Email Marketing Automation: Systematize Your Financial Business
Email Marketing Automation (EMA) refers to a variety of tools and mechanism that help to automate ongoing conversations and the seamless delivery of content to your clients and prospects. EMA is traditionally used for a welcome or nurture sequence, which can include tailored messages specifically to your list’s interests. EMA has become a prevalent and growing business strategy due to how efficient, scalable and convenient it makes managing prospect and client communications.
Is Email Marketing Automation Right for Your Financial Business?
As a financial advisor, you are in a highly-competitive marketplace, and having the time to follow up with all your clients and prospects consistently can be a challenge. Some of the benefits of email marketing automation to consider:
Saves time, energy and resources once the sequences are set up
More messaging, more content and more connection
Easy to see return on investment
Helps to turn prospects into clients
According to a recent survey by Ascend2, the top three most important objectives of a marketing automation strategy are:
- Acquiring more customers
- Optimizing productivity
- Increasing marketing ROI
However, automation may not work for all business models or scenarios, and there are some common pitfalls to look out for including frequency of emails, leaving a database disengaged, overly complicated sequences creating confusion for your team and your audience or improper use of lists to personalize relevant messaging.
How to Get Started:
- Choose an email system – Setting up email automation can be time-consuming on the front end, so choosing a system that is easy to navigate and manage will be beneficial. There are many email and client management services available to use such as Constant Contact, MailChimp and InfusionSoft, to name a few. Each of these providers not only has the ability to automate emails but offers client management to keep your contacts organized and valuable tracking insights to provide analytics on the content you are sharing. Make sure you develop segmentations within your email list. A simple segmentation can be prospects and clients. If you are not ready to embrace a CRM system or new email marketing system, you can even use your Gmail account to create simple automation to streamline your daily communications.
- Create a welcome series – A welcome series is one of the simplest examples of EMA. A cycle of messages is sent at different intervals to new subscribers/email addresses. The goals of the campaign is to encourage a prospect to take an action, such as schedule an appointment, downloading a whitepaper or signing up for an event you are hosting. A welcome series is also the perfect time to introduce your business, set up mailing expectations and ask your prospects what types of information they are interested in receiving.
- Set up trigger automated messages – Triggered messages allow you to send emails based on important dates. For instance, birthdays, anniversaries, end of the year deadlines or their retirement date can trigger one email or a series of emails.
- Automate nurturing campaigns – Nurturing campaigns can be set up to nurture your relationship with your clients or prospects. Using a nurture campaign allows you to send relevant emails at set intervals. Such campaigns could be to promote an upcoming seminar, book release, promotion of a whitepaper, sending out your blog content, newsletter or a monthly email. If you are feeling relatively tech savvy, you can set up nurturing sequences to follow-up based on an action from a previous message. For example, if an individual opened your last email and clicked on information about your upcoming seminar but didn’t register, you could set up a sequence to send additional emails to that individual encouraging them to sign up for the next event.
Have an old list of emails? Consider running the list through a validation service to clean it up prior to your first send to avoid spam complaints and deliverability issues. Here are some resources reviewed by Accuweb Hosting to consider (Top 10 Bulk Email Verification and Validation Services Compared.)
As you can see, email marketing automation can be very simple or can be very complex. The key is finding the right balance for your business. Just as each of your clients is unique, your email campaign needs to be able to keep your clients and prospects engaged and connected to your business. EMA has a place in the financial industry and depending on your business goals and objectives can be a great investment in the year to come.
Regardless of your email automation goals for your financial firm, our team is here to help define, support and promote your brand to capture and retain your audience. Call (866) 888-5333 or email us at Info@advisorpr.com if we can be of help.