One Channel Is Never Enough
I remember the first time one of our clients told me they had a 38% email open rate on their mortgage newsletters. They were proud of it, and honestly, they should have been. Industry average for financial services email sits around 20-25% according to Mailchimp’s Email Marketing Benchmarks.
But here’s what struck me. That 38% open rate meant 62% of their database wasn’t engaging at all. And some of those non-openers were actively shopping with competitors at the very moment the newsletter landed in their inbox.
Email is powerful. But a single channel, even a well-executed one, leaves enormous gaps in your borrower engagement coverage. A multi-channel borrower engagement strategy isn’t a marketing buzzword. It’s how you close those gaps and stay present in a client’s life across the different touchpoints where they actually spend their attention.
Understanding Where Borrowers Actually Pay Attention
Borrowers don’t all behave the same way. This sounds obvious, but most mortgage engagement programs treat their entire database as if they do.
Some clients are email readers. They open everything, click through, and respond to rate updates with genuine curiosity. Others have 14,000 unread emails and will never see your message in that channel no matter how good your subject line is. SMS reaches them in seconds. Others still respond to a personal phone call with context, but not to an unsolicited text.
And here’s the layer that most lenders miss entirely. The channel preference often correlates with behavior stage. A borrower who is actively shopping tends to be more responsive to any channel because they’re engaged with the topic. A borrower who is dormant but will be in the market in six months might need a lighter touch, something that keeps your name familiar without feeling like pressure.
A thoughtful multi-channel borrower engagement strategy takes all of this into account. You’re not just picking a channel. You’re matching a message, a timing, and a channel to a specific borrower in a specific stage.
The Core Channels and How They Actually Work Together
Let’s be direct about what each channel does well.
Email is your workhorse. It’s where educational content lives, where detailed rate updates belong, and where you can tell a longer story. The cost per send is low, the ability to personalize at scale is high, and the measurability is excellent. Email is best when the content genuinely serves the borrower’s current situation. Generic newsletters get ignored. A rate alert that mentions the borrower’s specific loan balance and shows them what a refinance would save them monthly gets attention.
SMS is your urgency channel. Open rates for SMS in financial services regularly exceed 90%, and most messages are read within three minutes of receipt. That’s extraordinary. But SMS comes with a trust cost if misused. Borrowers who feel spammed by text messages disengage fast and sometimes permanently. Use SMS for time-sensitive, high-relevance moments: a credit pull alert response, a limited-window rate offer, a check-in after a behavior signal has been detected. Not for every campaign.
Direct outreach from a loan officer or relationship manager remains the most powerful channel for high-value clients. One personal phone call or handwritten note does more relationship work than twelve email campaigns. The challenge is knowing when to deploy this channel, because it doesn’t scale the same way automated messaging does.
The answer is behavior intelligence. When Stikkum detects a high-value client showing active shopping signals, that’s the trigger for personal outreach. The loan officer gets an alert with context, a credit pull detected, a web behavior signal, a life event, and can reach out with genuine relevance rather than a cold check-in.
Behavior Data Is the Connective Tissue
Here’s what separates a real multi-channel borrower engagement strategy from a multi-channel marketing program that just blasts clients through different pipes.
Behavior data.
Without it, you’re coordinating channels based on schedule. Monday email, Wednesday SMS, quarterly call. With it, you’re coordinating channels based on what the borrower is actually doing right now.
Say a borrower from your 2022 purchase cohort just had a credit pull run by a competing lender. That’s a signal. The right response isn’t to wait until your next scheduled email campaign. It’s to trigger an immediate, automated email that speaks directly to their current situation, followed by an SMS if the email goes unopened within 24 hours, followed by an alert to their loan officer for a personal call if neither channel gets a response.
That’s a coordinated multi-channel sequence built around a real behavioral moment. It feels relevant to the borrower because it is relevant. And it arrives before the competing lender has had a chance to close the deal.
According to a report from McKinsey on customer engagement in financial services, personalized, behavior-triggered communications outperform scheduled campaigns by a factor of five or more in conversion rate. The data is clear. Timing and relevance matter more than volume.
Sequencing Matters as Much as Channel Selection
One thing we coach our clients on at Stikkum is the difference between a campaign and a sequence.
A campaign goes out to a segment. A sequence responds to a journey.
When a borrower signal fires, the engagement sequence should have a logic to it. Start with the least intrusive, most scalable channel. If there’s no response or engagement, escalate. If the borrower engages, shift the message to acknowledge that engagement and move the conversation forward.
For example: behavior signal detected, automated email sent within 15 minutes, email opened but no reply, SMS sent 48 hours later with a lighter touch, no engagement after 72 hours, alert sent to loan officer for personal outreach.
Each step serves a purpose. And the sequence stops the moment the borrower engages meaningfully, because at that point, you’re in a live conversation and automation steps aside.
This is how multi-channel stops feeling like marketing noise and starts feeling like attentive service.
The Mistake of Treating Every Touchpoint as a Sales Moment
Not every message should ask for something. This is a mistake we see constantly in mortgage engagement programs.
A borrower in your database hears from you three times a year, and every time the message has an ask attached: apply now, lock your rate today, schedule a call. Over time, this trains them to tune you out.
The best engagement programs mix value-delivery touchpoints with conversion-intent touchpoints. Send them a local market update. Share a tip about homeowner tax deductions. Acknowledge their loan anniversary. These touchpoints cost nothing in terms of marketing dollars and build the kind of familiarity that means when a borrower is ready to act, they think of you first.
Behavior intelligence helps here too. When signals suggest a borrower is not actively shopping, the right message is one that delivers value without pressure. When signals suggest they’re in active research mode, the message can be more direct.
Reach the right person, with the right message, through the right channel, at the right moment. That’s the full picture of a multi-channel borrower engagement strategy that actually works.
Want to see how Stikkum’s behavior monitoring and automation tools can power your engagement strategy? Book a demo and we’ll show you exactly how it works for your database.
