Financial services entrepreneurs understand ROI better than anyone. You’ve likely come across this page because you’ve heard that email marketing delivers a great ROI (correct), and you’re wondering how you can use it to grow your business—which is exactly what we’ll cover. Email is a dynamic marketing tool that can help you cultivate relationships with potential clients, build customer trust, grow your brand, and demonstrate your authority as the go-to expert on insurance, banking, real estate lending, fintech, etc.
If you’re looking to be strategic about your digital marketing efforts (and of course you are), you’ll want to focus on the most effective email marketing campaigns. Let’s look at the five campaigns that are most worth the squeeze for finance businesses.
Educational drip campaigns are information-rich emails sent at set intervals. They can be highly effective for existing and potential customers alike. You can use education campaigns in a few different ways. You can use these emails as content marketing, demonstrating your expertise to your audience and building your brand. By keeping the content focus narrower, you can also use educational emails to nurture leads and move them through the funnel. Drip campaigns like this can help you build credibility and trust with prospective customers by offering value first. Over time, this can help you build a stronger client relationship.
Examples of educational emails different financial service sectors might send:
Financial advisors: The One Rule for Retirement Planning Everyone Can Follow, Preparing for Retirement in Your [20s, 30s, 40s]
Accounting: Tax-Saving Tips for Year-End, How to Keep Your Books Clean, Perfecting your P&L
Business lending: X Ways Ways to Use a Business Line of Credit to Grow Your Business, Business Loans During a Recession? Here’s What to Know
Each customer has unique financial needs. Show that you understand that, and you care about their financial health with a personalized financial checkup email campaign. You can use customer data to keep track of which existing customers are due for a yearly financial revue and send an automated email suggesting they schedule a time to meet. This shows you care and does a lot to cultivate customer loyalty…and it doesn’t require you to remember each client and manually email them at the perfect time (thank you very much, email automation).
Examples of how different financial services firms can use financial checkups campaigns:
Mortgage lender: Annual reminders about how mortgage rates have changed since the client purchased a home. Is it a good time to refinance? Has the market in their area improved, increasing the value of the clients home?
Financial advisor: Annual revues to look at a customer’s portfolio performance can help you ensure they’re on track to meet their retirement, savings, and investing goals. Remind clients that it’s a great time to evaluate the financial products in their portfolio and whether or not any goals or life events may alter their plan from the year before.
Accountant: Tax professionals can email clients starting in January reminding them to schedule annual tax reviews before the busy season starts.
Create buzz around your product launches, product updates, and new services with an email campaign. You’ll want to create a series of emails before and after launch—first creating buzz and then, once the product/service is available, encouraging potential customers and existing clients to try it. Whether you’re an independent financial advisor, a storied financial institution, or a scrappy fintech company, letting your customers know what’s knew is a great way to encourage engagement and adoption.
Examples of when different financial services might use a launch campaign:
Accounting: Offering a new QuickBooks integration for your bookkeeping services? Let your clients know. Existing customers will love it, and it might just be what convinces a potential customer to switch to you.
Financial institutions: New credit cards or retirement plans.
Fintech companies: Mobile banking update or robo-investing services.
Client testimonials and case studies can do a lot to build credibility and trust for financial institutions, advisors, and financial entrepreneurs. These success stories show potential clients how your financial service or product have benefitted someone with a similar challenge or experience. Be sure to keep testimonials and case studies solution-oriented so that it’s easy for the email to recipient to imagine how it applies to them. Remember, it’s about what’s in it for them, not you.
Examples of case study emails that work:
How [NAME] Saved for Retirement in Ten Years (financial advisor)
How Made a Savvy Move Despite High Interest Rates (mortgage lender)
[NAME] stopped dreading tax season. Here’s how. (accounting and tax)
If your business ever offers promotions or limited-time offers to build business, email marketing can help you maximize your impact. Financial clients are often motivated by exclusivity and the fear of missing out (FOMO). This email campaign type helps you harness a potential customer’s financial FOMO and compel immediate action. To make your offers as irresistible as possible, ensure that there’s a clear benefit for your customer.
Offer examples that perform well in email marketing for financial services:
Money lending: Limited-time mortgage rates
Fiduciary and fee-based financial advisors: Free financial consultations for new clients
Credit cards and business loans: 0% introductory APR
Once you have your email marketing strategy ironed out, you need to build the machine so that you can turn your ideas into action. From setting up your email list to picking the email marketing software that will set you apart from your competition, here are the five main steps of building a world class email program for the financial services industry.
The first step towards a successful email campaign is a high-quality list. Your current roster of clients is a great place to start. You can also funnel client prospects into your email list when they submit an inquiry or schedule an informational meeting. If you choose to add these recipients to your email list, you’ll want to use what’s known as a double opt-in. That means you include messaging about subscribing to email when they submit an inquiry/schedule a meeting, and then the potential client receives another email confirming that they want to opt-in to receive emails.
You might be scratching your head thinking—but doesn’t that give people the chance to say no? Yes. And that’s the point. Those people are more likely to move your emails to Trash—or worse, to Spam—without engaging. When your email marketing it limited to a high-quality list of people who are invested in your content, they’re more likely to engage with your emails (which, in turn, will boost the overall performance of your email marketing).
One more thing: if you’re ever tempted to buy an email list, don’t. It’s not worth it.
Clean customer data is the foundation of solid digital marketing. Once you have clean data, you can use it to segment your email list. Segmentation allows you to deliver a more personalized experience, so potential and existing customers only receive the messaging that is most relevant to them. Some of the most common approaches to email segmentation include subdividing your list by demographics, email subscriber engagement level, or the types of emails that you send (newsletter, market updates, promotional, etc). The Essential Guide to Email Segmentation can help you properly set up segmentation for a financial services company.
The right software will save you time and make your life easier while making your email marketing more effective. Look for an email software that offers a beginner-friendly setup, automation workflows, list segmentation, templates, and landing page builders. More advanced digital marketers might benefit from choosing an email API that provides features like ISP monitoring, sender authentication, dedicated IP addresses, and expert support to ensure your emails reach their intended audience.
Once you choose your email software, it’s time to get to work creating your email campaigns. Start small with one or two campaigns, so you can troubleshoot and make adjustments based on what you learn. Create an email calendar so your team can understand what emails are being sent and when.
Financial businesses have an extra step when creating and reviewing email marketing—compliance. You’ll want to check with your legal team or an advisor to ensure you’re dotting all your i’s and crossing all your t’s. That may mean including boiler plate language in your content marketing emails about how “this is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice” or it may mean updating copy from “save money with lower fees” to “you may save money with lower fees.” It’s worth doing the double-check on every email.
After you create your first email campaign, you’ll want to follow up to measure performance. Track metrics like open rate, click-through rate, deliverability rate, inbox placement rate (aka how often your emails go to the recipient’s main inbox vs. spam). Following how current and potential customers interact with your emails will help you dial in your content, messaging, and cadence until you find the secret sauce for your business.
Email Marketing Campaigns by Twilio SendGrid has the full suite of tools to create world-class email marketing for your business. From easy-to-use welcome email templates to an industry-leading email delivery rate, we put the most important tools right at your fingertips.
