Client:
GMAC, a major financial services company and one of America's largest residential lenders, acquired a mortgage company called ditech^sm in 1999. This marked the beginning of significant growth for ditech and enabled the company to substantially invest in its products, technology and customer service, setting the stage for ditech's emergence as a leading mortgage lender.

Ditech was originally founded in 1995 to address the needs of customers for faster, easier access to mortgage loans. With the traditional mortgage broker model proving a bit slow and cumbersome for customers in a faster-paced, technology-driven world, ditech enabled borrowers to obtain mortgages directly from a lender rather than relying on an intermediary such as a broker. Providing this "direct" access through "technology" was how ditech was born.

Ditech also has a rich history of innovation, being the first mortgage lenders to introduce such things as flat-fee borrowing and refinancing, and 24/7 customer service.

Situation:
Ditech's cost-per-application had reached a level they considered to be too high (we can't give specific numbers, of course). Their existing direct mail programs' response rates were – like everyone else's in the B2C space – close to .2 percent. Yes, that's less than one-quarter of one percent. 

Objectives:
Simple: to generate more applications per dollar invested than their current solution.

Strategies & Tactics:
We knew from experience that we could substantially improve on their response rate and dramatically lower their cost per application using our Lead Machine approach.

Due to the high volume of people we would be targeting, we had to keep the per-piece cost of our direct mail pieces low. Or rather, even lower than we normally keep them. On the upside, we were going to get to test a lot of different direct mail vehicles, and you know how we love to test. Well, if you don't know that, we do.

We sent a total of 200,000 mailers in our test. Three kinds of direct mail pieces were tested: A) a typical postcard, B) a Farstar-style postcard and C) a Farstar-style three dimensional mail piece. We believed that even though Mailer C was substantially more expensive than both Mailers A and B, its performance in driving visitors to the site would more than make up the difference. More on that in the Results section (no skipping ahead, please).

One of the key objectives was to understand a prospect's "hot button." The best way to do that was to watch their behavior to determine which version of the value proposition each person needed to hear. So we knew we had to build a site that was intelligent enough to look at who was visiting, where they lived, in what kind of house, and then combine that with what they did on the site – where they were, how long were they there, what they read – in order to determine what content to show each person.

We also wanted to know how much equity a prospect had in their home. So we created a calculator that allowed visitors to calculate how much cash they could get out of their home. In order for them to do that, they had to enter their home's estimated value and how much they owed on their mortgage. That gave us the loan-to-value ratio, which we passed on to ditech's sales representatives.

Results:
This was an amazingly complex campaign for having such an amazingly simple user experience. Between the vast number of people we had visit the site and the vast amount of information gathered about those visitors, we couldn't fail no matter how hard we tried. Not that we actually tried to fail. You know what we mean.

Unfortunately, due to their proprietary nature, we are not able to show you images from the campaign. We'll have to let the numbers speak for themselves. Or shout for themselves. Loudly. Here are the facts:

About the direct mail piece: Mail Piece C (the 3-D piece) was the winner. Even though the client spent an extra 12% on those pieces, we achieved an extra 145% gain in the application rate (as defined by the percentage of mailers sent that resulted in the completion of a web application).

About the conversion rates:

• 60% of the site visitors viewed the entire value proposition
• 33% of the site visitors completed an online application
• 54% of the people who saw the online application completed it

About the cost per application: We can't go into the actual dollars here, but we can give you a relative sense of our success. GMAC's cost per application with Farstar's Mailer B was three times lower than it had been using previous methods. But with Mailer C, their cost per application was more than five times lower than it had been before Farstar.

This campaign was an excellent proving ground for our B2C campaigns, showing us that our prior B2C campaigns' successes were not flukes. Yay.