A white paper published by The DigitalFA titled ‘Going from email marketing to marketing automation’ gives insightful ideas on how financial advisors can use email marketing effectively to grow business.
According to a recent study, 77 percent of your audience wants to receive your marketing messages by email. Direct mail is the second choice at 9% and text messaging further back at 5%. This data leads you to believe that there is no other option available to you!
It doesn’t really matter what you’re communicating, email is the preferred channel:
· Financial alerts: 52 percent prefer to receive via e-mail
· Travel alerts: 43 percent prefer e-mail
· General customer service communication: 76 percent prefer e-mail
· Order confirmations/receipts: 77 percent prefer e-mail
· Online ticket delivery: 60 percent prefer e-mail
The promotion of products or services via email
Email marketing is about building a list, putting together valuable content for the people on that list, and sending it to them via email with a marketing intent. That intent might be building your brand, selling your products or services, staying top-of-mind, offering deals, or some other purpose.
Email marketing is:
Permission based: That means someone has signed up or agreed to receive your marketing emails. Buying lists doesn’t count, nor does scraping email addresses from other websites or pilfering your Facebook friend list. This also means your subscribers have the option to unsubscribe, easily, at any time, without hassle.
Targeted:Once you’ve got a decent sized list, start thinking about how you can group your audience into subsets with different needs, interests or preferences. You can also try A/B testing, i.e. tweak the subject line, layout and copy to see what works better. For example, changing one little word in an email subject can make the difference between a 2% and a 20% open rate.
Planned: Much like any marketing, emails should be scheduled and regular. Whether that’s once per week, month or quarter, set a goal and aim to hit it. Shooting off a bunch of emails just because you realized you haven’t done it in six months is not email marketing.
Action-based: Whether you’re sending out a newsletter or sale announcement, get your readers into the habit of taking action. The problem with a lot of newsletters is that they may get your customers caught up on your latest undertakings but they’re passive by nature. Next time you send out an email asking your customers to buy something, it’s going to end up in the same mental box as your newsletter unless you’ve trained them to take action. It doesn’t have to be a revenue-driving action; it can be as simple as requiring your reader to click to your site to finish reading a story, or providing a link to some other interesting content on your website.
Specific: The email needs a point. Is it a newsletter? An invitation?A request?An offer? It’s best to stick to a single point. If you want to share your latest news with customers, do it in a separate email from the one offering a 10% discount on their next purchase.
Somewhere along the line, someone has tried to convince us email marketing is dead.
Here’s when it’s dead: when it stops working. To date email marketing still returns one of the highest ROIs, as discussed above. That’s arguably its biggest advantage, but it’s also…
Inexpensive: You can start with any number of free and low-cost services that let you customize a template, schedule campaigns and track results. Unlike direct mail, which can cost a fortune once you’re done designing, printing and mailing, email is essentially free for the price of your time.
Easy: Businesses can set up and send email campaigns all by themselves without the need of a professional. This isn’t true of print design, website development or advanced SEO and content marketing services.
Trackable: Your email management software can show you how many emails were opened, which links were clicked and other important statistics that will help you determine the effectiveness of your content.
Action-based: It’s relatively easy to do A/B testing with email. You can test subject lines, layouts, headlines and content with essentially immediate results to help you improve your next email.
With the spread of emails as a primary means of communication, IFAs cannot afford not to use email marketing to develop their business.
Click here to download the white paper.
TheDigitalFA is a portal dedicated exclusively to the social media, technology and marketing needs of Financial Advisors.
