E-LOAN Imran Khan Gets "Radically Simple" - Cover Story on JFAM 2007 Issue

Volume 4 I Number 2 2007

TREATING CUSTOMERS WITH DIGNITY:
E-LOAN’s Imran Khan Gets “Radically Simple”

I n just a short period, Imran Khan has become one of the premier experts on
search engine marketing (SEM). Looking at his track record, it should be no
surprise. At Elance, where he ran the marketing group there from 2000-2003, the
company, a leading marketplace for financial services, experienced a whop-
ping jump of 400 percent in revenues, thanks in large part to his SEM efforts.
That was just the first of several stops in his effort to utilize SEM to its fullest
benefit. In 2003, he took a similar position at Cambrian Ventures, a venture
capital firm specializing in investing in early stage technology startups.
But since June 2003, he has been at E-LOAN, the direct-to-customer online
company that offers loans for mortgages, home equity, automobiles and
education, as well as savings accounts and certificates of deposits. There, he
directs a budget of more than $50 million as well as all aspects of E-LOAN’s
branding and its integrated multichannel marketing activities.
Khan started his education in his native Pakistan, with training in public
accounting and public administration. He then earned two M.B.A. degrees,
one from Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan and a second
from Cornell University in upstate New York.

JFAM: You’ve been at E-LOAN for several years already, but maybe you can
tell me a little bit about what you were doing before you were appointed CMO.
Khan: I guess the most important thing about my background is that I don’t
really have a traditional marketing background. I’m an accountant by training.
Frankly speaking, instead of looking at it as a weakness, I have tried to use it as
one of my strengths and I’ve been able to, in some sense, infuse a strong
analytical rigor in the marketing activities wherever I’ve worked. For that
reason, search marketing was a natural fit for me in the initial part of my
marketing career because it’s highly amenable to analysis and optimization.
That’s also where I developed a basic kind of evidence-based methodology
which essentially means applying a “test, measure, optimize, and roll out”
approach to marketing. It’s very, very simple, but you know what? I have been
able to apply it to pretty much all the channels that I’ve come across — be it
online media, direct mail, television or radio.
As far as my role at E-LOAN is concerned, it has grown over the past three-
and-a-half to four years. I was originally hired to build a search-engine
marketing channel. I built one from scratch and turned it into a $20 million
industry-leading search marketing program. My data-centric approach to
marketing not only delivered results, but I think also resonated well with the

The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing 7


management. Partly because of that, I was later asked to take on nonsearch
online media and, a couple quarters later, all of the media, including offline
media, like TV and direct mail.
The goal was to apply the same kind of approach that I applied to search
marketing and, obviously, my ability to deliver results did help. After a while,
everyone thought it would be a good idea for me to move to the CMO position
and apply my vision across all marketing functions, not just to media.

JFAM: Before E-LOAN, where were you working? Was it more in the
accounting business or was it on the marketing side?
Khan: Since I’ve been in the U.S. the late ’90s, I’ve been on the marketing
side, but mostly at startups. I am somewhat of a career changer. I went to
business school back in ’98. I’ve primarily been involved in marketing.

JFAM: When you accepted this role of CMO, what were some of the chal-
lenges you were facing? E-LOAN, according to all the people that I speak with
in the industry, has developed an outstanding brand presence in this country
with very little money. What have been some of the challenges at E-LOAN?
Khan: I think the biggest challenge is to continue pushing the brand with an
incredibly small amount of money and figure out what is the next evolution for
our brand. If you think about it, before this “Radically Simple” campaign, our
slogan was “a better way to get a loan.” The focus was primarily on comparing
E-LOAN with traditional ways of getting a loan. In some sense, we were
creating a new category and educating the consumers not just about E-LOAN,
but also about online lending in general and its benefits over the traditional
way of getting a loan.
When we launched the “Radically Simple” campaign a few years later, we
brought the focus back to our core values of fairness, honesty and respect.
Now, my mission is to continue to make the connection between what
consumers see on E-LOAN television commercials and their actual experience
with E-LOAN online and making it totally, totally seamless.

JFAM: Marketing has traditionally been thought of in a very creative way
meaning “you’re in marketing, so you must be a creative person.” Is there a
creative side to this accounting mind that you have?
Khan: Even in creativity, I’ve taken a structured approach to it, because you
can come up with a lot of creative ideas. Some might be winners, others might
not. I need to have evidence that a particular idea is going to work. Only then
am I going to roll it out at a larger scale.
For example, if we’re talking about a new TV commercial concept, using
maybe a new slogan. I might want to first test it out through my banner ads

8 The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing


online or through my search marketing campaign on a smaller scale. See what
resonates better with the audience and then take that learning back to the
agency and say, “OK, now we have some empirical data on all of these
concepts. Let’s figure out which one we want to roll out now.”

JFAM: How has the online lending field changed in the last five years in terms
of its acceptability among consumers?
Khan: Acceptability has absolutely increased. There is actually data that shows
that in the next five years, the overall market for mortgages is actually expected
to shrink from its current level, but the online portion will continue to grow. It’s
absolutely a sign of how consumers, in general, are becoming more comfort-
able with financial transactions online. They’re doing online banking, they’re
paying their bills online. I think if you look at this in conjunction with what’s
happening with the Net overall — with the high broadband penetration — all
these factors are helping this trend of financial transactions increase online.

JFAM: I think it was a great strategy for you guys to adopt the idea of talking
about the very thing that consumers are scared of online, which is this whole
notion of respect, sincerity and openness. These are the things I think gener-
ally turn people off about online. If somebody really wants to have a personal
relationship with the individual who’s processing their loan, can they do that?
Khan: They absolutely can. Getting a mortgage is probably the single largest
purchase an average American consumer makes in their lifetime. They feel
really insecure and are looking for clues to establish some kind of inevitable trust
with their lender. Therefore, even though the majority of the loan applications we
get are online, within 15 minutes we contact those applicants via phone because
we understand the value of the human interaction. Consumers want someone
who can hold their hand and walk them through this daunting process.
It’s not that we’re just verbalizing that we’re changing the industry, there are
processes in place that ensure that. One such thing that is probably most impor-
tant is that we don’t pay our loan consultants based on what kind of loan they sell
to the consumers or the kind of rate that they sell to the consumers. We compen-
sate them based on the number of loans that they sell, so now they have a vested
interest in offering a loan that makes the most sense for the consumer.

JFAM: If, for example, I’ve had a positive experience with E-LOAN and I had a
real bond with the person who worked with me, would it be possible for me to
tell my friend to call E-LOAN and say “this is who you should ask for,” or is it a
little bit more anonymous then that?
Khan: It can work either way. If you have a relationship with someone at E-
LOAN, you can absolutely contact that person. You have their e-mail



addresses, you have access to their web page, with all the information about
the consultant and how to contact them. Again, here’s this human connection.
There’s a real person sitting there who’s willing to help you.

JFAM: Tell me a little bit about the metrics of success and maybe you can
encapsulate for us some of the metrics that you use to determine the success
of your job in this new position and then the success for the overall brand of E-
LOAN. What are some of the things you look to measure that would be meas-
urements of success?
Khan: My mission is to make E-LOAN the “go to” place, the ultimate destination
site for all kinds of consumer financial needs at different stages of their life. To
that end, how do I operationalize this mission? With a limited number of
resources and a limited marketing budget, it’s important for us to figure out
those marketing activities that work the best. Measuring market success is
very, very important at E-LOAN internally. Our metrics are essentially consid-
ered return on advertising spend, as well as market share. These metrics help
us become data-centric in a lot of things that we do internally.
Our goal is to make sure that the last dollars spent across each individual
channel deliver equal return. This is a very important concept. It’s all about
how I might spend $100 on search marketing, $500 on television, $200 on direct
mail and $50 on an affiliate program. The most important thing here is that with
the last dollar we’re spending on each of these channels, our goal is to make
sure that the last dollar for each channel delivers the same value.
Even when it comes to branding, the success is determined by not just an
increase in brand awareness, but also if that increased brand awareness
helped us increase market share. Again, it’s not branding for the sake of
branding, but branding for the sake of gaining market share.
Taking it further, as a multichannel marketing company, our potential
customer might see a TV commercial for E-LOAN. Then they go online and see
our banner ad at Bankrate.com. Later, they might also go to Google and do
some research on home equity and click on an E-LOAN search ad. We also
realize that it is the same person to whom we sent out a direct mail piece in the
last couple of months.
Now, we have exposed this particular customer to E-LOAN’s marketing
message in four or five different ways. We came up with this proprietary system
internally to allocate credit to all these channels that touched the customer. We
want to make sure that credit is allocated in the most optimal way.

JFAM: Do you find yourself manipulating all the moving pieces that you
happen to be concentrating on, based on the feedback that you’re getting
back from your metrics?



Khan: There is a feedback loop and in certain channels, the feedback is instan-
taneous and comes in pretty much every day. In other channels, the frequency
is much lower because collecting data takes time. Every day, we go over those
numbers and decide “OK, do we need to make any changes in that channel,”
so our budget is a pretty fluid budget. It’s not like we decide upon a budget at
the beginning of the quarter, and at end of the quarter, we stay true to that
budget. The budget keeps changing and sometimes increases, if we feel that
things are going well.

JFAM: Today, given the feedback loops and the ability for marketers to
respond to it, I do hear more and more marketers saying that their budget is
much more fluid.
Khan: Absolutely. The question is “why do you want to give up on an opportu-
nity for the sake of staying with your budget?” The other thing is if you are
finding out that for some reason, television advertising is not working as well,
you can take those dollars and deploy them in some other channels. That
happens a lot more frequently, as opposed to your budget of $15 million all of a
sudden going up to $30 million. Such budget increases have consequences.
Every time someone fills out a loan application, someone from E-LOAN picks
up the phone and calls that applicant. There is a fixed capacity of loan consult-
ants involved here who can process those loan applications. Therefore, if we
are going to double the number of loan applications, we have to increase our
fixed call center capacity downstairs, as well.

JFAM: Financial services used to be a much more complex, mystical kind of
thing that always needed an interpreter. What are your general findings on how
financial services has changed over the last five or 10 years in this country?
Khan: I think the new financial services customer is a very well-informed
customer. They prefer to comparison shop. Also, they aren’t very loyal
anymore. They look for the best deal and they don’t necessarily want to stick
with the same bank that they’ve been keeping their checking accounts with
forever. I could speak more about how things are changing when it comes to
financial services marketing.
I think of the two or three main trends I see, one is that there is a greater
demand for accountability from the advertising spend. CMOs are under great
pressure from the CEOs to make the marketing dollars work harder and there-
fore CMOs are looking for measurable marketing channels. They are also
looking to hire marketers who don’t mind being held accountable.
The second trend I see is that online media is also becoming really important
to the financial sector. The biggest phenomenon out there in social networking
is MySpace. Around 25 percent to 30 percent of their ad revenue is coming



from financial services advertising. They are the biggest players on MySpace.
It speaks to my earlier point that online media is becoming important for
financial services. For example, when it comes to mortgage buying, people are
willing to invest some time doing some research. The best and easiest way to
do the research is online.
The third point I want to raise is that all media is fast becoming digital media.
This is slowly allowing CMOs to get visibility into the effectiveness of their
offline marketing spend. So maybe we are not quite there, but I think these are
the things that you’ll see in the next three to four years. The same skill set that
is required to manage online media is also needed to manage offline media,
because it’s going to be highly measurable. You are going to be looking for
accountability from offline media as well.

JFAM: What are some of the innovative programs that you’re doing with your
media partners, if you’re able to reveal them at this point?
Khan: What we have realized is that all media channels are interrelated and
we are trying to figure out how to leverage this interrelationship. For example,
we know that TV and search marketing work in tandem. TV campaigns are
creating awareness and we kind of monetize that awareness through search
marketing efforts.

JFAM: When you start a new flight of a campaign, can you see a notable
difference in what’s happening through your search measurements?
Khan: I’m actually going a step beyond that. I’m saying that we can actually
quantify the difference. When we are looking at our cost per application, we
are allocating some of the credit for applications that we generate through the
search channel to the TV channel. We know that television helped the search
channel generate those applications, so we build the model around that.
By the way, I couldn’t possibly have done this with a typical marketing team.
We have a team of marketers who are very data-centric. They are not neces-
sarily in the mold of traditional marketers. These are people with degrees in
computer science and econometrics.

JFAM: Has this been intentional or has it sort of been an evolution? If you turn
around, do you realize you have a very result- and research-driven team? Or
has this been intentional along the way?
Khan: I think it’s been totally intentional. It started with search marketing. In
search marketing, I knew even before I joined E-LOAN what kind of people I
wanted because with marketing campaigns generating tons of data, I needed
marketers who had the ability to see the forest for the trees. They could analyze
the data and come up with insights on how to optimize and grow these



campaigns. I refer to them as analyst marketers because, you know, it used to
be that these two functions were somewhat divorced — analysis and
marketing. You’ll have a team of marketers and then you’ll have a team of
analysts that crunched data for these marketers and then the marketers tried to
figure out how to use it. The problem is, as I said, things change so frequently in
marketing today that if your job is dependent upon the analysts doing their job
well and doing it in a timely way, you’re only half a marketer then.

JFAM: Do you think from a staffing point of view that financial services is
taking more and borrowing more from the model of Procter & Gamble and the
consumer packaged goods category?
Khan: I think they might be, but frankly speaking, it’s been an evolution that has
taken place over time. As I mentioned earlier, online media is becoming impor-
tant for financial services. People who are doing a really good job of online
marketing realize that they can’t do it without being data-centric. Now when
they saw that this approach worked well, I think the question was asked “why
limit it to only online media?”

JFAM: What about the interplay between your marketers and analysts,
meaning your in-house team with your agency. I think you use Merkley, if I’m
not mistaken.
Khan: We’re using Merkley on the creative side of TV, and use Hill Holiday on
the media side. Then we have a bunch of other agencies we deal with. Like for
direct mail, we use Merkle*. On search, we use an agency called eFrontiers,
and then various agencies on the online media side.

JFAM: Could you explain the structure of how you work with your agencies?
Khan: We were talking about pressure on CMOs. So, what do CMOs do? They
pass the same pressure on to their agencies. I think agencies are under pressure
just like CMOs these days to deliver return. My personal experience is that agen-
cies like to work with progressive and agile companies like E-LOAN, because we
continually push them to stay ahead of the curve. That’s the only way, with a
limited budget and limited resources, that we can maintain a competitive advan-
tage, but we also treat them like partners. We share a lot of data with them, but at
the same time, we expect them to drive performance for us.
So talking about our media agency, Hill Holiday in this case, we provide them
with a lot of data. When we saw this correlation between search and televi-
sion, we provided them data from search (which was not originally part of their
mandate) to look at. But they do realize that E-LOAN has found this interrela-

*This agency, while similar to their TV ad agency, is spelled without the “y” on the end



tionship and they need to figure out how they can leverage it to make TV adver-
tising work better for us.
When it comes to the creative process, we use various tools that are avail-
able to us. For example, we used to get a lot of the consumer insight from our
customer care people. What kind of competitors do they talk about on the
phone? What kind of issues do they point out about the lending industry, what
are their concerns? What do they like about E-LOAN? We have put together a
kind of technological solution in place where we are digitizing those conversa-
tions and then using an algorithm that helps us come up with useful nuggets of
actionable information. This way we can uncover intentions in real time.
Instead of depending on our customer care guys to write up an e-mail or tell
their manager about these things, we’ve just made that process totally auto-
mated. We provide these insights to our agency contacts as well, so that they
can take advantage of it.

JFAM: Some people think that one of the worst things that ever happened in
this business is the separation between media and creative. How do your
creative and media teams work together? Are you always the referee or the
person in the middle or do they have their own relationships?
Khan: I think they do communicate with each other, but again I can’t rely upon
their own communication, so we kind of ensure that. We ensure that we have
frequent conference calls with them. For example, whenever we’re coming up
with a concept for a new product or a commercial, we get both the creative
and media agencies involved in the process.

JFAM: What do you think about some of the more nontraditional media that
are popping up today, such as product placement?
Khan: I think as far as product placement is concerned, it’s definitely a trend
that I see. It’s the result of the fact that consumers are tuning off when TV
commercials are coming on. This is a trend and I don’t think this is going to go
away anytime soon. Because of that, advertisers are trying to figure out how
they can insert their marketing message into the content itself.

JFAM: What about sponsorships? It’s part product placement and it’s part
philanthropy. Do you see more and more strategic need for that in the future?
Khan: I do, but again, it’s one theme that’s playing out all around, including
“American Idol.” However, we need to figure out if it makes sense for E-LOAN.
We’ve done a few things with HGTV. We did a home makeover sweepstakes
contest with those guys. We were not necessarily looking for product place-
ment. We were trying to test another idea — integrated marketing. We had



some 15- or 30-second commercials talking about this promotion on television.
We had some vignettes. We also had a part of the HGTV website where this
promotion was hosted. There were banner ads and online video ads that were
driving traffic to the promotion page.
On top of that, we were running a major video on-demand campaign where if
you are downloading shows from HGTV about home design, there were two or
three 30-second E-LOAN commercials in there. There was another 90-second
educational piece about E-LOAN. You could do each of these things independ-
ently. In this case, we were trying to use the glue of the sweepstakes to see if
together they can work together better and deliver better results while working
in tandem. That was what we were trying to see, but maybe that might also be
considered product placement.

JFAM: I’m intrigued by the notion of viral marketing, fun and informational little
videos that come onto your desktop and can be passed along to other people?
Have you delved into this area of marketing yet? Is it on your radar at all for
the future?
Khan: We are absolutely interested in this. There is already something in the
works. I can’t go into too much detail. Overall, we’re watching it closely.
Especially, we’re looking at the phenomenon of online videos and consumer-
generated content. We are worried about loss of control. But that doesn’t
mean that we are going to shy away from it totally. If the market is going in that
direction, we have to follow the market.

JFAM: So as far as you’re concerned, this is a strategy for the future.
Khan: That is a potential strategy for the future. We are trying to figure out how
we can leverage this. Let’s say if we have some kind of sports sponsorship,
such as stadium signage, then how do we make the connection online
between our brand and the sports team’s brand? It’s not like I’m going there
and telling them, “OK, let’s put together an online viral video about mortgages.”
Mortgages are not necessarily a very sexy subject, but I think we can leverage
consumer-generated videos in other ways by creating some kind of indirect
connection with a product or brand that is sexy.

JFAM: Tell me a little bit about how public relations fits into your marketing
strategy.
Khan: The media market is becoming increasingly fragmented. It’s not just
money, but you have to invest a lot of resources to get your message across
because you have to do it in so many different ways. I think PR for us has
always been critical for our success. We have always positioned ourselves as



a consumer advocate and, as mentioned earlier on, we created a new cate-
gory. Getting a mortgage is complex by itself and getting it online probably was
even more daunting in the early days of the web. We had to build trust. We
knew if we educated the consumers, they would trust us. And when they were
ready to transact, they would think of E-LOAN. PR helped us get our message
across very effectively.

JFAM: What about the emphasis you place on the authentic voice? It seems to
be pretty strong.
Khan: It’s always been one of our top priorities. There’s a lot of mystery around
the process of getting a mortgage and people feel uncomfortable during the
process. So even in our TV commercials, we talk about things like honesty and
fairness. This is not specific to E-LOAN only. We ask consumers to expect fair-
ness, seek honesty and demand privacy from their lenders in general. Even in
our PR efforts, that’s the kind of message that we’re trying to get across. I think
it resonates well with the media, as well as with the consumers.

JFAM: I think it was a smart move to use words like “dignity,” which I know
you’ve thrown around today. It’s smart positioning and you’ve really taken the
high road.
Khan: Let’s take the auto insurance sector, for example. In one case, the
conversation with consumers is more along the lines of a child speaking to an
adult. Then there is another extreme case — where it’s like a grownup talking.
We believe that consumers deserve an adult-to-an-adult conversation.
Progressive does a good job of that. So, essentially they’re saying, “we’re not
going to just give you a quote from ourselves, we’re going to give you a quote
from five other people.” It’s like saying, “we know you are a smart, intelligent
adult.” If you had all the information, I’m sure you’ll be able to make the best
decisions for yourself. In the mortgage industry, we also want consumers to
make smart well-informed decisions.
We treat them like adults. We’re not treating them like children.

JFAM: It’s a very smart platform.
Khan: If you look at it, you will not find many real brands in the lending industry.
There are a lot of companies there, but not many real brands. No brand has a
leading mind share. There are companies that spend two to three times more
money than we do. But when you do a brand awareness study, you find out
that these guys either stand right next to us or below us. This is phenomenal.

JFAM: You’ve already touched upon Progressive in terms of some advertising



that you admire. Are there any other financial services campaigns or
marketing efforts out there that you think are great examples of those who are
doing it right?
Khan: I don’t like to say it out loud, but I do like E*TRADE’s “Be Extraordinary”
campaign. I like the way they extended their brand to products outside the
brokerage area and how they’ve put together a kind of a somewhat edgy
brand. I think they’ve been successful in drawing a kind of a smart, Starbucks-
drinking kind of an audience. I think they’ve done a masterful job there.

JFAM: I was speaking with Nick Utton, who’s the CMO of E*TRADE, not too
long ago. What I found remarkable is that his external advertising-marketing
platform is also very vital to his operations on the inside of the walls. This
whole notion of being extraordinary is their outward voice, but it’s also their
inside voice. There are posters on the wall about being extraordinary. Is there
any degree of internal marketing that you find yourself doing at E-LOAN that
inspires and helps get the team behind the external brand?
Khan: That is one of the things that I guess is part of my internal mission. I want
to continue to make the connection between what consumers see in our TV
commercials and their experience online. Making it totally seamless, so when
we talk about “Radically Simple,” we need to make sure that our consistent
messaging across multiple media, user experiences online and customer care
experiences all work together to make the whole “getting a loan” process
radically simple.
I don’t think that we are quite there yet, but one of my top priorities right now
is to ensure that it happens. There are a lot of online tests, for example, that are
in the works. We are making radical changes on the website, in certain cases.
Reducing a lot of content to make it more simple and measuring the effect. We
will use that feedback to expand this knowledge across the rest of the website.

JFAM: What is it that you love about your job? What makes you whistle while
you work?
Khan: I think what I like is that there is a never-ending series of challenges. It’s
not like I say, “I finished this TV commercial campaign, now I can relax
because that is a big thing,” because it never happens like that. We are always
trying new things all the time. Obviously, not everything works, but we’re
always learning. This is my way of keeping my team engaged and interested. I
facilitate and channel their energy.
I have a great team and most of the time, these are the people who come up
with the great new ideas. They don’t have to go with the CMO’s idea necessarily.
We try out multiple ideas and let the consumers decide which one’s the best.



JFAM: So in essence, the objective controls that you have in place really do
empower the team, because any idea can be a good idea. It doesn’t have to
be from the top, right?
Khan: Absolutely. They do realize that it is the power of the idea that matters.
We are all living in this idea economy. It is the power of the idea that drives
businesses forward. That’s the reason why you find these 19-year-old entre-
preneurs becoming overnight millionaires. It’s not about experience. It’s not
about technology. It’s about the power of the idea. I


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