As I explained in part 1 of this email marketing for Financial Advisors series, email marketing is a powerful tool for those of us that want to attract, nurture, and bring on new clients in the financial advice game.
Not only does email marketing deliver your messaging right to your prospects’ inboxes, but it also allows you to really establish yourself as an authority in the industry by sharing your insights as valuable content.
Further to this, email marketing builds brand loyalty. It can turn leads into clients pretty fast compared to other marketing tactics.
Also, email marketing is one of the most successful tools for Financial Advisors to market themselves in terms of ROI because people are far more attentive to their emails than any other platform. In fact, the average open rate for email marketing in 2022 is 21%.
I shared some impactful stats about email marketing in my last post, but wanted to share more to demonstrate how this marketing strategy can really shake things up for you as an Advisor:
- The average click-through rate (CTR) for Financial Advisors who use email marketing is 2.72%.
- The average unsubscribe rate for email marketing in the financial advice sector is only 0.20%.
- Welcome emails sent by Financial Advisors get a conversion rate of almost 52%.
- The average bounce rate in our industry is as low as 11.55%.
- As a special side note, my email open rate for Advisors I’m marketing to at Conneqtor is just over 50%, and that’s over a 7 email nurturing sequence!
I really can’t emphasize enough how this digital marketing activity can transform how you advertise yourself and your services. Traditional marketing methods may still work for some Financial Advisors, but email marketing is the way to go for those who want to bring their firms into the 21st century.
For part 2 of this series, I’d like to dig deeper into how Advisors can use email marketing to their advantage.
Give A/B testing a go
Put simply, A/B testing in the digital marketing world is testing one version of something against another. This is something most email marketing tools will allow you to try out – and I strongly suggest that you do.
A/B testing is the quickest way to determine what you should send in your marketing emails. Knowing exactly what your audience wants saves you time and money. Now you can whip up an email campaign that is more likely to succeed.
In Mailchimp, for example, you can A/B test your campaign, and the platform will send different versions of your marketing messaging to separate sets of subscribers in your audience and track their engagement.
The version that performs best is then sent out to your recipients who weren’t sent any of the test versions, and voila! You’ve got an email campaign that just works!
Another cool feature of ActiveCampaign, which is the email tool I use & love, is that through AI it’s able to figure out what time/day is best to send emails to individuals on your list to help increase your open and click through rates.
You can test all kinds of things using A/B testing on email marketing platforms, like:
- Subject lines.
- Design and layout.
- Your written content.
- The time and day you send the email.
Foolproof email campaigns? Here we come!
Make magic with your links
When you’re just starting out with your email marketing, you might be tempted to use the generic phrase “click here” when you include links in your templates. My advice? Avoid doing this completely.
When people receive an email that tells them to “click here,” they’re not likely to click it because it’s unclear where it will take them. With so many scams out there these days, you don’t want your prospects and clients to feel unsure about where a link is going to take them. You want them to know exactly where they’re going to end up when they click your link.
Using a generic call-to-action (CTA) for your link also means you lose the opportunity to include important information that screen readers need for disabled users. “Click here” also suggests clicking a mouse when most people view their emails on their mobile devices.
So, make sure your link text is descriptive – yet concise – and be sure to use a link that is relevant. For example, if you’re referencing a particular financial product on your website, be sure to send the link directly to that webpage instead of your business’s webpage.
In my experience, with anything digital, you need to tell your audience exactly where to go and precisely what they’ll see when they get there.
One final point on making link magic is to include more than one embedded link in the text of your email. Particularly if it’s a sales email where you want to drive users to convert. You can include several CTA buttons within your layout (without it becoming too much, of course) or vary your link text throughout your email.
Perfect your subject line
Before I tell you more about nailing the subject lines of your email marketing campaigns, let’s run through some quick stats:
- Over 68% of email recipients report emails as spam just by reading the subject line.
- More than 64% of email readers will decide on whether to open the email based on its subject line.
- Around 33% of email users will open an email simply because it’s catchy.
- A/B testing your email subject lines can increase your CTR by over 25%.
It’s fair to argue that your subject line is a pretty important piece of text!
Get personal
Personalized email subject lines with the reader’s name or location have been proven to increase open rates.
Just as I mentioned in part 1 of this series, personalization is key to email marketing for Financial Advisors.
Be descriptive
Ensure your subject line is clear about what the contents of the email include. Using trending terms might be cool, but it won’t necessarily convince your prospects and clients to open the email.
Shorter is sweeter
You may get carried away with crafting an epic subject line that reads like a dream. But you need to be careful that you don’t make your subject lines too long. Remember, a lot of your readers view the emails from a mobile phone.
Ditch punctuation
I’m a stickler for high-quality content, which often means a well-paced comma or an intuitive hyphen. However, there’s no place for punctuation in email campaign subject lines. According to Mailchimp, using more than three punctuation marks in a subject line can quickly send your email to spam.
Wrapping up on email marketing for Financial Advisors (for real this time)
Now that you know all the basics of email marketing for Financial Advisors, it’s time to get out there. Start exploring the email marketing tool of your choice! Most of them are packed with useful features that will help you along your way to creating emails that are on-point. There are plenty of tools to consider and make sure to check with compliance if you’re in that type of situation. I’ve tested MailChimp, Hubspot, some lesser know apps, and ended up using ActiveCampaign for all of my email marketing campaigns for Conneqtor & my RIA. Check them out to learn more and give them a trial.
If you’d like to know more about what you can do to bring your firm into the 21st century, download my free eBook. You can also visit my website to learn more about Conneqtor, my online course for Financial Advisors.
Until next time,
Derek Notman
