Web Research: Lendingtree Feeds Financial Appetites

For most consumers making decisions on personal finance matters can pose a challenge. LendingTree is hoping to ease that burden, while at the same time conducting valuable market research for its own use.

The firm has debuted its Smart Borrower RSS Feeds, a series of 27 Internet-based feeds that allow subscribers to access relevant information about financing, buying homes, purchasing autos and planning for college tuition. By using the feed services, LendingTree can track and analyze subscription statistics for all of its feeds. This will help LendingTree learn about the interests and concerns of specific market segments, such as seniors, students and homebuyers. In turn, LendingTree can better serve and sell to those customers, as well as develop, introduce and market new products. LendingTree did not make an executive available for comment.

Users also benefit since feeds open up a new world of self-directed Web-based information gathering. Consumers are increasingly turning to Web-based research when conducting personal finance, and financial institutions realize that providing information to customers-in the form of links to news sources or by access to real estate information portals-can be a "sticky" proposition.

Don Loeb, vp of partner services for FeedBurner, the firm that sold LendingTree the feed service, says feeds are a good way to track the preferences of a consumer base since the consumers play an active role.

He calls feeds a "democratization" of Web surfing, since users play a role in forging their own home pages. "For the consumers, it's like an email newsletter," he says. "You can put The New York Times on your home page, for example, if you want. [With regular search engines] The Times would be on your home page if the engine decided to put it there. With feeds, the user is in control."

FeedBurner was founded in 2004 to help companies analyze syndicated Web content usage by studying consumer clicks, surfing and other Internet activities; this lets firms get a sense of what's happening to their content once it's out of their control. "The main thing is to understand who's using content when it gets syndicated out, which articles are the most important. It's very similar to Website analytics."

For LendingTree and other FeedBurner financial services clients such as American Express and Fidelity, the services let the institutions know what sites customers are using on the Internet, how many people are using specific sources of information, and how those preferences are changing over time.

"LendingTree is using the feeds to establish a connection with the user, with feeds on mortgage rates, and providing consumer-oriented information on what people should be looking for when they are buying a new house," Loeb says.

This kind of information has always been available online, but Loeb argues that it's better for financial institutions to give consumers access to specific information they are interested in getting-and give it to them when there's new up-to-date data that's actionable. That's not always possible with traditional search engines, which require users to find sources of information, such as mortgage rates and other market data, themselves.

Craig Focardi, research area director in consumer lending for TowerGroup, calls the "email newsletter-like" practice of Web feeds "more of a push" of information on the part of Web retailers rather than a "pull." "It gets customer to keep coming back to your Website."

Since users don't always know the best places to look for pertinent information-and they may look at times when there isn't new real-time information-feeds can be a way to make self-driven customer education much easier. Customers get the information they want, on their home pages, when there's important and new information for them to receive.

"You can have multiple points of entry on the Internet, and it can be confusing," Loeb says. "Providing feeds can be a good way to build customer loyalty."

Focardi says this kind of approach can be useful for firms, but it's dependent on the quality of information being made available. People likely aren't going to stand for a marketing pitch disguised as news-you-can-use.

"Customers get inundated with marketing inquiries all the time," he says. "The ability to distinguish a content-rich feed from a thinly veiled marketing email is important for this strategy to work for financial firms. The value of the feed is in the value of the content. Banks do need to invest capital in providing the right content so that those feeds get looked at regularly." (c) 2006 Bank Technology News and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.banktechnews.com http://www.sourcemedia.com

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