Umbraco
Case Study

BBMC Mortgage

Umbraco implementation with a full redesign and improved lead generation

BBMC Mortgage (BBMC) came to Scandia with the challenge to help set them apart in a very competitive market, with billions of dollars at stake. The task at hand - after many hours of analysis and collaboration with BBMC marketing stakeholders - ended up being a full redesign and Umbraco implementation of the corporate site, build-out of a micro-site for one of their community initiatives and just a week before going live - a lead-gen Sweepstakes site. Finally, a custom lead management platform was built and fully integrated with the Umbraco back office.

A solution with some great post-launch joys 🎉

75%
Mobile bounce rate is down by 75%
38,000
BBMC Sweepstakes site generated more than 38,000 leads in two months
1072
In May 2017 alone, 1072 keywords improved in rank

A bit about BBMC

BBMC is a full-service lending division of Bridgeview Bank Group, headquartered in Chicago. The division has over 30 local loan offices across the United States, with a total of over 650 bankers. The company has a strong focus on serving veterans and active military service members and participates in a number of community-driven initiatives. To date, BBMC has donated over $2.5 million as part of their programs and community events.

The organization, through the use of the tools and mechanisms that Scandia has built, has won many awards, including the Top 10 Customer Satisfaction award from LendingTree (a leading national provider of mortgage leads).

 

 

What we had to do

In addition to designing the user experience and building out a fully customized grid implementation of Umbraco, we had to focus on the ROI of lead generation and optimizing the business process of getting a lead to one of the 650+ bankers behind the scenes.

Before we started the project, BBMC was losing out on deals due to the time it took for leads to get to a banker, if they even got there at all.

The website was riddled with poor calls to action (CTAs) and did not educate the user on what type of loan made sense for them. To do this, we built out a custom lead generation platform that integrates with 50+ lead sources (including LendingTree, LowerMyBills, Bankrate, and many others).

Now, leads stream in from a variety of providers (including the BBMC website), they are scrubbed against various data verification services (such as telephone number verification and consumer profiles), and then ultimately sent on to Velocfiy (CRM and auto-dialers). 

All this takes place within less than 10 seconds from the consumer clicking “submit”.

The custom development ultimately resulted in a persistent session tracking system inside their Umbraco CMS. This means that regardless of where the prospect ended up submitting the form it tracks back to the original campaign and page. For BBMC, this opens a lot of possibilities. They can encourage people to “learn more” by exploring the site or to talk to a banker by going ahead and submitting a form or starting a chat session. They know that additional time on site and page views before the form is filled out increases the likeliness for conversion from a prospect into a customer.

Now, BBMC has the ability to allow people to move around the site. When a form is submitted, they now know which campaign initially drove the lead AND which page the lead came in through. Closing this gap for them helps them make data-driven decisions on their marketing dollar investments now and in the future.

And how we did it

Our business analysts and engineers approached this project, like many others, by designing widgets that are used as building blocks for the entire website. This includes interactive and education pieces like the “How the loan process works,” adding fillable and trackable forms throughout for CTAs, creating custom campaigns and versatile URLs for tracking, etc.

All this is accomplished by the underlying Umbraco Grid, which provides the editor with an extremely flexible framework to build out pages with agility.

Our developers utilized the extensible Umbraco API to integrate content and custom data for both the custom API section as well as sending content to third-party systems. We built the custom lead platform by leveraging existing Angular and view templates, customized, but built to match the style of the Umbraco back office, for a seamless end user experience.

 

Results speak for themselves

BBMC saw great results, and quickly. Overall, mobile bounce rate is down 75%. In May, 2017 alone, 1,072 keywords improved in rank. That includes being indexed for 342 keywords they’ve never ranked for before.

Before the redesign, zero of their top 10 landing pages were VA mortgage-related. Six months after the redesign, 4 of the top 10 were VA conversion pages. Plus, because of the early launch of the Sweepstakes pages, they were able to successfully run their most entered Sweepstakes ever where they generated more than 38,000 leads in two months.

“This site is spot on in terms of what we needed to continue to grow. Scandia hit the ball out of the park for us with the redesign and all of the enhancements we’ve asked them to make since the relaunch. We’ve even been able to eliminate costly third-party systems to funnel and scrub our leads. A true win-win.”

Brian Surgener, Senior Vice President, BBMC

The intelligence gathered from this project will not only pay for the investment but create other opportunities for BBMC. It enables them to launch and test new styles of landing pages and different calls to action. It also allows them to streamline forms since more data is being passed with the individual lead, leaving them needing less individual tracking forms.

Most importantly, their robust monthly reporting gets stronger. They track and trend data month-over-month and year-over-year. The data behind their web leads now become more meaningful than ever before.

BBMC is delighted with their new site, the endless possibilities and flexibility Umbraco gives them.