Financial services email marketing is one of the most effective ways to acquire new leads and clients, as well as a great way to engage with an existing client base.
Your email list is an invaluable resource that doesn’t depend on paid advertisement or Google algorithms.
Email marketing campaigns can be launched whenever you like, and can send traffic to specific landing pages or contact forms depending on their goal.
Your list will become more profitable the larger it grows.
Over the last few years, the ‘email is dead’ narrative has plagued the marketing space. Although we now know this could not be further from the truth.
Email is still a highly effective and popular tool, despite the rise of social media and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), when used well.
There are 3.9 billion daily email users. This number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025.
However, many businesses are unsure how to start with a tried-and-tested strategy.
Before you get into the details of your email campaign, it is important to first understand the goal. What do you want it to accomplish?
Every message you send should have a goal and unique call-to-action.
Let’s look at some goals that you may have for your campaigns, and give you some guidelines on how to reach them.
Finding New Clients
We have pulled together some ways to grow your client base faster:
Your email list should be built efficiently and ethically
Lead Generation tactics, such as paid ads, can all help you grow your email list over time.
Although you should only send emails to those who have signed up for your email list, otherwise you risk breaking GDPR regulations.
Offer compelling and relevant incentives
Email marketing, and financial services email marketing in particular, is competitive. You need to give people a reason to sign up for yet another email list.
Financial Guides, regular financial blogs and articles, financial reports and financial newsletters are all great hooks.
However, it’s important to choose an issue relevant to your audience. You should identify a problem and offer a solution.
For example, if you have run a lead generation campaign to consolidate your pensions, a guide or collection of blogs on the topic would offer value to this segment of your audience. You can then slowly nurture them with other services you offer that they could be interested in.
Promote your offers widely
You should also consider promoting your lead-generating offer via paid ads, social media and blogs, to generate the contacts for your email marketing funnel.
Nurturing relationships with clients and prospects
An email list can also be used to increase client knowledge and build authority and trust with prospects.
When you acquire a new client or get a warm lead, this is only one stage in what will hopefully be a longstanding relationship.
Email is one of the best ways to nurture this relationship. These guidelines will help you do this better in your financial services email marketing campaigns:
Consistency
People will forget to hear from you if they don’t hear and see your name and branding regularly.
33% of marketers send weekly emails and 26% send emails multiple times per month.
63% of businesses reduce the frequency of emails sent to subscribers based on their engagement levels to ensure nobody feels bombarded. We believe this tactic is sensible and is one we use.
Most email marketing tools allow you these insights.
Make useful content
Discuss financial topics relevant to your clients and prospects.
Engaging financial content will help you establish yourself as an authority in your field and build relationships.
Establishing trust and authority is particularly important within the financial industry.
Keep your brand consistent
It is important to keep your branding consistent within all your email marketing. This will help people recognise your brand.
This should also be consistent with your website, social media pages, as well as any other channels or platforms where you are active.
Segment your list
It’s okay to start small if you are new to email marketing. You can then send more relevant messages to clients as your list grows.
Email segmentation lets you separate your readers by gender, location, interests, and past behaviour.
If you run various financial lead generation campaigns, these leads can then be segmented within your email lists to ensure everyone receives financial content that speaks to them and their financial needs.
Increase engagement using automation
Email automation is a great tool.
Based on a consumer’s action or event, triggered emails can be automatically sent.
You can send welcome messages to new subscribers, email on people’s birthdays, or even time, and tailor the automated sequence based on the actions of the recipient.
Evolving Your Financial Services Email Marketing Campaigns
To perfect your financial services email marketing campaigns, you must track your results to improve your strategy over time.
You can improve your effectiveness by focusing on these factors:
Find the best time to email
The morning may be the best time of day to send financial marketing emails: 10am ranks highly for open rates in many sectors.
However, the afternoon can also yield good results. There is no right or wrong – it’s all about testing. Each financial business is unique, so you should test times on your audience yourself and learn from your data.
Financial Services Email Marketing Benchmarks
Open Rates
You can’t expect results if people don’t open your emails. Open rates can be improved by changing subject lines and sending messages at different times.
According to Mailchimp, the average email opening rate in the financial services sector is 21.56%.
Click through rates (CTR)
You want people to click on your links to achieve your goal. Your CTR can be improved by using different types of links, images and landing pages.
Click-through rates can vary depending on the industry. However, you want to see a CTR of between 2-5%. Your audience will likely reward you with higher open and click rates if you don’t send more than five newsletters a week.
Conversions
Conversions are more important than CTR, because it shows how many recipients actually took an action from your campaign.
Conversion is unlikely to happen the first time you send a new contact an email. This is why consistency and lead nurturing are so important.
Bounce Rate
It is important to know how many emails are actually delivered.
The average bounce rate across all industries is 9.96%, giving you an indicator when viewing your campaign statistics.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Your ROI will tell you how profitable your campaigns were.
This is especially important if you use paid advertising and support it with automated email campaigns to decide if the returns are high enough to continue the campaign.
Email Analytics
Email analytics can be done using tools like Google Analytics or GetResponse.
Here at Opulent Media Group, we manage many financial businesses email analytics.
We nurture their leads, keep email lists clean, and improve on campaigns week on week, depending on the actions their audience takes.
Although you won’t see immediate results from your financial services email marketing campaigns, it is a long-term strategy to build your business and nurture your audience and leads.
Your efforts will reap the rewards over time. Your list will become more profitable the longer it grows.
It’s important to target the right clients to get better responses and a higher ROI.
Over time, you’ll learn how to improve your campaigns through analytics and feedback.
Email marketing has been around for many years, and all evidence shows it will be an effective method of communication for many years to come.
So if you are a financial company and do not use the power of email marketing, it is time to jump aboard.
If this blog has sparked some ideas that you would like to implement, or perhaps you would like an expert opinion on a burning question, you can contact our friendly team.
