Firestarter
Kim Allen
Digital Marketing Strategist at The Federal Savings Bank
I’m the Digital Marketing Strategist at The Federal Savings Bank, a federally chartered bank headquartered in Chicago that operates in all 50 states. We have 28 locations across the U.S., with pretty big sectors in the Midwest and on the east coast. We offer traditional services like checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, and CDs, but our primary focus is the mortgage world.
We’ve used other CRMs before. And the first thing I always point out about Total Expert is that it’s both a CRM and a marketing platform. It really does do both. It’s two incredible tools packaged into one piece of software. Our bankers have everything they need in one place, so they don’t have to search multiple places to find different things.
I personally love how Total Expert challenges me to think about how I can do things better. It’s ever-changing, with new tools and new functions constantly coming out. And that’s amazing to someone like me who enjoys learning and being engaged.
And I just love Total Expert’s Journeys—they’re probably my favorite thing to do in the platform. I’ve built well over 150 of them at this point!
Meeting compliance requirements while streamlining daily work
Our 500 loan officers on the mortgage side of our business are the primary users, but I’m the one ultimately responsible for everything The Federal Savings Bank does in Total Expert. Since we’re a bank, we’re federally chartered and monitored by the OCC, so marketing needs to maintain some control over some things—we can’t just let our bankers do whatever they want. So, we build and deploy all the Total Expert-powered Journeys and run all the campaign builders on their behalf.
I do so many different things—from assisting with our Google ad campaigns and all-things-website to managing where our digital efforts intersect with Total Expert and providing technical support to all our Total Expert users. I used to help with content and handle all the compliance, too. But over the last couple of years, our marketing team has grown to include two new marketing directors. I report to the director of digital marketing, and we both work in tandem with the new director of marketing operations, who handles more of the content side of things as well as our banker requests.
So, while I’m building out the Journey structure, I’m working with the director of marketing to figure out the content we need based on what the Journey is trying to accomplish. Together, we compile a really structured creative brief, create the content based on the brief, and then our compliance team reviews and approves the content.
After the copy is approved, all I have to do is drop things into the Journey, and we’re ready to go.
Fine tuning a successful, long-running Total Expert implementation
We’ve been a Total Expert customer for so long that we’ve hit a bit of a “growing pains” period. We’re doing some really cool stuff in the platform, and there’s still a lot of potential. But we have changed a lot in the last couple of years, so, we started going back in and taking a deeper dive into what we’ve already built to figure out what’s really necessary for us to be successful.
Turns out, in some cases, we built more than we needed. For instance, at one point, we had 97 automated Journeys running, and that was way too many for what we needed. So, we figured out which ones really mattered and deactivated the ones that didn’t. Now we have about 50 active Journeys operating.
So, we’re pulling back a bit now to make sure we support our eight divisions more holistically than we did before. We want them to have everything they need, but we’re being more thoughtful about what we create and what purpose it serves.
Standardizing on Total Expert for lead follow up
In the last year, we pivoted into what we’re calling a hybrid role where outside bankers use Total Expert to work on digital leads that come in through Google ads and other various lead partners.
It was an entirely new approach for us to standardize on Total Expert for that kind of lead follow up. It took a bit of work to pivot to it because people had been working on leads in so many different systems—requesting use of Velocify, using Encompass loan origination system (LOS) pipelines, leveraging Blend as a lead management tool, working on paper/Excel, etc.
Recent feedback from the hybrid bankers working these leads has been very positive. It’s just so much easier for them to do everything in Total Expert instead of the three or four different systems they’ve been working in.
Delivering both standard and specialized trainings
Our training department provides a three-module course on using Total Expert to our loan officers. They teach users the basics like what a CRM is, what they’re looking at when they start using Total Expert, how to use the marketing materials in Total Expert, etc.
Then there’s a shorter version for our hybrid bankers that I personally handle. I’m the one who walks them through the process on how to work their leads in Total Expert, how to set lead dispositions, all of that. And then I answer all the questions they have. I have to say, our hybrid bankers really use Total Expert and give me good, concrete feedback on it. They definitely appreciate having one system that’s really easy to use.
For all types of training, we give attendees recordings of the training they attend, so they can reference them later if they want to.
Generating millions in closed loans with one Total Expert Journey
So far, the thing I’m most proud of is using Total Expert to build out a VA cash-out refinance Journey that resulted in millions of dollars of loans at pre-pandemic rates! We’ve updated the journey recently to reflect today’s market and are looking forward to refreshed data to continue improving our messaging.
Overall, we tend to measure success a bit differently than other banks. That’s because, when we first started using Total Expert here at The Federal Savings Bank, we focused less on user adoption and more on providing as much automation to our bankers as possible, so they’d have fewer things they’d have to worry about doing.
A big part of how we measure our success with Total Expert is by analyzing how we impact our bankers in the long term. We measure that not solely based on engagement, but also by whether we provide some sort of end user value—what I call “soft attribution.” So, are we providing touchpoints at the right spots throughout a loan status update Journey? Are we building effective post-close campaigns that result in referrals or refinance opportunities? That kind of thing.
What’s next?
We’ll continue to refine our Journeys and how we’re using Total Expert in general, but the next big initiative we’re going to use Total Expert for is recruiting—and I’m so excited about it; I’ve watched the recruiting demo at least five times! We have never been in a place to move forward with this recruiting project before, so I’m really excited for what that future state is going to look like.
