Email marketing is a great way to stay engaged with potential and existing customers. Having a large email list is a valuable asset to a growing firm, and your email subscribers may re-engage with you as their financial needs change with their life events.
In order to build up an email list, you need to select an email marketing provider, set up opt-in forms on your site and produce a monthly or quarterly newsletter to give those subscribers a reason to stay on the list.
5 Email Marketing Tips for Advisors
1. Select an Email Marketing Provider
If you don’t have an existing email list and email marketing provider, your first step will be to select a platform where you can manage the list and send out email campaigns.
The most common email marketing platforms are Mailchimp or Constant Contact. Some CRMs also offer an email marketing solution as part of their services.
In general, you don’t want to send massive email campaigns from your website. Website platforms like WordPress were not built for sending large email blasts, and you’ll actually face a lot of challenges with the emails being marked as spam and customizing the email template within the site.
Platforms like Mailchimp or Constant Contact offer high-quality templates that you can customize and the layouts are pre-built to show up nicely in all inboxes.
2. Create an Email Opt-In Form on Your Site
In order to build up your email list, you’ll need to set up an email opt-in form on your site. You typically won’t see great traction and lots of subscribers if the form is a generic subscribe option to your newsletter.
When working with advisors on a financial website design, we discuss how the email opt-in form can be another conversion goal on the site and how to make the form and messaging engaging for visitors.
One strategy is to offer an e-book or white paper to entice visitors to sign up for your list. You’ll want to understand your niche and what kind of content would be extremely valuable to them. This email opt-in form can be set up in a nicely designed panel that you can add to multiple pages on the site, even on the call to action page.
With WordPress, it’s very straightforward to integrate the website form with a popular email marketing platform like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, so that any form submissions will be synced and added to your email list.
3. Send a Monthly/Quarterly Newsletter
Once you start gathering a list of email subscribers, you need to give them a reason to stay subscribed. We typically recommend that clients send out a monthly or quarterly email newsletter. As we mentioned, the email marketing platforms will have templates that you can select and customize to match your branding and use for these newsletters.
The goal is to stay consistent with the newsletter frequency, and weekly can be a challenging deadline and also may be too often for your subscribers.
Unlike e-commerce where the goal of an email may be a direct sale, finance newsletters are more about presenting your team as an expert and staying in touch with potential and existing clients.
For finance websites, we recommend highlighting a blog post or even video blog in the newsletter. It’s best to put a short snippet or preview of the content in the newsletter and link to the post on your website. The goal is to get visitors to your site from the newsletter and you can then see the metrics in the email platform on the open rate and click through rate.
4. Test Drip Campaigns & Targeting
Once you are rolling with a regular newsletter and steadily building up an email list, you may want to dive into more advanced email marketing tactics.
For instance, you may consider offering more gated content on your site where a visitor needs to submit their email address to access it. If one piece of gated content is focused on a topic for those in retirement, another piece could be catered towards those still planning for retirement. You can create different audiences or lists and target them with specific follow up emails.
When setting up drip campaigns, it can be helpful if your email marketing provider is connected with your CRM or contact resource management. This allows you to track whether drip campaigns are going out to active leads or visitors who have yet to contact your team.
There are lots of different opportunities for more targeting with email marketing. If you don’t have high volume traffic right now and are just getting started, you may want to start with one enticing opt-in giveaway and wait to dive into specific drip campaigns for each audience.
