How Investment and Financial Services Providers Can Use Email Marketing to Their Advantage
| April 5, 2023
How to Deploy Six Effective Tactics Used Every Day by the Most Successful Finance and Investment Marketers
Introduction
Email marketing is a digital marketing communication tool that has aided many companies in their business success. According to TechNomads, email marketing returns $44 for every $1 spent. If you are not utilizing it, you may want to consider it.
In fact, according to RIA Intel, email gets more traffic for financial advisors than any other industry.
Email marketing can be used to build trust, gain credibility, and build rapport, all while converting prospects to customers. Email gives you a great opportunity to put time on your side, as you grow a relationship and nurture a prospect through the evaluation and buying process.
Benefits
There are many benefits to utilizing this marketing channel, including:
- Building a more personalized relationship with your customer: Delivering personalized emails will create a sense of trust between you and your reader.
- Informing your audience: Financial services have a lot more to offer than just basic services. Inform your customers about what else you can provide for them.
- Expanding your marketing promotions to a new channel: Trying out new marketing tactics doesn’t hurt. It can be a great decision for your business.
- Easing readers’ minds about the financial process stress: Financial planning and financial decisions can be a source of stress for people, so creating messages that ease the readers mind could be beneficial.
- Educating readers on successful investment strategies: This is probably the most important method used by financial companies to attract and capture new customers.
Below are strategies that have proven to work for this sector.
1. Appeal to newer investors by helping them improve their financial knowledge
The financial process can be extremely stressful for many people. Other than a person’s health and loved ones, there’s few things more important and personal to people than their money.
To make investing and finance accessible and available for everyone, keep it simple. Creating videos, explaining concepts, and sharing your knowledge can be beneficial to your customers. Dave Ramsey hosts The Ramsey Show, a podcast that aims to discuss anything money related, such as debt, retirement, budgeting, saving, insurance, taxes, home buying, and more. His podcast coupled with short YouTube videos captures his audience and seeks to inform.
2. Brand your newsletter with a memorable title or theme
A lot of newsletters try to make the investing process more fun using a creative name for their newsletter. Robinhood calls their newsletter “Robinhood Snacks: Digestible Financial News”. I don’t know about you, but reading that title makes me interested in reading further.The people at Cabot offer their free Cabot Wealth Weekly as part of their Cabot Wealth Network. Schaeffer’s offers a free weekly “Edge” newsletter sent every Monday. And our friends at All Star Charts offer a free Chart of the Week, with professional technical analysis. Tradewins offer a free Inside Trading Weekly Newsletter, with actionable advice. Try to think of something that helps you stand out in a busy field.
3. Create personalized messages
There are multiple strategies to complete this.
You could start and end every email with their name. For example, “Hi [First Name],” at the beginning and “Thank you [First Name], at the end. Or, you could include it in the subject line, like “[First Name], You’re Never Going to Believe This.”
You could also personalize it by segmenting your list. Everyone on your list could be at different points of the customer journey. Someone who purchases your product or service has different intentions and needs than someone that is just learning about your company. You can even segment with age, gender, lifestyle, you name it! This will lead to higher open rates, higher engagement, and less unsubscribes.
And of course keep track of specific interest areas that your prospects have indicated. A new 20-somenthing investor will want to know about financial information that is far different from an age 65+ recent retiree.
4. Offer educational opportunities
Financial literacy programs can educate, as well as encourage financial actions.
Just to give you an idea, some common topics include:
- What should I do with $20,000?
- How do I minimize taxation when investing?
- How much should I invest in my retirement fund to become a millionaire by age 55?
- Are growth stocks better now, or value stocks?
- Are index funds really the best, or how about some target date funds, or inverse funds, or industry specific funds?
- Should I stick with passing investing ETFs, or go with a more active approach for the next market cycle?
When you answer these questions with wisdom and authority for your readers, you create goodwill and can develop a following of people who want to hear what you have to say.
5. Offer benefits
Why would a customer want to be on your email newsletter? Besides learning something, it’s often because of something free. A free stock report, a free portfolio review, a free analyst report, a free three months added to your subscription.
It has been proven that giving away something often helps you sell something else down the road. This is called a loss leader, and is probably the most commonly-used marketing approach. Carefully calculate how the numbers can work for you, in a best-case and worst-case scenario, before launching your loss-leader promotion.
This newsletter example above offers a free consultation. It mentions the word “free” multiple times throughout the email. One mention is bolded and another is in a call-to-action. People love free stuff.
6. Provide useful tips, ideas, suggestions, and selections that have good value
All kinds of advice on investments can be made through effective emails and email marketing. Many investment companies produce various research on topics like: bond investing, SPACs, ETFs, hot stocks, value stocks, income stocks, REITs, dividend stocks, turnaround stocks, municipal bonds, real estate investing, gold and precious metals investing, investing during times of inflation, stock market timing, hedge funds, and many many more.
After the new subscriber gets a few days, weeks or months of the free newsletter with good picks and sound advice, it’s time to upgrade them to a paid subscriber.
A good example of a service that offers quality content at a very fair price is the Motley Fool Stock Advisor. Every month, they reveal two stocks that they believe will outperform others in the market in a minimum of five years. With a subscription price of $99 per year, this newsletter has proven its value through their stock tips. It a fair price, and of course one good stock recommendation will cover that subscription price many times over.
Conclusion
Email can be one of the best strategies for a financial advisor or investment company. Make good use of tools provided by Email Service Providers (ESPs) like segmentation, templates, inserting photos and gifs, split tests, dynamic content blocks, and personalized messages to help reach your email marketing goals.
