Qtopia

Quicken Loans may be known as the nation’s largest home mortgage lender, but last month the Livonia MI-based financial services company stretched its town-building muscles, constructing a library, newsstand, café, shopping mall and sports arena. All online and all virtual, of course—but still, a big game-changing step toward constructing community around a finance brand.

Qtopia is designed to provide current Quicken customers with an engaging way to access financial planning tools and content, get tips and assistance in selling or renovating their homes, connect with both Quicken agents and with each other for money advice, and oh yes, enter some instant-win and weekly sweepstakes drawings.

It’s also a potent differentiator for Quicken, according to client chief marketing officer Todd Lunsford. “In a business that would appear to be a commodity on the front end, we look for things like this to differentiate us,” he says. “The paper a mortgage is printed on is in the end the same for pretty much every company. All other things being equal—pricing, service, and so on—these are the types of tools that we think separate us from our competitors.”

Quicken users log into the community using their e-mail and a provided access key. Once inside, they can go immediately to their “home”, which can be personalized to one of three designs and which contains a number of assets, including online access to their current loan information, a quick form to contact Quicken for any new loan needs, e-mail and phone contact information for their personal mortgage banker, and a directory of local home repair and renovation providers through a partnership with ServiceMagic.

Walk out the door of your home, and you’re in metropolitan Qtopia. Here users can travel to the Q library and use mortgage calculator tools, visit the Q Newsstand and read current and archived issues of Quicken’s “Home Advantage” client magazine, or drop into the Q Café to listen to housing-related podcasts, read the Quicken Loans blog “The Diff”, or share comments and questions with other Qtopia members.

“We did some preliminary focus groups before launch and found that many people said they would like to interact with other Quicken Loans clients, or other homeowners in general,” says Catherine Buzzitta, marketing project manager for Quicken Loans. “Sometimes people don’t necessarily want to talk to an official financial advisor; they want to talk to their own peers. So we’re offering that opportunity as well.”

Online promotions agency ePrize collaborated in creating the site and in running the sweepstakes available to visitors at Q Arena, including a $10,000 grand prize, to be awarded after May 30, and 12,700 instant win prizes such as Blockbuster and Starbucks gift cards. The Q Arena also integrates games from the Web site of the Cleveland Cavaliers, whose home court carries the Quicken name. Visitors can also buy Cavs tickets or merchandise or purchase full-size Fathead sports figures—at a member discount, since Quicken owns Fathead.

And at every location in Qtopia, visitors can link to Quizzle, a financial scoring tool that lets users get an overall view of their money, from credit score and personal budget to home equity.

“Other than some blogs, this is our first community effort, and the first exclusive site specific to our ‘closed’ clients,” says Lunsford. “We’re trying to build a stickiness into the site so that folks will come back to us often. In our businesspeople are doing a mortgage transaction on average every four to six years. So it’s important to provide features that make them feel like our family, so that even though we may not have talked to them for a while, they’ll have a reason to come back to us, listen to us and look at new promotions. It’s really a customer retention tool.”

In the past, Quicken has relied primarily on a bi-weekly e-mail newsletter for keeping contact with current clients. “We’ve always had e-mail campaigns, and quite frankly right now I think they’re kind of boring to people,” Lunsford says. “Now we’ll be leveraging that e-mail reminder to drive people back to Qtopia.”

Whether Qtopia eventually outranks e-mail as a retention tool will depend in part on how customers use it. Buzzitta says the company is monitoring how visitors interact with the world: how many register, how much time they spend in each building, what tools they use and so on.

“Right now Qtopia is in addition to other forms of marketing we’re doing,” Lunsford says. “But in all the things we do we measure performance back to the business. So we’ll make those decisions as this evolves.”