Case study 01 · Solo agent · Paid acquisition
Turned Scrolls Into Sales-Ready Leads Through a Standout Social Campaign
585 Facebook leads over twelve months. 22 funded deals. Fourteen of them closed more than 90 days after the lead first came in.
We don't publish client names — you're a mortgage agent, so are they, and some of them work your market. Figures below come from live account screenshots with identifying details blacked out. On a call we'll open the same accounts unredacted.
Before us
He'd already tried this once
Two years earlier he'd spent $3,000 with an agency that sent him a spreadsheet of names every Friday. He called them between appointments, three or four days after they'd filled the form. Nobody remembered submitting anything. He cancelled in month two and told everyone Facebook leads don't work.
He wasn't wrong about his experience. He was wrong about the cause. The leads weren't the problem — the four-day gap was, and so was the assumption that a lead who doesn't book this week is dead.
A mortgage lead is not a pizza order. Somebody filling in a renewal calculator in March may not be renewing until November. The entire economics of this channel depend on still being in front of that person eight months later, which almost nobody does, because it isn't a campaign — it's infrastructure.
"I don't need a huge pile of leads. I need fewer of them, better qualified, and someone talking to them before they've closed the laptop."
Client, at intakeSpeed to lead
What happens in the first five minutes
Every form fill hits the CRM in real time and triggers a sequence before anyone has done anything by hand. The goal isn't to sell in the first five minutes. It's to make sure the prospect knows a real person has them, and that the phone number showing on their screen is one they recognise.
Lead lands in the CRM
Tagged with campaign, ad set and the answers given in the form. Assigned to the qualification queue and surfaced on the caller's screen immediately.
SMS goes out, from his local number
Short, first-person, asking one question. Two-way, so replies land in the same thread the caller is looking at.
Email with the thing they actually asked for
The comparison, calculator result or guide the ad promised, delivered inside a minute. No gate, no "book a call to receive it." The deliverable arrives; the conversation is separate.
A human being calls
Our qualification team, not an auto-dialer and not the agent. They work a defined script, log everything to the CRM and have one job: find out whether this person is worth thirty minutes of a licensed agent's day.
Ringless voicemail, only if there was no answer
Deliberately delayed. The first version of this sequence sent it inside the first minute, alongside the SMS and the email, and it read as a machine.
Nine further touches across call, SMS and email
Varied times of day and days of week. A lead that hasn't answered by 6pm Tuesday is not the same lead at 11am Saturday.
The lead lands on the caller's screen the moment the form submits — no queue, no manual routing.
Short, first-person, from his local number, so replies land in the same thread the caller is already watching.
Held until 18:00 rather than sent alongside the SMS and email — the version that fired inside the first minute read as a machine.
The comparison, calculator result or guide arrives inside a minute. No gate, no "book a call to receive it."
Varied call, SMS and email times — a lead who doesn't answer Tuesday evening gets a different window Saturday morning.
Cropped to the node column. Account name and workspace switcher are outside the frame.
See it as an annotated flowHide the annotated flow
Rebuilt from the live workflow so it stays legible at any width. The node names, order and wait times are the builder's own.
Either way is perfectly fine — I'm just trying to point you in the right direction.
Okay
Thanks — roughly where does your credit sit at the moment?
TransUnion score 610
And how much of a down payment do you have for the purchase?
The lead volunteers a credit band and a down-payment position over text before anyone has spoken to them — the entire point of putting a two-way number in front of them in the first nine seconds. Wording tidied and identifying details removed; the substance and sequence are from a live thread.
The definition
What "qualified" actually means
Most agencies use the word to mean the lead answered the phone. Ours has a definition, and the agent's calendar stays closed to anything that doesn't meet it. He gets fewer appointments than the raw lead count would suggest and a far higher percentage of them turn into applications.
- TimelinePurchasing or renewing within 6 months
- CreditSelf-reported band, plus any prior declines
- Income typeSalaried, commissioned, self-employed, new to Canada
- Property statusOwns, renting, under offer, has a realtor
- Down payment or equityRough figure and its source
- Decision makersCo-applicant identified and available
A 60% show rate in month one climbing to 84.6% by month twelve — the system improved over the year rather than arriving perfect.
| Month | Leads | Speed to lead | Appts set | Show rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | 36 | 8m 52s | 5 | 60.0% |
| Month 3 | 45 | 5m 40s | 9 | 66.7% |
| Month 6 | 52 | 4m 38s | 12 | 75.0% |
| Month 9 | 51 | 4m 20s | 11 | 81.8% |
| Month 12 | 56 | 4m 02s | 13 | 84.6% |
| 12-month total | 585 | 4m 26s | 127 | 77.2% |
The rest of the twelve-month totals, so nothing is hidden by the trim above.
Paid media
The campaigns behind it
$1,100 a month, split across a small number of ad sets and left alone long enough to learn. The pattern below is the one that matters: the cheapest ad set was also the one that produced the most leads.
Read this as one window, not the whole year. Three ad sets, 203 leads from $2,365.72 at $11.65 per lead. The twelve-month totals elsewhere on this page — 585 leads, $13,200, $22.56 per lead — cover every campaign across the full period, including the early months where cost per lead was far higher. We'll open the account on the call and you can set the date range yourself.
The long tail
The part that pays for the channel
Of 585 leads, 151 qualified on the first pass. The other 434 didn't get discarded. They went into a twelve-month sequence: a monthly newsletter, rate-movement alerts, a renewal-window trigger that fires 120 days before their stated date, and a quarterly call from the same team.
Average touches per unconverted lead over twelve months: 47. That is a rounding error in cost and it is where more than half the deals came from.
Deals funded inside 90 days: 8. Deals funded after 90 days: 14. A broker who cancels in month two, as he did the first time, collects the first bar and pays for all five.
The three indigo bars are the whole argument for staying in month seven.
- Sent
- 602
- Delivery rate
- 97.84%
- Unique opens
- 201
- Total opens
- 372
- Unique clicks
- 6
- Total clicks
- 6
One month's send. The list is wider than this campaign's 434 unconverted leads — it carries his past clients and referral contacts too, which is why the send count runs ahead of the lead count.
Show the raw captureHide the raw capture
Cropped to the analytics panel.
What actually lands in the inbox
Not a rate table and not a "just checking in." Each issue answers one question a borrower is already asking, at the length it takes to actually answer it.
This is the piece that keeps a lead warm for eleven months without anyone on the team writing a bespoke email — and it is why the renewal-window trigger has something to attach itself to when it fires.
End to end
The whole twelve months in one column
Roughly one funded deal for every twenty-seven leads. Any agency promising better than that on cold paid social is either counting differently or hasn't run it for twelve months.
The arithmetic
What it cost and what it returned
Our fee is in the denominator, where it belongs.
Commission stated at 100 basis points because that's where this agent's files landed. Yours will differ. Any agency quoting you a dollar return without naming the basis points is guessing.
Worth isolating: the 14 deals that funded after day 90 represent roughly $7.0M in volume and $70,000 in commission. Cancel at week eight, as most brokers do, and that's the number you leave behind.
Results described are specific to this client and to the conditions of their market and business. Individual results vary. Figures are reported by the client and derived from platform and CRM data for a twelve-month period. Client details have been anonymised at their request. The SMS exchange shown is a representative thread: wording has been tidied and identifying details removed. Nothing here is a representation or guarantee of future performance. Rates and lender comparisons shown in campaign material were accurate at the time of sending. All outbound calling, messaging and email described operates under consent obtained at the point of form submission.
