9 Business Texting Best Practices for Loan Officers

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9 Business Texting Best Practices for Loan Officers

Jungo SMS Business Texting Best Practices
Jungo SMS Business Texting Best Practices

If you haven’t taken advantage of business texting in 2019, then you’re missing out! Not only is texting an easy way for you to communicate with your borrowers and partners, your customers will love it too.

There are a few business texting best practices that are very important to keep in mind as you start to type up your first text messages.

Introduce Yourself

When a client first signs up to receive text messages from you, it’s important to introduce yourself. After all, you want them to add you to their contact list! We suggest writing a template introduction message that you can reuse for future clients.

For example, you could send new texting contacts something like this: 

Hi Jane! This is Anna Smith from Success Mortgage. I wanted to send you a quick message to let you know that I’m always available to chat about your mortgage needs. Feel free to reply to this message, give me a call at (619) 727-4600, or email me at [email protected]. Thank you for choosing me as your mortgage expert!

Give Them An Exit

Along with an introductory message, it’s important to give new SMS contacts a way to unsubscribe from receiving your texts. We suggest including a brief “exit” sentence at the end of your initial introduction text.

This opt out message may read something like this: 

If you want to unsubscribe from these messages, reply STOP at any time. 

Jungo SMS Business Texting Best Practices

However you chose to phrase the opt out, it’s critical to tell contacts that they can reply STOP to automatically unsubscribe. Not only is this respectful of your customer’s privacy, it is also a business texting best practice.

With the Jungo SMS app, your customers can also choose to resubscribe to your texts by replying START.

Keep It Short and Sweet

Although you don’t have character limits when using the Jungo SMS app, texting isn’t the time to write the next great American novel. Focus on getting your point across as simply as possible. 

If you’re sending a loan process update, just tell them the information they want and need to know. 

For example, a loan status update could read something like this: 

Congratulations! Your loan just closed. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. I will be in touch soon with your next steps.

Jungo SMS Business Texting Best Practices

Provide Valuable Information

It’s easy to understand how sending borrowers updates on their loan application is valuable. However, how do you provide value outside of these critical updates?

Consider what you’d want to know about your mortgage. Would you want to be updated when interest rates drop significantly? How about seasonal home maintenance suggestions?

One way to approach writing these types of texts is to actually sit down with your borrowers. Ask them what they’d like to see more information about. Then, write texts that they would actually enjoy receiving! 

For example, if you decided to send an informational text about mortgage rates, your message may look something like this: 

Hi! I wanted to send you a quick update: mortgage rates just dropped below 4%! If you’ve been thinking about refinancing your current loan, now may be the perfect time. Give me a call and I’d be happy to discuss your ReFi options.

Jungo SMS Business Texting Best Practices

Make It Personal

One of the most useful features of Jungo SMS is its mass texting tool. From right within your Jungo account, you can text an entire group of people at once. 

This brings up a problem though: how do you make the texts personal if you’re texting 20, 200, or 2,000 people at once?

That’s where merge fields come in. A merge field pulls information from your CRM and automatically populates the necessary information. For example, you could choose to enter a [FirstName] merge field into your mass text message. Now, for every text that is sent, Jungo will automatically fill in the recipient’s first name.

Here’s how a text message including merge fields would look like when you write it: 

Hi [FirstName]! I hope that this holiday season has been filled with love and happiness for you and your family. If you ever have any questions about your mortgage, I’m always here to chat! Feel free to reach out at [OwnerPhoneNumber]. Best, [OwnerName]

Your customers, on the other hand, would receive this message:

Jungo SMS Business Texting Best Practices

Skip The Texting Lingo

It can be tempting to utilize texting shorthand, such as acronyms or other slang. However, it’s best to stick to professional writing. Because your audience may cover a wide variety of demographics, using “textese,” such as acronyms, may alienate some.

But that doesn’t mean that your business texting needs to be stuffy! Keep it light and fun. Just imagine that you’re chatting with your audience one-on-one, and write accordingly. 

Check For Errors

Just like any communications with your customers, it’s important to make sure that your messages are error free. The best way to ensure that this is the case is to draft your messages in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Both these programs have a spell check feature that will catch any possible mistakes before you send them out.

Not only is this a critical step for crafting effective messages, your customers are much more likely to enjoy and read your texts if they aren’t riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes.

Be Careful When You Text

Another business texting best practice is to only text your clients during normal business hours. Unlike personal texting, no one wants to receive a business related text at 9 p.m. on a Friday night!

Keep this in mind when you’re scheduling texts as well. Keeping on top of this will show your customers that you respect their time and privacy. 

Read this next! How to Get More Mortgage Leads No Matter The Market

Pay Attention to How Often You Text

In much the same way, it’s extremely important to set guidelines for how often you will send text messages to your database. These rules vary between loan officers, but the idea is to make clients look forward to receiving your texts, not dread them!

Sending between 2-4 texts to your database a month is a good place to start. If you’re interacting with a borrower who is currently in the loan process, this number may be higher, due to required loan status update texts.

Your clients and professional partners are looking for easy and open business communications. And there’s no better way to provide that then through texting!

Bottom Line

Business texting is an excellent way to up your client communication game. After all, your clients and professional partners are looking for easy and open business communications. And there’s no better way to provide that then through texting!

Jungo SMS Business Texting Best Practices