Email Marketing for Financial Advisors: Best Practices & Tips
Email marketing is one of the best digital marketing channels you can use to get more clients through the door.
Unlike social media or paid advertisements, it’s the one channel you completely own. You have more control over the user experience, and you can customize your email marketing strategy to work for your goals.
Profit-wise, email marketing is the most cost-effective channel you can manage. According to Litmus, the average ROI for email marketing is $36 for every dollar spent.
While email marketing isn’t new, not a lot of financial advisors actually utilize it correctly. That’s why in this article, we’ll cover how you can make the most out of your email marketing campaigns to build stronger relationships with leads and current clients alike.
The Advantages of a Strong Email Marketing Strategy
Email campaigns play an important role across all stages of your financial planning practice.
Depending on your goal, there are different ways to use email marketing for your advisory. The core of email marketing is nurturing stronger relationships, making it a great way to generate new leads and promote your services. You can use your email newsletter for various applications, such as requesting referrals, promoting a new offer, or checking up on past clients.
For example, if you’d like to re-engage past clients, you can send regular email newsletters to keep them informed about the latest financial news and share how they can navigate through recent changes. Just make sure these past clients have still opted into your newsletter!
In the same vein, you can share relevant resources with leads who aren’t ready to sign up for a meeting just yet. By being the authority they turn to when they need financial help, you’re making sure you’re top of mind when they are ready to look for an advisor.
Email Marketing Best Practices for Financial Advisors
When done correctly, email marketing is an outstanding resource for fostering client relationships. Here are a few email marketing tips to help you make the best of your email marketing efforts.
Grow Your Targeted Email List
Your email list (a list of subscribers) is the cornerstone of your email marketing program.
This isn’t just a list of email addresses.
Rather, you need to curate your list carefully. Fill your list with folks who have shown an interest in your services and actively engage with your content. You know, the kind of people who don't just open your emails but actually read them and, better yet, act on them.
With a carefully curated list, you’ll be able to create more relevant content and see a more engaged audience.
But don’t forget that there’s a limit to curating this list. In accordance with major privacy guidelines, you need written confirmation that people on your list want to be there.
Compliance laws, like CCPA in California and GDPR in Europe, are pretty clear about this. While they’re different laws, the gist for email marketing is the same: recipients should have the ability to opt in and out of email lists.
Buying a list from a third party isn’t ideal, and not only because you might be violating the privacy guideline that is applicable to your business. You also don’t know if people in these third-party lists are looking for financial services—or interested in financial news.
Instead, try the opt-in method, where your audience will have to fill out a form to receive your emails. The form can be something as simple as just inputting their email address and checking a box. You can also ask for their first name for better personalization—but make this optional if they’re not interested in providing that information.
Segment Your Target Audience
All of your clients have different financial needs, different risk tolerances, and different goals. So, it makes sense that a one-size-fits-all approach to your email marketing isn't going to cut it.
However, if your goal is to build trust at scale, personalizing each email according to the recipient’s needs will be almost impossible.
That’s where segmentation comes in.
Segmentation is dividing your email list into smaller, more specific groups based on certain criteria. By segmenting your audience based on certain parameters, you can create more relevant content at scale.
The parameter you use could be demographics like age or location, financial needs like retirement planning or wealth management, or even behavioral data like past interactions with your content.
For example, you may send a series of emails about how your readers can manage their money during retirement to clients who are nearing retirement age. If you were to share these tips with fresh graduates who haven’t spent a year on the job, it wouldn’t make sense—and it’s unlikely they’ll be interested in what you say.
Sending relevant content boosts your conversion rates. When your clients receive content that's tailored to their needs and interests, they're more likely to take the next step. Whether that's scheduling a consultation, signing up for a webinar, or referring a friend to your services.
Craft Compelling Email Content
Once you determine who your segments are, it should be easy to come up with content they will be interested in.
To come up with more relevant topics, you can start by figuring out what’s bugging them at this stage of their financial life.
Let’s go back to our retirement planning example.
If you’ve identified that one of your segments is people who are retiring within a couple of years, you can send content on how they can manage their money after retirement so they don’t have to go back to the workforce later on. For segments of young professionals who just entered the job market, you can start with more introductory content, such as types of retirement accounts they should have access to or how to quickly pay off their student loans.
Each of your segments has different needs, different interests, and different financial goals. And your content should reflect that.
Of course, your content should also be engaging if you want people to stick around. People often think this means you should sound extremely excited or friendly with your content. But that’s not necessarily the case. A good rule of thumb is that you should write how you speak. If it’s not something you wouldn’t say IRL, that’s a sign that you should change things up a bit.
Don’t Forget To Be Mobile Friendly
Let's switch gears a bit and talk about something that's often overlooked but oh-so-important: mobile optimization.
According to Hubspot, 41% of email views come from mobile devices.
Your readers aren't stuck with consuming content on their computers anymore, and the same applies to emails. They're reading them on their phones while they're waiting in line for coffee, on their tablets while they're watching TV, and even on their smartwatches while they're out for a run.
Naturally, your emails need to look good and be easy to read on all these devices. If your email is hard to read on a small screen, or if the formatting breaks, your message is going to get lost.
Making your emails mobile-friendly isn't as hard as it sounds. If you use email service providers, such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, or MailerLite, they usually offer responsive templates and automation options, so you’ll have everything you need to run your email marketing campaign in one place.
Check how your email looks on mobile by sending a test email to your inbox once in a while. You might also need to make it easier to skim, such as increasing the font size, using bullet points, or adding visuals.
Maximize Open Rates
Alright, let's talk about something that's a bit of a hot topic in the email marketing world: open rates.
With Apple introducing its privacy protection feature, open rates are no longer a dependable statistic on its own. But you can still use what people have learned over the years to make sure people are opening your emails.
First up, let's talk about timing. Email is supposed to be for asynchronous communication, but if yours lands in your client's inbox at 3 AM, chances are, it's going to get lost in the shuffle. Figure out when your audience is most likely to be checking their emails. Maybe it's first thing in the morning, maybe it's during their lunch break, or maybe it's in the evening after they've put the kids to bed. Every audience is different, so make sure to experiment and see what works for your audience
Next up, frequency. Some people might appreciate a weekly newsletter, while others might prefer a monthly roundup, and yet some might even want a daily digest.
It’s a bit of a Goldilocks situation. Too few emails and your clients might forget about you. Too many, and they might feel like you’re too noisy and unsubscribe.
Often, though, you can overcome this by simply setting up expectations upfront. You can also make it their choice—ask them how often they’d like to get emails from you.
In addition to timing and frequency, interest should be on the list. Your email subject line is the first impression your readers will have of your email. You need to compete with the 49 other emails in your reader’s inbox to grab their attention. You can try using emojis, personalizing the subject line using their name, or creating a signature for your regular emails. Yet, the most effective tip is to keep your subject line relevant to what interests your reader.
Keep in mind that what your audience prefers will be different from others. Don’t follow best practices blindly. Instead, set up an experimentation program so you can test, test, and test some more. Try out different timings, frequencies, and subject lines, and see what fits your audience’s preferences.
Measure Your Success
Just like any marketing channel, you need to see some measure of success to continue your email marketing program.
Track the metrics that matter, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Tracking these metrics can help you prove that what you’re doing is working (or not working!).
Here are the four most important metrics you should keep an eye on.
Open rates tell you how many people are actually opening your emails. Apple’s privacy setting will skew the numbers here, so you might need to analyze this number relative to another email’s open rate. If your open rates are lower than usual, that means people aren’t clicking on what you sent. Optimize the experience in their inbox, such as your display name, subject line, or the time you send emails, to get a higher open rate in the future.
Click-through rates measure how many people are clicking on the call to action (CTA) links in your emails. There are many factors at play here. Your content might not be engaging enough, your call to action might not be clear, or your readers might not be interested in what you’re offering right now.
The conversion rate of the landing page connected to your CTA, if there’s any. You can analyze the conversion rate of your landing page as an overall measure of the success of your campaign. For example, there might be a dissonance between your email content and your landing page’s hero section, or the page might be broken.
The unsubscribe rate usually shoots up when you’re not sending relevant or valuable content to your customers. People might be reporting you for spam as well, which makes it more likely that your future emails will land in your reader’s spam folder.
Metrics are a good way to see what’s working and what’s not. Analyzing these metrics will give you some insights into your campaign’s effectiveness and, in turn, guide your email marketing strategy in the future.
Monitor Your Marketing Success With Asset-Map
There are other financial advisor marketing tactics you can try, such as content marketing and SEO.
Still, email marketing produces the best result. But that might not be the case for your business. As we’ve said before, each target audience is unique. Tracking where each client comes from will help you determine which marketing strategy works best for your audience.
Asset-Map helps you see a bird's-eye view of your marketing efforts. Always know the results of your marketing campaigns with real-time analytics and spot opportunities as they arise.
Schedule a demo here to see how Asset-Map can help you optimize your marketing strategy.