Affinity marketing is a term coined by MBNA Bank some 20 something years ago. The then division of Maryland National Bank and now division of Bank of America coined the strategy with this slogan: "Get the Right Customers and Keep Them". They started their strategy by marketing credit cards to alumni associations with a portion of the fees earned being donated to the alumni association. Their first partnership was with the prestigious Princeton University Alumni Association and expanded to over 1400 organizations today.
I started a division for a mortgage company that focused on affinity marketing by selling discounted real estate related services as an employee benefit to HR managers. It worked out pretty well. In 1999, our first year in business, we partnered with the Peoria (AZ) Unified School District and Peoria (AZ) Police Department to offer the program to its employees. We assigned a Realtor to each "account" and mined the employees for business. By the end of the first year, each Realtor was generating one transaction each month and we were closing a purchase loan and refinance loan each month. We added employee groups like The Boulders Resort and, oddly enough, Bank of America (in AZ). I say that BofA was odd because they bought the leader of affinity marketing (MBNA) earlier this year. By the time I sold the little company in 2003, it was generating 5-6 real estate transactions monthly and over fifteen loans each month. I abandoned that idea with my move to San Diego but restarted the idea earlier this year with the unveiling of http://sandiegobenefits.com/
Here are ten hints to establishing an affinity marketing program for your real estate practice:
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