Best Practices for Email Marketing

Digital marketing — all the ways you can reach your clients beyond face-to-face conversations — has never been more important than during this COVID-19 crisis. Email, newsletters, social media all have become hugely instrumental in helping to stay connected to clients and prospects.

Email marketing isn’t new, though. According to research conducted by Fidelity, over 60% of advisors use email to some extent; of those, 60% rank it within the top three methods they count on for lead generation. Far more established than social media platforms that rise and fall in popularity, email marketing is a constant source of communication that you can create without boundaries (after all, how much can you really say in 288 characters, spaces included?). Successful advisors understand the value of email marketing — but the flip side is, that’s a lot of email. How can you make your message stand out and not just become one more “delete without reading” item?

Four best practices help content stand strong and stand out:
1. Know your audience — Communicate with clients and prospects regarding the topics they want to hear more about. Don’t bury them in market updates when they are more interested in lifestyle pieces (or vice versa). How do you figure out what clients or prospects are interested in? Ask them! Explain the type of content you typically send, and allow them to easily opt-in or opt-out. It’s also helpful to establish the frequency you are sending things — a client may be happy to get a monthly newsletter, but not interested in a daily email.

2. Be creative — Create content that is engaging (use imagery, or quotes that sum up the topic). Use video; these days, video doesn’t need to be slick and expensively produced. You can effectively record video using your computer or Zoom. Make content so good that your clients WANT to share it with their friends.

3. Make it count — Build subject lines that are short and sweet, but draw the reader in with a sense of intrigue. Keep content timely and on-point, and include a call to action—perhaps it’s answering a question, downloading more information, or joining a webcast. Think about the emails that intrigue you, and the ones that you automatically delete. That can help inspire your process.

4. Personalize it — Within reason. If you are sending emails to clients that you know, they should be personalized with their first name, or nickname — easily accomplished if your Salesforce (or other CRM) is up to date. Consider, however, that personalizing too much — being too familiar with someone you haven’t met — can be a turn off. Have you gotten a slew of emails that pretend to know you and offer 2-3 times to meet “as a follow up”? Those can be a real turnoff.

These four best practices can help your message stand out. But… they are clearly time consuming. It can be hard to create timely content for each audience segment you work with. Don’t fall into the trap of using “canned content”— pieces that every advisor in town are using. That can actually backfire, when a recipient gets the same “personal” message from several sources.

Luckily, the Engage platform that is available to all Hightower advisors helps bridge the gap. Content is audience-specific across multiple segments (retirees, business owners, accumulators… just to name a few) and/or topical; i.e., covering the pandemic or market conditions. And each and every piece is customizable, so that there is a starting point for you to use and add your own perspective to.

If you enjoy writing or creating emails with graphics or other stand-out items, it’s a good idea to set aside several hours a week to create your communications. Set a schedule and block the time on your calendar — it is almost impossible to create quality communications while multi-tasking or fielding phone calls! Draw topic ideas from the conversations you’ve had over the week, or ideas that have resonated with you. When you use your own voice to talk about topics of interest, it is far more genuine (and fun!). The Engage platform may help by presenting topic ideas to riff off of, or next steps to follow up. For instance, maybe you are writing around the topic of small business owners in this economy, and want to allow readers to opt in for more material on this topic. Engage has campaigns and papers that you can leverage, customize, and — most importantly — track.

Unlike direct mail, with Engage you can clearly see the level of engagement of your email recipients, to determine if you’re hitting the mark or just talking into the air. A “good” open rate for advisory communications is in the 25% range; if you are consistently lower than that, you may want to re-think your topics or approach.

One last statistic: a survey found that email marketing had a ROI of 122%. That’s a pretty impressive number, and should be the impetus to give email marketing a try!

*All statistics are sourced from the Fidelity report:
Diving into Digital Marketing: A Practical Guide to Deepening Connections with Clients and Prospects

Hightower Advisors is registered with Hightower Securities, LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, and with Hightower Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor with the SEC. Securities are offered through Hightower Securities, LLC; advisory services are offered through Hightower Advisors, LLC.