Mortgage broker conversion rate optimisation

Conversion is one of those words that sounds precise and usually is not. Two people in the same brokerage will quote different conversion figures for the same month because they are counting different things: one is counting everyone who filled in a form, the other is counting everyone who was worth talking to. Until the counting is settled, no improvement can be proved.

This article is about the two ratios that decide most of a broker firm's income, how to measure them without fooling yourself, and where they usually break.

Settle the stages before you settle the maths

Write down the stages a person passes through in your firm and give each one a definition that two people would apply identically. A workable set for most brokerages is:

• Enquiry: any new contact from someone who might want advice, from any source.
• Contactable: you reached a live human being, or they replied.
• Qualified: the situation is one you can help with and they want help now or soon.
• Appointment: a booked fact-find that actually happened, not one that was diaried.
• Application: submitted to a lender.
• Offer, then completion.

The definitions are more important than the choice. "Appointment" meaning a diary entry gives you a flattering number and useless information, because no-shows are one of the leaks you are trying to find.

Choose denominators you can defend

Enquiry-to-appointment is the first ratio. Decide whether the denominator is every enquiry or every qualified enquiry, and then be consistent. Both are legitimate and they answer different questions: the first tells you about the quality of what you attract, the second about how well you convert what is genuinely yours to win. Firms that quietly switch between them are usually doing it to make a channel look better than it is.

Appointment-to-application is the second ratio, and it is the one that reflects your advice process rather than your marketing. It should be measured per adviser as well as per firm, because it is a personal skill as much as a system.

Keep a third number alongside them: how long each stage takes. A stage that converts well but takes six weeks is still costing you cases through attrition.

Count cohorts, not calendar months

The most common measurement error in a brokerage is dividing this month's applications by this month's enquiries. Those two populations are not the same people. An enquiry in March may apply in May, so a busy March makes April look terrible and June look excellent.

Instead, tag each enquiry with the week it arrived and follow that group forward. Ask what proportion of the enquiries from the first week of March had reached an appointment within thirty days, and an application within ninety. Cohorts are slower to read and they are the only version that tells the truth.

Segment by source at the same time. A blended firm-wide figure hides the fact that referrals convert differently from paid search, and averaging them tells you to do more of everything.

Where enquiry-to-appointment usually leaks

Read the enquiries that never reached an appointment. Not a summary of them: the actual records, thirty of them, in one sitting. The reasons tend to fall into a small number of buckets.

Some were never reachable, which is a contact-strategy problem. Some were reached and were not ready, which is a nurture problem rather than a conversion problem, and counting them as failures will push you into chasing people who told you the truth. Some were reached, were ready, and drifted, which is the expensive bucket. Some were never yours: wrong region, wrong product, a tenant who wanted advice about a landlord's mortgage.

Only the drifting group responds to better process. Look at what happened between the first conversation and the appointment that never happened: how long the gap was, whether a specific time was agreed on the call or left to be arranged later, and whether anything confirmed it in writing.

Where appointment-to-application usually leaks

Here the causes are different. Documents that were never sent. A fact-find that surfaced something nobody expected. A recommendation the client did not understand well enough to act on. An estate agent pushing a competing broker. A client who went quiet because their purchase fell through and nobody asked.

The diagnostic is the same: read the cases, in bulk, and count the reasons. Most firms find one dominant cause and are surprised by it.

Change one thing and measure it properly

Improvements are usually small and specific: booking the appointment while still on the first call rather than promising to email times; sending a document checklist within the hour rather than the next day; confirming appointments the day before. Each of these is testable.

To test one, hold everything else steady, apply the change to everything arriving from a given date, and compare the same ratio for the cohort before and after. Give it enough volume to mean something. A small firm may need a quarter before the difference is distinguishable from luck, and it is better to wait than to declare victory on nine cases.

Numbers that will mislead you

A rise in conversion after you cut a lead source is not an improvement in your process. A high enquiry-to-appointment rate paired with a poor appointment-to-application rate usually means you are booking people you should have screened out. Per-adviser figures compared without regard to case mix will punish whoever handles the complex work. And any figure computed from a month with a bank holiday in it deserves suspicion.

Conversion is not the only thing you are optimising for

Under Consumer Duty the question is not only how many people proceed but whether the ones who did understood what they were agreeing to and were well served by it. A tactic that lifts a ratio by adding pressure, obscuring a fee or rushing someone past a decision is a bad outcome that happens to look like a good number. The changes worth making are almost always the ones that make the next step clearer and easier, which is fortunate, because those are also the ones that hold up over time.