As technology advances, marketing is increasingly two things: rich in opportunity and risky.

With an exploding number of channels on which to reach future homebuyers, you have more paths than ever before to appeal to potential customers. But before you assume that every avenue is fair game, it’s important to know that a lot of regulation rules how you can interact with consumers in 2025. 

Specifically, there are things any mortgage lender, broker, or credit union needs to do before using automated systems to call, email, or text leads. Getting the right lead consent doesn’t just save you from legal trouble and fines. It also builds a foundation that makes it easier to close loans. 

Understanding lead communication preferences

To help you understand what kind of lead consent you need in 2025, take automated communications with leads as an example. 

Old-school robodialers have given way to sophisticated AI models. These artificial intelligences can communicate with leads via text, doing everything from collecting information about their home-buying budget to providing personalized rate quotes. 

That automated marketing means you can warm up leads without requiring any time or energy from your team. Because that communication is automatic, though, it falls under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). 

To be legally compliant, then, you need to have that lead’s express consent to contact them. In other words, that lead needs to intentionally opt into getting these kinds of texts from your team. (We’ve done a deeper dive into this if you want to make sure your lending institution is doing things above board here). 

The extra hurdle of one-to-one consent might feel burdensome. Actually, though, it’s fairly easy to build into your lead capture processes. As a result, it doesn’t necessarily mean added work for you, your loan officers, or any of your office staff. And once you have that specific okay from the lead, you get a few added benefits.  

Lead receptivity: from ice cold to warm and ready

In our social media age, people are constantly flooded with information. They don’t want all of it. Research shows that this unsolicited communication in the form of ads and spam contributes to people feeling tired and anxious.

If your lending team reaches out without warning, then, you risk contributing to these unwanted sensations. Even if that person is, in fact, looking for a house, and even if your team could actually help them with a loan, your uninvited approach might turn them away. 

Consumers are tired of being contacted when they didn’t ask for it. Take the widespread unpopularity of trigger leads as an example. 

In short, then, if you use someone’s phone number or email without permission, your team could face an icy reception. In fact, according to a recent SAP survey, 79% of people said they would end their relationship with a brand over using their personal information without their knowledge. 

That’s why lead consent isn’t just a hassle you need to manage. Instead, it’s an opportunity. 

Moving leads toward close with clear consent practices

Now that we’ve clarified how unwanted communications can harm consumer sentiment about your company, let’s look at the other side.

When you take the time to make sure a lead actually wants to be contacted (automatically or otherwise), it goes a long way. Suddenly, when your AI SMS bot or your loan officer reaches out, you’re answering an invitation. The communication goes from feeling spammy to feeling genuinely helpful. 

Walk through the mental exercise yourself. Your cell rings, and you pull it out of your pocket. If you see a spam number, what do you do? Promptly ignore it, right?

But picture grabbing your phone and seeing that someone’s calling with information you’ve been waiting on. You probably eagerly answer. 

Better yet — particularly for our millennial and Gen Z readers — imagine that there was no call at all. Instead, you could communicate to get the info you want with a series of completely painless texts. 

When someone opts into communication from your team, you move from an unwanted ping on their phone to a welcome channel of information. It builds in a level of receptivity from the lead. And your loan officers can capitalize on that to move them toward close. 

Connecting the technology and your team

The key, then, is making sure your loan officers can work in tandem with any marketing technology you’re using. 

Say someone fills out a lead form and opts into texts, for example. The loan officer should be aware of that lead, even though they may only interact with your AI SMS messaging bot at first. This way, once that lead asks for information the AI can’t provide, your loan officer is ready to jump in. 

With all of the information the AI collected from that lead ready in your CRM, the loan officer can pick up seamlessly where the bot leaves off. Continuing the conversation the lead okayed by giving their initial consent maintains momentum. With more information on the lead and the positive sentiment you’ve built up to that point, the loan officer should have an easier time getting that person to the closing table. 

In short, building lead consent into your marketing processes can set your team up for wins. And none of this has to be a lot of work. Here at BankingBridge, we offer everything from lead workflows that automatically collect consent to TCPA-compliant AI SMS texting. And we can most likely connect seamlessly with your product pricing engine and CRM, too. 

To learn just how easy it can be to build a powerful, compliant, automated suite of mortgage marketing tools, book a demo with our team today. We’re here to help you take advantage of all of the opportunities technology provides while managing and mitigating the risks. 

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