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Marketing Pulse May 25

Memorial Day Monday: the right move is to send nothing

Federal holiday, market closed, the inbox is the wrong channel — use the quiet for the analytics work that gets skipped every other week.

Monday, May 25, 2026 30Y 6.54%15Y 5.85%5/1 ARM 6.32%

Mortgage news is silent today — federal holiday, bond market closed, no agency communications, no data prints. For LO marketing this is doubly quiet: not only is there nothing to react to, but Memorial Day is the calendar day when sending almost anything to a borrower list is read as opportunistic. The 5/23 Marketing Pulse covered the one exception — a respectful no-pitch thank-you to veteran contacts — and the 5/24 brief covered the Tuesday-morning send window that actually matters for outreach. Today's marketing move is the one that doesn't show up as activity in the CRM: the analytics and prep work that gets skipped every other week.

The rate backdrop reinforces the analytical posture. Bankrate's 30-year sits at 6.65% — exactly where it closed Friday — and nothing changes until Tuesday's open. So today is the rare clean window to audit the marketing math behind your post-holiday segment plan. Three numbers worth recalculating before the Tuesday send goes out: average payment savings per refi quote in your current pipeline (the dollar figure your messaging should anchor on), the response rate by segment from your last three campaigns (which lists earn the time and which don't), and the open-rate-by-send-time data your CRM has been collecting silently (the actual best window for YOUR list, not the industry average).

Two specific projects fit this off-day. First, run the response-rate report by audience segment for the past 90 days — VA-loan past clients, FHA closings, conventional 7%+ refis, active purchase. The segment with the highest response per send is where the Tuesday-morning outreach budget should concentrate; the bottom segment is where the script needs rework. Second, prep the next three weeks of content drafts in one sitting — a refi-environment explainer, an FHA tri-merge-timing FYI, and a credit-score and LTV pricing-tier explainer for the typical borrower who saw "the rate" in the news but doesn't see their tier. Today's quiet is the one day in the quarter when batching three weeks of content into a single session is actually realistic.

Do this today

run the per-segment response-rate report from your CRM for the past 90 days, identify your top two and bottom two segments, and decide which gets the Tuesday-morning send and which gets the rewrite. The conversation tomorrow with the borrower who picks up the phone matters more than the message you ship today.

Borrower segments to act on today

Locked-low cohort below 6.0% — your equity-driven outreach base

These past clients sit on rates well below current market, so refi is off the table — but the equity buildup from the past two years opens HELOC, cash-out for non-rate purposes, or move-up conversations that do not require shopping the rate. Often the highest-response-per-send segment because the value proposition is concrete and unrelated to the rate cycle.

closed loans · ≥12mo since close · rate ≤6.00% · conventional

Today’s content angles

Blog post

Three-week content batch: refi explainer, FHA tri-merge timing, pricing tiers

Internal — not a send today. Plan the three pieces of educational content for the next three weeks: (1) a refi-environment explainer that frames where the rate is and what the GSE streamline pathway means for borrowers above 7%; (2) an FHA tri-merge timing FYI for when FICO 10T / VantageScore 4.0 actually kicks in on new originations; (3) a credit-score and LTV pricing-tier explainer that walks the borrower from "the headline rate" to "the rate on your specific file". Two hours of work today yields three weeks of scheduled sends with the rate environment as the through-line.

Tactics worth stealing

Audit response rates BEFORE the next campaign, not after

The marketing instinct is to write the next campaign and audit its response after. The discipline that compounds is the reverse: pull the response data BEFORE deciding what to send. The bottom-performing segment from the past 90 days does not get the same script; either rework it or stop wasting the impression budget. The top segment gets the prime send window. This sounds obvious; most LOs do not actually do it because the run-rate of the next send always feels more urgent than the audit of the last one.

HubSpot State of Inbound report; Mailchimp segmentation benchmarks