The reality is banks and lenders are often targeting prospects who simply do not fit their profile. Large organisations often have big legacy systems full of contacts, databases, and audiences. Yet marketing spend is wasted on customers who have a higher risk profile than the lender would like, meaning customers are led on by ads for products they will never be approved for. Or you spend valuable budget marketing to prospects who have no intent to apply for a mortgage in the foreseeable future. This wasted ad spend not only drives down your marketing ROI, but it can also create a bad customer experience as you have to say “no” to applications.
Why demographic targeting is not enough
Demographic targeting has long been the go-to for marketers. But in a digital world, is far from ideal. It doesn’t help us understand how risky customers are or whether they have intent to purchase. Even other behavioural targeting methods aren’t specific enough when it comes to targeting the right people for mortgages.
By using data-driven targeting to identify the right audiences for your digital campaigns, prospects will more likely meet the lending criteria, and their application for a mortgage is more likely to be approved, plus you can generate a stronger return on marketing investment (ROMI).
How can you identify who the right audiences are for your digital campaigns?
In this article, you’ll learn exactly how to create and target the right audiences for your digital campaigns so you can prevent targeting risky prospects, increase conversions and reduce marketing waste.
1. Find and convert customers who are ready to buy
Purchase intent is everything. In the case of mortgages, how likely is it that who you target has a strong intent to apply for a home loan?
With one of Australia’s largest consented customer databases in the market, Equifax will help you find more relevant prospects who are in the market for a loan, and can narrow that down to a specific time period, such as the past three to 12 months. So, you can paint a clearer picture of the customers who are most likely to convert. Then target them with ads, content, and the right messaging to move them to the next step in your funnel.
2. Stop targeting risky prospects
The more effective way to reduce wasted marketing spend is to remove risky prospects from your audience targeting. Through our unique pre-screening capabilities, we can help you remove risky prospects, such as anyone who has a court judgement, has been defaulted, or applied for a home loan in recent months. This pre-screening process is a critical step to improving conversion rates, approval rates and ROMI.
How pre-screening works
Pre-screening is only available to licensed credit providers.
We’ve recently worked with a New Zealand financial services provider to help them build the right audiences, so they could significantly improve loan approval rates and avoid making offers to ineligible and risky consumers. The bank’s Credit Risk team also specified its audience attribute requirements and criteria, so they could better target the right groups of people.
This helped the bank to ultimately boost their conversion rate. And, more importantly, it reported a reduction in rejected applications. Because the bank now says “no” less often, more people have a much better customer experience.
Another way to reduce risky prospects involves using a risk-based model developed at a geographical level for audience suppression. This way, you can narrow down the locations to those that meet your risk profile and use this to build a more targeted audience whose applications for a home loan are more likely to be approved.
3. Know who’s on the move
Knowing when your potential and existing customers are planning to move home, and where they are in this process, is a critical component for customer acquisition and retention.
With the Equifax Movers Model, you can tap into rich insights about who’s on the move and when they last moved home. Using what we know about the audiences, we can give you a predicted date for home movers. Simply set your own parameters, such as “moving within 60 days”, and effectively target customers with more precise messaging.
4. Create look-a-like audiences
A look-a-like audience can help you reach even more prospects who are likely to convert and reduce your lead acquisition costs. You can either build a custom audience based on your specific requirements or refer to our rich library of pre-built attributes and segments to help you improve your targeting. For example, you might be interested in targeting inner city professionals from a certain demographic with a regular household income. We can help you find them!
Once we have built your audience, we can then push them into your preferred demand side platform, such as Facebook or DV360 (Google Display & Video 360), to create highly targeted digital campaigns.
Over to you
When it comes down to mortgage applications, our goal is to help you find and target more of the right customers online – customers who are more likely to convert and get approved for a loan. This results in not just less marketing waste and a better ROMI but also less of your own time being wasted.
Laser-focused audiences are critical in helping you achieve this goal for your highly targeted digital campaigns.
We help marketers activate unique financial and geospatial insights from our rich library of digital audience attributes, segments, and landscape groups across 18 million consumers.
Talk to us about what your specific targeting requirements are, so we can help you find your best customers and propel your ROMI.
Find the solution to your challenge. Talk to us today.
