Tag: Ditech

CMO Insights: Focusing on Innovation

Posted on by Drew Neisser

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In part one of my interview with Rich Smith, CMO of Ditech Financial, we focused on Ditech’s sponsorship of NASCAR and how that helped build broad awareness for the brand. In part two, we’ll broaden the lens and explore the brand’s overall strategic approach, internal training to improve the customer experience and a program that aimed at improving brand loyalty (offering another great example of the power of “marketing as service” in action).  There’s a lot of meat in here so I’d encourage you to read the interview carefully but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a few highlights:

  • Ditech is gaining customers without being the low cost provider;
  • Increased employee training helped to remove the friction from the buying process;
  • By delivering an unexpected progress report to current customers, Ditech improved loyalty;
  • While CMO’s can’t be expected to control the entire customer experience they can be the “voice of the customer” across the organization.

All of this should leave little doubt why he won the Marketing Innovation Award from The CMO Club late last year.

Drew: Let’s talk about some of the innovative things you initiated in 2015.

I think we’ve done a lot of innovative things with our brand message and how we are reaching consumers.  Most brands in the industry either compete purely on price or they compete purely on a quick and easy transaction. We’re certainly very competitive on price, but we’re not the lowest. We also strive to provide a very convenient transaction process. Taking it one step further, we position ourselves as a partner that can be trusted in the mortgage process, who understands customer needs and won’t put them into the cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all, thirty-year fixed product. Customers are trying to find the best fit for them and we think Ditech offers that. Our Home Loan Specialists are educated to work with customers by asking questions, building rapport and finding solutions.

Drew: How did this translate to into you brand messages?

We have a certification program for our home loan specialists that helps them take a more personalize approach with each customer and we’ve found a way to work that training into our brand message. For example, we mail our current customers a “report card” on their current mortgage that tells them where they are and how they could change their plan by refinancing. These report cards could also tell them about the value of their home and even when there is no opportunity for them to refinance. We call this our Smart Watch Report and it’s a health of your mortgage report. You don’t see that from other providers. We are really transparent with our customers when it comes to what they currently have and what their opportunities are. That’s the theme we strive for throughout our business. We find that transparency with customers generates trust.

Drew: I suspect social media customer service is lot harder in the financial services industry because you have so much sensitive data. How do you use social media as customer service?

We definitely have to be sensitive to that and we have. We are very good at responding to the common issues we hear from customers on social media but if they’re upset, we then try to get them offline as quickly as possible and service them in a way that’s private such as on the phone or e-mail or gather more information and provide a solution to their situation.

Drew: How do you handle privacy on social customer service?

We have a customer care team that handles all the escalations. But certainly any time that somebody posts something like an account number, social security number or any private or secured information we either delete it or advise the customer to do so because you can’t have private information like that out there. And then we also obviously try to get the conversation offline as fast as we can.

Drew: Can you give me a specific example of how customer-centric approach to marketing has translated into some form of out-bound marketing, whether it’s TV or print?

The one I just mentioned was our direct mail campaign with the Smart Watch Report. That is one of our most successful retention marketing programs because people really appreciate getting that information. They call our home loan specialists about their options; it’s very engaging for the customers. And we are in the midst of taking that beyond just one direct mail medium to make it digital in the future which is very interesting.

Drew: Interesting. And so, how important is retention to the acquisition process?

That’s a very interesting question. It’s important in not necessarily a direct way but it’s important perhaps in an indirect way for a couple of reasons. In as much as you do a great job of servicing and retaining customers you have happier customers who then write more positive reviews about you and influence other people to seek you out or consider doing business with you. So that’s a nice indirect benefit. Also, the better job you do at retention the more financially sound your business is and the better base you have from which to grow. Any company that can’t do a good job of keeping its own customers probably is not going to do a good job of acquiring new ones.

Drew: I think that’s a fairly safe bet although I have worked with clients who put all their energy into acquisition and just kept watching the retention numbers decline.

Yes, you can’t fill the bathtub if you have a big hole in it. Just from an ROI perspective on marketing campaigns, the ROI on retention campaigns are many multiples higher than the ROI on acquisition campaign. It’s been true in every business that I’ve worked in my entire career.

Drew: One of things I’ve seen happen to other brands when they start advertising on TV is that their cost per clicks go down on Google Adwords. Increased awareness translates into better SEM performance because people are more familiar and click faster and therefore you can bid lower. Have you seen this?

We are seeing growth but it is a little hard to identify direct impact in SEM. We are definitely seeing more and more organic growth throughout the year, which is a clear indication of rising brand awareness. We did an extensive brand awareness study right before we launched and we repeated it about six months ago and saw major improvements in overall brand awareness and brand favorability. So, we know that it’s having an impact; it’s difficult to parse that out from the other things that we’re doing.

Drew: How much control do you have over the customer experience as CMO? How much influence do you have on this other areas?

I would say that the only person in any organizations that has complete control over the customer experience is the CEO. I can’t say that I control it. One of the most important roles that I play on our leadership team is to be the voice of the customer. I take on the responsibility of bringing the customers insights forward so that they are considered in all of our decision making. As we look to make changes in the future on both the origination side and the servicing side of our business, I definitely have a prime seat at the table to influence and emphasize the importance of the customer experience.

How NASCAR Revs up Marketing for Ditech

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Ditech Drive Down Your Mortgage

I think we can all agree that cutting through is hard these days. There are more brands than ever vying for our attention across a myriad of platforms and channels.  Consumers have become extremely adept at tuning out all these messages, time shifting to avoid TV ads and using ad blockers to avoid their digital brethren. So what’s a marketer to do, especially one wanting to reach a truly mass audience?

This was the conundrum facing Rich Smith when he took the reins as CMO at Ditech Financial in 2014. Without going into all the gory details, Ditech became a household name in the mortgage business in the 90’s, got acquired by GMAC in 1999, was merged and submerged over the next 14 years and then re-emerged as a standalone entity in 2014.  Given this circuitous history, it was important to Rich that the brand regain lost ground quickly, capitalizing on any familiarity with the name while adding on a new sense of energy.  To do this, Ditech turned to NASCAR, an effort that worked remarkably well as you will see in our interview below.

[Please note that this is only part of our extensive interview after Rich was awarded the Marketing Innovation Award by The CMO Club late last year. Part 2 will be posted shortly.]

Drew: What led you to sponsoring NASCAR?

We signed the deal with Stewart-Haas Racing of NASCAR in September 2014. It really didn’t get big at all until 2015. It’s been a great relationship for expanding our brand awareness in a relatively low cost way. We’ve gotten a lot of bang for our buck out of it. The days of people gathering around TV at 8:00 o’clock at night to watch a certain primetime show are kind of gone with the advent of the DVR and Netflix streaming and time shifting. So, one of the best places to invest brand building advertising dollars are live events, like sports. In many ways we’re a start up, re-launching a brand and we don’t have the really deep big pockets of other larger advertisers. The NFL, NBA and MLB are extremely expensive and it is hard to do both on a national and local level. NASCAR is the fourth largest sport in the United States in terms of reach and as I said earlier, it’s been a really cost effective way for us to build brand awareness.

Drew: Interesting. Tell me more about your NASCAR relationship.

The beauty of NASCAR is it’s a sport that completely gets the sponsorship model. Just watch a race and you’ll see the logos of Fortune 500 companies everywhere. The entire sport gets that sponsors make the sport go around. The fans understand that sponsors make the sport go round. Even though it might be fourth largest in terms of fan-base size, it’s number one in terms of brand loyalty with sponsors, without a doubt. It is also has a very good overlap with our target market and relatively low cost inventory. They race 38 out of 52 weekends a year, so it’s almost year round. And there is a home game in a different city almost every weekend. So, you get national coverage at a relatively low price point. It’s definitely helped us grow brand awareness with a relatively modest budget.

Drew: How do you evaluate the effectiveness? Is it brand tracking that simply shows that pre and post awareness went up as a result of this program?

We track it in a lot of different ways and we’re working on refining and getting even more analytical about how we do this. We do pre and post brand awareness surveying and analysis. We also do direct tracking through our websites during events and the resulting activity of that traffic. We monitor the impact of social media through the sponsorships. We have separate social properties that we use for the sponsorship. We look at engagement rates on various pieces of content. I would say that even though our social following is relatively small, it’s growing rapidly and we’ve achieved much higher engagement rates in social media than most of our competitors do. People attend, interact and engage with our content at a much higher rate than most of our competitors. Some of that content is related to the sponsorship, most of it isn’t but they work well together.

Drew: Interesting. What if your CFO walked in the door and said, “All right, we’re spending X thousands of dollars on NASCAR can you actually show this pays out?”

It is difficult to correlate exactly to new customers.  That said, there are lots of quantifiable metrics. For example, we do track all of the exposure we get through the sponsorship. We track every time our logo appears on the screen, how many seconds was it there and how many people saw it. And we know the value of that media. So we can show the cost of the sponsorship relative to the value of the exposure we’ve received.