As old school as it might sound, there are few things more important to an Internet marketer than a good email list. Email is still a powerful way into consumers’ wallets.

What makes email marketing so important and how do you build the list?

The Importance of Email Marketing

The first step to success with email marketing is to understand that it’s important.

The simple fact is that the majority of Americans are in their email the majority of the day. It’s as essential as the phone in the business world and as common as the TV in the home. So, if you want to talk to consumers there is no surer place to find them than by email.

Add to this the fact that you are likely to get there attention, even if for a fraction of a second as they scan their inbox. Try to get that guarantee from TV, magazine, billboard, or other advertising medium. You can’t even get that assurance from website advertising.

What’s more, that bit of attention is guaranteed to be exclusive–just you and the customer.

How to Build an Email List

The first step is to drive acceptance. This means you need people (preferably prospects) to opt-in to your email marketing. There are a variety of ways, but here are a couple that work consistently.

• Prominently display an option for email updates on your website or blog

• Include a link to sign up for your email newsletter in your email signature
• Use Twitter to pitch signing up for emails. Don’t forget an incentive (special content)
• Buy aged Internet leads and have your initial contact encourage them to sign-up

At every turn in your marketing plan, in every contact with customers, and on each follow-up ask for their permission to receive emails from you.

In the (paraphrased) words of Seth Godin, once you have their permission to market to them you, you need only to find something to sell them.

Blogs are great things. They make publishing our thoughts and services nearly free. Google loves them and all their fresh content.

But, there are millions of them. How do you make yours draw attention and produce results?

1. Have a Plan - This is the achilles heel of most bloggers. They have an idea or two that stirs there passion to publish. Unfortunately, that is often the conclusion of the plan. Without a clear objective and path to lead you there your blog is likely to be a ghost in six months.

2. Start an Editorial Calendar - A big part of that plan should be an editorial plan. Know and program out what you want to publish. This can be posts, podcasts, video, ebooks, or other creative content. Regardless of the format there needs to be a calendar, some deadlines, and the consistency that your audience will expect.

3. Repackage Content as Valuable Giveaways - Don’t forget that people are busy. They don’t have time to dig through your archives to find the masterpieces. It is your job to help them be efficient in finding your valuable content. I suggest routinely repackaging that content into rewrites, updates, or even better eBooks. This makes it easier to find, consume, and distribute.

4. Syndicate Widely - Use an RSS service like Feedburner to increase your syndication. Also, don’t forget to use other social networking venues like Twitter and Friendfeed to get the word out. There are services like TwitterFeed that can automate this syndication.

5. Don’t Forget to Ask Them to Come Back - Finally, never miss the opportunity to ask them to come back. That means closing every post with an invitation to sign-up for your RSS feed, email updates, or simple to call you.

Now take a quick peek at your blog. Is it clear what you want your readers to do and are you inviting them to be loyal followers? Probably not. So, go tune things up.

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What do 90% of your daily sales calls turn into? Voicemails.

However, if I were to peek into your sales training routine I am guessing I would see a lot of weight being placed on perfecting conversations with customers face-to-face or on the phone. If you want to have more of those good conversations you need to put a lot more effort into getting your voicemails listened to and calls returned.

Here are 10 voicemail tips that work:

1. Remember the objective is to get a call-back. So, don’t tell them you will call back. That will give them a reason to ignore your message.

2. Don’t leave a web address (URL). This gives them another reason to research without you and never call back.

3. Leave a strong call-to-action. This needs to be something that makes them curious. Something that convinces them you have a better debt strategy than what they are trying now.

4. Clearly and slowly repeat your phone number twice. This is a huge factor in converting these voicemails into call-backs.

5. Make it short. The longer it is the more likely they are to hit delete before they get to your call-back number.

6. After you clearly repeat you number twice leave a quick “P.S.” statement. It should be interesting and make them want to take immediate action.

7. Leave voicemails first thing in the morning and right after work. This shows people you really want to talk to them and doesn’t interrupt important things like work and dinner. This approach will seem more considerate.

8. Disclose clearly who you are and what you can do for them. Don’t be cryptic or mysterious about your services.

9. Have a positive and enthusiastic tone. Your voice should say, “I really want to talk to you because I can help.”

10. Use their first name throughout the message. People love to hear their name and it makes your call less intimidating and less like the collection calls they have been getting.

I guarantee these simple tips with get more of your voicemails returned. Do you have other surefire voicemail tips? Leave them in the comments below.

More and more our debt settlement and mortgage sales are dependent upon our performance on the telephone. That means that your voice and tone are critical to closing the deal. Is it helping or hurting you?

Let’s run through a simple checklist.

Tone

Let’s start with your tone. What are you conveying to the customer? Confidence, strength, and competence or are you telling the customer you are unsure, timid, or confusing?

You need to position your mind to be sure of the sale. This and a little preparation will make you come across as the right person to help them. And if they aren’t looking for help they may open their mind to your value proposition.

Inflection

Your key points are critical to conveying value. Are you pointing to this unique value propositions with your voice? That is what inflection does for you.

Put the emphasis on the key point of your pitch. This takes thought and practice. Rambling through a script is unlikely to deliver.

Delivery

Like I just mentioned in talking about inflection, a good delivery takes practice. A smooth delivery brings confidence and competence to the sales pitch. Your customer will feel like you know what you are talking about. It makes them confident you can guide them through a complex transaction or solution, like a mortgage or debt settlement.

Sound

Listen to your voice. Record your sales pitch while you are practicing. This will sound weird at first, but understanding your nuances or distracting features in your voice can bring big improvement.

A good conversationalist does not necessarily make the best sales voice. Record, listen, and practice. Get your voice to sound more appealing. It works. This is what all the actors, singers, and politicians do. If you want to earn a living with your voice too–practice and perfect it.

Energy

You ever wonder why the great sales people don’t do sales calls laying down or even sitting? It is because those body positions are energy killers.

Do you want more proof? Think about rock stars. They stand, run, and gyrate around the stage for their big, high-energy hits. And then they sit down for their slow ballads.

Stand-up and move around. This is what gives your voice energy and confidence. No customer wants to buy from someone that sounds like they are awaking from a slumber.

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Any Internet lead provider will tell you calling immediately is important. However, if you go beyond running your marketing one lead at a time and look at the bigger picture you can find other opportunities.

Internet leads have long been the pariah of marketing. Meanwhile, consumers continue to make the Web more and more a part of their decision-making and mortgage brokers in particular are learning to use that to their advantage with websites and blogs. This makes it increasingly important to learn how to handle these leads as a bigger part of your database marketing process.

Direct Mail Works

Direct mail, done well, is still the big boy on the block. That is why I tell my clients to create direct mail campaigns for their Internet leads too.

Take a look at what you are doing today with your leads. My guess is that your are direct mailing past clients and maybe even some purchased lists but any lead generated or purchased from the Internet you only call or email. If so, you are missing a lot of opportunity.

Internet Leads are People Too

The logic generally goes that people submitting their information online must want to be called or emailed. The truth is that they are the same people that are past clients, referrals, and on those purchased lists. They simply are using the Internet for convenience.

Even my mother uses Facebook now–it is time to stop thinking of these consumers as different.

Contact From the Web Does Change This

That means simply this… If you use direct mail as a marketing strategy then don’t leave out those prospects that contact you via your blog, website, or you buy from an Internet lead provider. I am seeing remarkable success from clients that approach these leads as they would any other prospect or past client.

Here is a simple flow that might work for you:

1. Internet lead purchased, coming from blog, or email campaign
2. Immediately contact via email and telephone
3. Build a process for 14 days worth multi-touch contacts (email and telephone)
4. Transition into database marketing (lead nurturing)
5. Include in the normal flow of direct mail (marketing, newsletters, cards, etc.)
6. Attempt to re-contact at 30, 60, 90, increasingly longer increments

Ultimately, let the database marketing work the way it does on all your other leads. Your database becomes your biggest lead generation source.

Give it a try. What do you think? What is your experience?

One of the biggest killers of mortgage deal opportunity is our own “gut.” We think the next phone call, email, or lead is going to be the one. We think new is better and old is lost. However, the statistical reality continues to prove our “gut” wrong.

This is why staying top of mind on past prospects and clients is critical. Those old leads in your database are nearly twice as likely to close.

Why?

Anxiety/Indecision

This is the number one cause of friction in your mortgage deals. Customers are simply anxious and indecisive about the process. Face it the mortgage process is not like buying a book on Amazon. It is a little more complex and is signing you up for writing big checks every month.

This is going to make that first call more of a therapy and trust building session than a closing sales call.

If you are doing things right (using mortgage CRM and automated marketing) the aged leads in your database have been given the time and education to push through this resistance.

Relationship

Okay, so they have a little anxiety. Add to that the fact that they have no idea who you are, now you have no chance to close.

Relationships are important, especially in sales. That is why past prospects and clients that have heard your name and seen your marketing are likely to be more responsive to your pitch.

The better these touches are over time the more likely you are to generate sales from past prospects and clients. By better I mean they should be varied and as personal as possible. Too often even the best of us get lazy and have email blasts do all the work–that doesn’t feel like a relationship. However, email most of the time and an occasional call or handwritten note does.

Trust

A cold call is probably the point-in-time when a mortgage broker is the farthest away from a trusted position with a prospect. Why then would you think that the next lead in the door is going to be the hottest?

Fact is that trust is earned with time and experience. Consequently, your dusty old prospects and client leads are your hottest prospects. Again, assuming you have touched base with them a few times along the way.

Consistency

This one is a little secret, one Mark Green talks about as a motivation for starting Top of Mind, consistency is a killer sales weapon. You see most mortgage brokers aren’t consistent. We’re probably all a little bit ADHD. We jump from one shiny object (lead) to the next. Unfortunately, what the customer sees is a guy or gal that doesn’t follow-through.

Now to the smart mortgage broker this smells of opportunity. With a little consistency your database of clients will never have a question as to who their mortgage broker is, and new prospects will experience the diligence they will get after the sale.

Don’t forget the gold in your database–dust of those names, emails, and phone numbers and start closing more loans.

Obviously all of the contributors on Top of Mind are bloggers. And I am guessing that a fair number of the readers are bloggers too. I don’t know about you, but I often wonder if I am doing it right. So, I took a little time last night to research that question: “How do you blog better?”

Here is what I found:

1. Write to be Helpful – This is the number one tip from Chris Brogan’s 10 Blogging Tips and I think it says it all. Blogs are simple publications and no one subscribes to a newspaper or magazine with gaining some value from it. Decide early on how you are going to help your readers and be true to that objective with every post.

2. Conquer Your Fear of Blogging - This is another goodie from Chris Brogan. Much like sales has phone anxiety; a lot of beginning bloggers have a fear of blogging. Will my post be good enough? What if I make a grammar or factual error? What is no one shows up? Guess what? Every blogger experiences each of these. Blogging is a growing and evolving experience for the author. Jump in! You will get better with age.

3. Learn to Build an Audience - Readers are humans, not stats in your Web analytics. Don’t forget that, it will go a long way towards your success in attracting and gaining their loyalty. We that being said lets look at the number one factor in building a strong audience on your blog-consistency. That’s right; people are driven by normalcy and habits. For a blogger that means delivering focused, consistent, predictable content. Of course that doesn’t mean boring. It just means you are posting regularly, on a similar concept, and using a predictable format.

(I swear I will quote someone other than Chris Brogan in a minute, but he is a master!)

4. Teach Your Readers to Subscribe - Very few people know what RSS is, even less know how to use it. However, increasing your subscriber base it critical to long-term blogging success. So, teach your readers to subscribe. Then make it easy and obvious.

5. Learn a Little SEO - “If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound if no one is there?” This is the sad state of many new blogs. You should learn a little bit about amplifying your blog and cornerstone posts in the search engines. This is the modern online marketing megaphone-learn the basics of how SEO works.

I don’t profess to be an expert (that is why I consulted the experts), but I do know that blogging can be a great business development and lead nurturing tool for your mortgage business. That is why I do and would encourage you as well to do a little reading on how to improve this marketing strategy.

What are your tips on better blogging? Who are your favorite blogging mentors? Please leave a comment and help us all get a bit better.

Few things build trust better than being helpful and knowledgeable. Answering questions can be the trick to building a strong trust-based selling opportunity.

I think social networking and websites are beginning to get the power of questions to proceed sales-LinkedIn, Yahoo!, and several others are debuting question and answer formats.

Capture Consumers Early

These are precisely the services you should be targeting to harvest new prospects.  Invariably consumers will start complex and infrequent processes, like mortgage loans and debt settlement, with a ton of questions. The earlier and more often you get in the mix to answer these the better.

There are a couple of great places to start to begin capturing more customer questions and earlier:

• Twitter-Simply add your search terms and monitor for mortgage or debt questions
• Yahoo! Answers -Search or monitor varied loan related categories
• Linkedin Answers-This is another great place to search for opportunities

There are tons of questions already out there. Many have been answered and possibly the original inquirer is long gone, but search is a powerful thing. Many of these basic questions will bring new visitors with the same questions. Answering puts you in a credible position for a follow-up or a visit to your website.

Answer Questions

Make it a practice to answer a few questions everyday. This builds a bigger search “net” to capture curious homeowners or debt clients. It also improves your knowledge and presentation skills. Being forced to put your knowledge of mortgages or debt into concise, short, sentences is great practice for sales.

Follow-up with Information

If you do get an inquiry or visits to your website you need to be ready with information. Remember they had questions and they will have more. Take each of your answers (or at least the most popular) and turn them into longer explanations or PDFs that you can point or provide to these prospects.

Close and Get Referrals

The beauty of closing clients that started with questions and received a good knowledge-based sale is they are usually great referring clients. They feel like they got more than a mortgage or debt settlement. And, they want to reciprocate, which usually means a referral.

If you are like most sales people you get a little surge of adrenaline, your heart rate increases, and a bead of sweat forms on your forehead when a fresh new sales lead pops into your queue. It’s natural-anticipation of an easy deal becomes top of mind.

Unfortunately, the statistics would tell us otherwise. The fresh new lead is much less likely to close than one already in your sales pipeline. However, my gut tells me that most of your sales processes are not built on that premise.

Try these 4 simple steps to get more closings from old leads:

1. Never Throw Away a Lead – Of course, you are never going to close a lead that you throw away. So, why do will constantly kill opportunity based on the date it came into our sales pipeline. Customers, especially mortgage borrowers, should never have an expiration date.

Homeowners regularly refinance, make home improvements, relocate, buy larger homes, and downsize into smaller ones-truly mortgage customers for life.

2. Introduce or Re-introduce Yourself - The first step to bringing that old lead back to life is being polite. Your first contact is likely to be an interruption. Whether you just bought an aged lead or are trying to reignite that old database of contacts-these people haven’t heard from you recently. So, use your manners.

A simple introduction or reminder of a past interaction is a good start. Quickly get to the point. Why should they give you a few valuable moments of their time? And, what value are you going to give them in that first conversation?

Free stuff works great in this step-timely article, valuable eBook, or a simple do-it-yourself mortgage assessment.

3. Ask Permission to Continue Contact – Very quickly get a commitment or permission for follow-up contact. Not only does it assist in your compliance with a variety of marketing laws and regulations, it builds trust and respect.

This simple request makes your customer feel in control and at the center of the process. Asking permission will heighten the awareness to ongoing marketing campaigns and remove any perception of invading their privacy.

4. Persistence Lands Deals – The bottom line in increasing the activation and conversion of old leads is persistence pays. These leads are potentially in a variety of different positions in the buying cycle. Unlike a fresh lead, their intent will be far less clear-that is your challenge.

The opportunity is that those who build processes and campaigns that nurture aging pipeline leads will increase lead ROI and closed deals. Smart sales person know that regular touch points with customers in their database is the best possible source of lead generation on the market.