequently stop and pick out one or two that look interesting.

Saw one I liked a couple of days ago, it was from a commercial e-mail delivery service with a large industry database. They reported they send out ZILLIONS of industry e-mails, and to many of the competitors of Secret! University too! Showed me several nice testimonials; at first he seemed like as nice young man (until he pressed hard to ‘close’ me); but I kept on listening, even though that annoyed me, and I don’t believe in e-mail advertising.

As it turned out, I agreed finally to a ‘half-his-data-base’ e-mail campaign; next Tuesday morning out goes a nice special FREE FOR LIFE offer flyer I made up, to 50,000 currrent industry e-mail addresses … YOU might even get one!

At this point, I fear I’m about to ‘teach myself a lesson’ … but we’ll see, I have an open mind … I’ll keep you posted.

 Yesterday, one of our new students asked a question about conversation ratios for Internet Leads, via our E-mail Answers Program (EMA). It seems she has been doing some research comparing one lead company to another and asked for some direction.

Her main concern seemed to be how to get the most bang for her buck, a feeling most people have these days with the production numbers being as they are most places. From her question, I could see she held the opinion that she was not only going to be buying leads, but that she also was buying results too! It was that ‘conversion ratio’ notion that brought that to light for me.

She told me one lead seller reported their customers normally hit a XX% conversion ratio (leads to closed funded transactions), and another had a better number, etc. “How can I trust these people,” she asked.

I explained, what I thought she already understood (but she didn’t) and that is, a conversion ratio is relative to a combination of several things. One ofcourse, is the quality of the lead … Two, where the lead’s head is in the buying cycle (like maybe today they’re merely doing some research), PLUS three … the customer service skill level of the loan origination who contacts them.

Understanding there are several factors that make up a good lead, will take the focus off those ‘conversation ratios’ lead sellers ‘pitch’ to their potential customers … the best lead source, she asked me?  EASY, drive qualifiable traffic to your own website (once it’s ready to handle customers), via acceptable page ranking in generic search engine searches, and other methods (which we have a class on) that are available.

This morning I was again studying our ‘action’ across the three search engines we statistically watch carefully for our keyword/phrase rankings. I spend so much time on this activity for a couple of reasons: One is so I am as up to date as I can be,  when we hold our LIVE! Website & Internet Origination classes, I don’t want to look like I’m clueless, or out of touch with some of the tech types that frequently attend. The other reason is because the vast majority of our new students come to us via generic search engine searches vs. people who know about us from other encounters – and therefore I want that channel to continue to be an active one.

Today’s examples below will show you some of the challenges that I and anyone else who tract their site visitor stats have.

Only two of those key word/phrases have we done much SEO with, yet all these are word/phrases are contained inside several different pages in our website. What amazes me is that people will gig deeply in search results to find what they want … just look here … one individual drilled down to position 75 and another to ranking position 80 until they found wht they wanted, then clicked over to our site … I don’t think I have every dug that deeply for anything in Google myself … fascinating.

This is typically what I see each morning …

You know what’s literally shocked me more than most anything in recent memory? It was the well hidden new initiativies “Keys to Recovery” statement Fannie Mae plugged inside their boring May 6, 2008 10-Q Filing results of it’s First Quarter 2008 financial results press release.

It wasn’t only their new 120% LTV which they’ll now utuilize in certain cases, but the fact that I haven’t seen one other comment about it anywhere in any news report, or anywhere else on the Internet … even though I highlighted it in The Mortgageland Journal’s June edition; I have received only one e-mail remark about it!  And, given all the difficulties originators face today, this revelation should have landed like a bomb-shell!

  Have you heard the latest about our line of CD Mortgage Lessons, titled Secrets of the Mortgage Industry™ ? It was revealed in our May 31st Press Release and inside The Mortgageland Journal’s June edition … we are now offering a Free Lifetime Upgrade Guarantee on all of our CD Mortgage Lessons. This trademarked series, Secrets of the Mortgage Industry™ consists of nearly a dozen and a half, wide-ranging core instructional materials for the Mortgage Professional … not just the ’sales’ and ‘ego pumping’ stuff the other guys seem to always offer.

Given the speed of change going on during these early stages of today’s industry reverse pendulum swing, updates to stay up with technology and other changes just makes sense – GET SMART!