The race to capture more business is on, and one of the ways to win is by identifying the types of customers you want. If you are contemplating increasing and improving strategies and tactics to address the growing competitive landscape – and you should be because your competition likely is – do not fall prey to the perception that all prospect lists are alike.
Investing in new means for customer acquisition is not cheap, and it can get even more expensive if you are not tapping into prospect and property information that is accurate, up-to-date and criteria specific. Ideally, you need flexibility to be able to create customized customer lists with multiple filters, suppression and segmentation options, produce saved searches and ensure easy file delivery on demand.
Even in just the last couple of years while business leaders have been working from the comfort of their home offices, there have been advances in the type of data that can be leveraged to improve response and conversion rates with customer acquisition. Bottom line: Prospect lists are only as good as the data and analytics behind them. Here are four key considerations for prospect-list generation and management.
Go to the source.
Accurate property and borrower data is the most important piece of developing a campaign. For instance, if you are developing a campaign focused on home equity lending, you must have up-to-date information on the type of loan, interest rate, loan-to-value status and other criteria for it to be worth your investment. Make sure you are getting your lists not only from a reliable source, but from a source that has access to original data. While county recorder data may be useful in some cases, it can have missing or incomplete information and documents, creating significant gaps in coverage. Because DataTree Lists™ is part of First American Data & Analytics, which aggregates data from a variety of sources, it has greater reach and accuracy with the most comprehensive real estate property database on the market covering 100% of the nation. In addition to including public record data, having access to title plant data, which ensures the last recorded deed with the most accurate information, allows DataTree Lists to tap into the freshest property data available, providing more complete datasets across the board.
Get specific.
If you are not drilling down to access and leverage highly specific borrower and property criteria in your acquisition strategy, then at the very least you are missing out on cost-effective elements that could greatly improve results. And at the very most, you are wasting your precious dollars. Ideally you want to match your sales and marketing goals – and specific product pushes – with campaigns that incorporate specific criteria into your list generation datasets. This can include current owner and equity status; mortgage type, assumed interest rate, loan status and refinance activity; recent sales and property transactions; foreclosures and distressed homeowners; absentee owners and vacant properties; property assessed clean energy (PACE) lien data; and homeowner association data. Having the ability to create customized lists with this level of specificity will not only generate better results, it can also actually inform how campaigns should be structured and measured to match your goals.
Take advantage of suppression features.
With a full suppression-grade marketing tool that produces customized mailing lists, as with DataTree Lists, you can take advantage of suppression features that increase the efficiency and cost effectiveness of your mailers. Suppression allows you to run an updated list using the same criteria, but exclude certain elements to further enhance the specificity of your campaign. For instance, you might want to designate or segment lists based on geography; remove duplicates or non-responsive prospects; or finetune when and what offer you send to certain prospects while still maintaining the integrity of the original list criteria. DataTree Lists has advanced the suppression feature so that it is nimble, allowing for easier and quicker development of customized datasets so that you can be more agile in structuring and adjusting your marketing campaigns based on prescriptive property information.
Understand your resources and limitations.
To fully maximize your borrower prospect list management, you need to fully understand your company’s resources and limitations. What capabilities does your team have to access data, generate lists based on specific borrower and property attributes, adjust criteria and measure results? DataTree Lists has two ways of delivering data to customers. We can equip them with a portal that allows for direct access to the data and the ability to generate and manipulate lists on their own – basically giving them the keys to the car. Or, we have a fulfillment service in which they tell us their criteria and campaign goals and we supply the lists – basically acting as a personal driver to get them to the destination. Each approach has its benefits and how clients choose to work with a list provider is based, to a large degree, on the human and technical resources within their organization.
The key is finding your prospective customers, using the right filters and criteria, and matching them to a specific promotional offer, whether you are behind the wheel yourself or you let someone else help with the driving.
As real estate shifts to more of a purchase market – with limited housing inventory further constricting opportunity – identifying prospects – will be an important strategy to employ with accurate property data being the key differentiator. Having quick and easy access to source-level data, with the ability to slice and dice your lists using highly customizable criteria, will arm your team with the tools they need to reach and exceed their sales goals.
If DataTree Lists sounds like something you would like to bring into your business, you can learn more by clicking here.