Email Marketing for Financial Advisors: What You Need to Know

Email is a big part of digital marketing for financial advisors. But like most things marketing-related, financial advisor email marketing very easy to do wrong. In this post, we cover some of the basics of email marketing financial advisors should know before they click send.  

Build your email marketing infrastructure

The biggest benefit to email marketing for financial advisors is that the whole process can be automated. All it takes is a little bit of work to get things set up. Here’s what you’ll need:

1. An email marketing tool: This is how you’ll reach out to subscribers, build automated workflows and store contact information. A few of the most popular options are Mailchimp and Hubspot’s Marketing Hub are both popular options that integrate with Redtail and other CRMs.
2. A subscriber form: This is how you’ll collect subscribers’ contact information. Your email marketing tool will likely come with a template you can customize and add to your website — you’ll want to place it on several different pages to make it easy for visitors to sign up.
3. A contact list: Of course, in order to do email marketing, you need people to market to. Start with your existing contact list and work to build it on LinkedIn and other social media channels. 

Offer something valuable

About that last part — growing your email list is a lot easier if you have a compelling offer for subscribers. Instead of saying, ‘Subscribe Now,’ give people a reason:

• Offer a solution: Clearly outline what people stand to gain by subscribing. Usually, one of the best ways to do this is by offering a free resource, such as a budgeting template, retirement calculator or investment guide. 
• Create a sense of urgency: Encourage immediate action by incorporating a sense of urgency into your value hook. For example, you could offer a limited-time promotion, early access to a new service, or a deadline for signing up for a webinar or workshop.
• Showcase your expertise: Highlight your expertise and credibility as a financial advisor by emphasizing your qualifications, certifications, industry recognition or any success stories or testimonials from satisfied clients. 

Get your form in front of subscribers

Once you’ve established your value proposition, you need to put your form in places where people will be able to easily find it. Here are the most common spots to put your form:

• Your website: This includes your home page, other popular pages, new blog posts, and in your sidebar/footer. You want to maintain a balance between making it easy for people to subscribe without being too obnoxious or distracting visitors from navigating your site.

• Social media: Another great place to include a link to your subscribe form is in your social media bios. By doing so, you’ll turn every social media visitor into a potential subscriber.

• Pop-up forms: You’ll also want to include a pop-up form on your website (in addition to the forms you already have). You can alter pop-up forms to go off when someone visits your page, scrolls for a certain period of time, or clicks away. Website pop-up forms are one of the most effective ways for financial advisors to grow their email marketing list —  they can convert up to 23.7% of website visitors into subscribers.

Once you’ve gotten your subscriber form setup throughout your digital assets, it’s time to build your first email marketing campaign.

Set up campaigns

Now that most of the upfront work is done, it’s time to talk about the main benefit of email marketing for financial advisors: automation. You can automatically send emails to your subscribers by creating campaigns in your email marketing tool. Here are a few types of campaigns to set up:

• New subscriber intro campaigns: Introduce yourself to new subscribers with a short email sequence explaining who you are, what you do and what they can expect from your emails. 
• New customer welcome campaigns: Set your newest customers off on the right foot with a sequence with breaking down your services and setting them up for success — think financial tips, when to call and ask questions, etc. 
• Upsell/cross-sell campaigns: Finally, make sure existing customers know about your full range of services with sequences promoting things like tax prep, end-of-year planning, etc. 
• Referral campaigns: If you offer a referral bonus for existing customers who send new clients your way, consider putting together a short email sequence to keep it top of mind.  

The extent to which you can tailor your campaigns will depend on how you segment your lists. Look at criteria stored in your CRM — such as demographics, interests, net worth, etc. — and build out lists that will allow you to create highly segmented, highly personalized campaigns. 

Writing effective marketing emails  

Now that you’ve gotten the proper infrastructure in place, it’s time to get to the fun part: writing your email campaigns. 

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that you always want to send valuable, relevant content. Only reaching out to your list when you want to sell them something is a surefire way to lose subscribers. Instead, be sure to keep things educational or entertaining. 

Personalization can make your emails more relevant and engaging. Address your subscribers by their name, reference their specific interests or previous interactions with your brand, and customize content based on their segment.

Finally, if you’re struggling to get started, remember that you can always lean on every marketer’s new best friend: ChatGPT. This generative AI chatbot is still known for spitting out false information as fact so you’ll want to avoid letting it write 100% of your copy. But, it’s still incredibly useful for generating ideas, outlining rough drafts or tweaking content that you already have.

With all that said, email marketing isn’t just ‘set it and forget it.’ Even though you can automate your campaigns, you should constantly be evaluating their effectiveness.

Test, Measure, and Tweak

Email marketing for financial advisors is an ongoing task that can, and should, be improved over time. You can improve your results by continuously testing, measuring and revising different phases of your email marketing plan. Here are a few things you can test within your email marketing ecosystem:

• A new value hook
• Copy on your subscriber forms
• Subject lines in your emails
• Types of email campaigns
• Calls-to-action across your marketing materials
• The graphic design of your marketing materials
• Timing and frequency of your emails 

The first step when doing this is to analyze metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to determine the effectiveness of your email marketing plan. From there you can make adjustments based on the insights you gather.

The Bottom Line on Email Marketing for Financial Advisors

Email marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. With a few tools and some time, you can create basic campaigns that engage your prospects and bring new clients into your sales funnel. Start with a monthly newsletter and go from there — the more comfortable you get working with the tools that are available to you, the further along the maturity curve you can progress.