Email Marketing Essentials: Financial Marketing That Works
Email marketing may seem old fashioned to advisors who are all about social media, mobile marketing, and other fashionable marketing channels that are on the uptrend. Some marketers will even tell you that email marketing is dead. This is, frankly, crap. Numbers alone tell us that email has nearly three times as many users as Facebook and Twitter combined.
Fortunately for advisors, email marketing is very much alive.
If you take a content marketing approach, email is more powerful than ever and integrates perfectly with your social media and offline marketing efforts. Hat tip to Copyblogger for their great work in keeping email marketing relevant.
Why is email marketing still relevant to financial advisors? Because it moves the conversation about your practice into a much more personal space – the reader’s inbox. It also allows you to make repeated contact and remains “sticky” in a way that tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media messages are not. A social media post will quickly get lost in a much larger timeline that features scores or hundreds of other people.
Email gives you one of the most direct lines of communication to a large number of people, making it both effective and cost effective. The Direct Marketing Association claims an ROI of email marketing of 4,300%, which, if true, makes it one of the cheapest marketing tools in your arsenal. While social media can bring a lot of real-time compliance headaches, email marketing is asynchronous, meaning you can create email content days and weeks in advance, making them much more compliance-friendly than other marketing channels.
The key to making it with email marketing is to focus on your readers by sending them only useful, informative, and timely information. You’re probably all to familiar with email newsletters that waste your time by bombarding you with pitches, annoying you with frequency, and comes across as too salesy. You’re probably on more than one or two spam lists. This kind of email marketing simply doesn’t work. Particularly in the financial services niche.
Copyblogger says that successful email marketing is founded on a very basic value exchange: your valuable information for your prospect’s valuable time and attention. Your readers need to know and trust that you’re only going to send them information that matters. Great email content deepens your relationship with clients and prospects through alluring subject lines (getting them to open your emails,) and delivering quality, targeted information that educates, informs, and gets shared with others.
One of the most frequent complaints clients have about their financial advisors is that they only hear from them when they’ve got a stock to pitch. Some clients only receive account statements and the annual phone call from their advisor. In a way, this is great news for you, because you’re going to steal those clients from under them by blowing them away with your email marketing.
Weekly, monthly, and as-needed emails are one of the best ways to let your clients and prospects know that you’re thinking of them, that you care about their problems, and that you have solutions to their most pressing financial issues.
Here are some examples of how to make email marketing work for you.
Are you convinced about what email marketing can do for you? If you have any questions or would like to know more about how email marketing can integrate with your existing marketing, contact me or ask me a question in the forums. As a freelance financial writer, I help a lot of advisors create better content that turns readers into clients.
Fortunately for advisors, email marketing is very much alive.
If you take a content marketing approach, email is more powerful than ever and integrates perfectly with your social media and offline marketing efforts. Hat tip to Copyblogger for their great work in keeping email marketing relevant.
Why is email marketing still relevant to financial advisors? Because it moves the conversation about your practice into a much more personal space – the reader’s inbox. It also allows you to make repeated contact and remains “sticky” in a way that tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media messages are not. A social media post will quickly get lost in a much larger timeline that features scores or hundreds of other people.
Email gives you one of the most direct lines of communication to a large number of people, making it both effective and cost effective. The Direct Marketing Association claims an ROI of email marketing of 4,300%, which, if true, makes it one of the cheapest marketing tools in your arsenal. While social media can bring a lot of real-time compliance headaches, email marketing is asynchronous, meaning you can create email content days and weeks in advance, making them much more compliance-friendly than other marketing channels.
The key to making it with email marketing is to focus on your readers by sending them only useful, informative, and timely information. You’re probably all to familiar with email newsletters that waste your time by bombarding you with pitches, annoying you with frequency, and comes across as too salesy. You’re probably on more than one or two spam lists. This kind of email marketing simply doesn’t work. Particularly in the financial services niche.
Copyblogger says that successful email marketing is founded on a very basic value exchange: your valuable information for your prospect’s valuable time and attention. Your readers need to know and trust that you’re only going to send them information that matters. Great email content deepens your relationship with clients and prospects through alluring subject lines (getting them to open your emails,) and delivering quality, targeted information that educates, informs, and gets shared with others.
One of the most frequent complaints clients have about their financial advisors is that they only hear from them when they’ve got a stock to pitch. Some clients only receive account statements and the annual phone call from their advisor. In a way, this is great news for you, because you’re going to steal those clients from under them by blowing them away with your email marketing.
Weekly, monthly, and as-needed emails are one of the best ways to let your clients and prospects know that you’re thinking of them, that you care about their problems, and that you have solutions to their most pressing financial issues.
Here are some examples of how to make email marketing work for you.
- Weekly market updates: What are markets doing and what does it mean for investors?
- Monthly client letters: Here’s an in-depth look at an issue that may affect you.
- Event-driven emails: Here’s something that you’ve seen in the headlines and here’s what it means for you and your investments.
- Local event announcements: You’re a valued client, prospect, or member of the community and I’d like to invite you to this fabulous event.
Are you convinced about what email marketing can do for you? If you have any questions or would like to know more about how email marketing can integrate with your existing marketing, contact me or ask me a question in the forums. As a freelance financial writer, I help a lot of advisors create better content that turns readers into clients.