Digital marketing is a huge part of finding prospective clients in today’s age. Financial advisors have to get creative and meet them where they are — online! One key component is creating a valuable list of prospects’ emails to whom a comprehensive digital campaign can reach. Here at Impact, we run many successful email campaigns for advisors across the country. Here’s what our Marketing team believes are the best email marketing tips for financial advisors.
Building a Successful Email List: The Essential Steps
Building a solid email list is critical because it’s usually the first step toward starting a strong relationship. Emails are convenient and potentially profitable for any business. If done correctly, email marketing can be a big money-maker.
Email lists can come from many different marketing campaigns. For each blog or landing page, financial advisors can build a call to action (or CTA) to subscribe to your email marketing database, pop-up windows asking a website visitor to subscribe, pitch email newsletters on social media and email signatures, create new lead generation offers, or add bonus content!
For email marketing to be convenient and profitable, you’ll need clean lists and data in your CRM database. According to Statista, there were almost 4 billion global email users as of 2019; that number is set to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025. That’s a lot of possible prospects out there to add to an email list, but adding the right data is important to make sure they fit your business model.
That’s where segmenting and targeting becomes most valuable. The right audience is critical for any financial advisor since you can reach out to large groups with just a single click. (This can be pretty intimidating, especially since you can’t get back that email once sent.) Make sure to build lists and segment them to target specific people for specific campaigns. Spend some time strategizing how you want to structure your marketing campaigns. Once you have done that, it can open up a lot of marketing ideas to target people of your specific lists with content directed right toward them for better responses and engagement!
Biggest Challenges in Building an Email List
There are plenty of ways to build lists incorrectly. A financial advisor can buy email lists that have unverified, expired, and unsegmented prospects. Email lists with unknowns can decrease deliverability or affect your business reputation, or even worse, your email server can suspect you of sending out spam and can begin blacklisting its IP or domain. Trust us, you don’t want to go down that path!
There are also other challenges to building email lists, such as keeping your subscribers engaged. It’s always a challenge to keep everyone interested in what content you are sending out. Sending newsletters, updates, offers, etc., is a way to keep the high-quality leads interested. (For more tips on converting leads, check out our exclusive Conversion Coach program here.)
Nurturing a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Once you build lists to your satisfaction, building an automated email campaign is the next essential part in email marketing. Keap, Marketo, Hubspot, Mailchimp and many others have automation that can assist financial advisors in sending emails automatically on certain days to “warm” potential prospects.
Automation can save you a lot of time and effort! Think of an email drip campaign as a series of emails and texts which work together with proper messaging to warm up a prospect toward a final conversion or goal you want achieved. It’s referred to as a “drip” campaign because the messaging provides ongoing value to your email lists. Your subscribers are slowly “dripped” key information leading to that goal with updates, product notifications, handouts, or CTAs for appointments, special offers, driving traffic to a landing page, etc. These are all ideas to have during a campaign to touch your prospect.
Drip campaigns are set up before the actual campaign begins and are fully automated throughout the timeframe you set from start to finish. The campaign sends an email immediately when someone signs up, and then you can build a 30-day educational series where that prospect receives an email every week with new updates or information you want to provide. It’s about automatically delivering the proper information to push your subscriber further down your sales funnel to eventually convert.
Accurate segmentation can lead to better conversions or revenue with drip campaigns. Matching the correct people to the content in the automated drip series can build trust with an audience.
Extra Tips For Building Email Marketing Campaigns: “Take the Roast Out of the Oven”
You ever bake a cake or something so delicate that it will not taste right if not done properly? The same principle applies when it comes to building a successful email campaign. Financial advisors have to make sure all their ingredients are correct and have the right measurements to see a successful campaign. Email lists are important, and automation is the frosting on the top, but there’s one key ingredient we haven’t yet mentioned: TESTING! You must test your emails, test your automation campaigns, test to see if emails are delivering, and make sure all your links are correct. Clean your lists every 30 days to manage your database, and always look for the next best idea.
Email on Acid is a great platform to check spam possibilities and to see what your emails will look like on different devices and servers. Test to make sure all integrations are connected and messaging is correct.
In buliding successful email marketing campaigns, we always keep one phrase in mind: “you have to take the roast out of the oven.” Being a perfectionist can lead to missed opportunities and can be a huge waste of time and energy. Focus on constant improvement and innovation. Overanalyzing can kill an idea and make you miss an opportunity. We look at email marketing the same way. Automation can be really complex, but continue to analyze and look for ways to innovate so you can continue to adapt and connect with your subscribers.
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