- Give your clients something for nothing and add value wherever you can. Listen to their concerns, listen to what they are saying online and find solutions to match to their problems where you can, even if they are slightly outside the mortgage field. This not only positions you again as their advocate it also keeps you front and centre and shows you truly understand their needs. Knowing more about each of your clients also helps you position your services far better with each of them in the years ahead as you start to anticipate the shifts in their circumstances.
- Personalise at every turn. Never treat your client as one of many. ‘Dear valued client’ is the way to kill every conversation or ensure every email ends up in the trash. Personalise every interaction which again demonstrates you know your stuff, but also helps open conversations on email which often lead to refinance or referral discussions.
- Using the same data, look closely at the clients who have discharged a loan with you and not refinanced. Dig down into why this is the case with each client and develop strategies to employ across clients with similar characteristics. A lost client may mean a loss in revenue but it does also represent an opportunity to apply learnings and improvements across your business that will ultimately see you grow.
- Create a referral program and reward your clients when they send a new client your way. Your existing clients will feel even more connected with your business and they’ll take the time to get to you know you better as they forward on your details or content to a friend or colleague. Referral programs tend to aid client retention as when a client refers you, it validates their choice to arrange their mortgage through you in their own mind.
- Ensure you’re taking advantage of the full suite of tools you have access to as part of the ever expanding FLEX offering. Have you sent the email to all of your clients inviting them to download your very own broker smartphone app AFG has developed for you? Being front and centre on your clients’ smartphones means they will never have to scrounge for your details when they want to review or when a mate asks for the details of a top shelf broker.
Maintaining your customer database and building your pipeline of prospects in one core location is critical to retention and overall business success. A well-maintained database reduces complexity, increases productivity, helps you scale your business, affords ease of analysis, increases client retention and acquisition, and of course adds tremendously to the value of the business you’re building. Make sure you populate AFG’s ‘FLEX’ system with as many of your clients’ and prospects’ email addresses as possible. Email is the most instantaneous form of communication with the highest impact, and it’s a medium that customers are far more likely to respond to and forward on. Aim for at least a 95% email capture rate and make it your mission to capture every new client’s email address as you go. As an AFG broker on the SMART program, if you have your client’s email address in FLEX you are a whopping 3.5 times more likely to retain that client. The graph below demonstrates the direct link between higher email capture and portfolio growth, so the number of email addresses you capture translates directly into profitability.