Updated on: April 21, 2022

Email may be an older marketing method, but it can still be one of the most powerful tactics in your marketing arsenal. According to a digital marketing study by Fidelity, 67 percent of financial professionals utilize email campaigns, with 60 percent reporting it as one of their top three most effective marketing tactics.¹

Want to make the most of your email marketing efforts? Here are some best practices you can follow.

1. Know Your Why

Similar to creating a digital marketing strategy, planning ahead and knowing your why is key to optimizing your email marketing efforts.

Every tactic—including email—should be implemented with specific goals in mind. What are you trying to accomplish by sending this email or launching this email campaign? Who is your target audience? What do you want them to learn? What do you want them to do?

Answering these questions first will guide all other aspects of your email marketing—from audience targeting to writing copy.

2. Segment Your Email Lists

Email marketing for financial advisors should be a value-add to the clients or prospects receiving them. But what is valuable to some may not be valuable to all. Getting your email in front of the right audience is crucial to email marketing success.

Rather than sending out a piece of content to all your clients or all your prospects, create targeted lists based on recipient attributes. You can segment your lists in an endless amount of ways depending on your firm’s client base and the products and services you offer. Understanding your client demographics, your buyer’s journey, and buyer personas is helpful for this process.

3. Focus on Your Subject Line

Your email’s subject line is the first interaction the recipient has with your email—and it’s the most important indicator of whether they’ll open it or not.

A good, attention-grabbing subject line makes a promise to the recipient about what they’ll find inside the email. It should be interesting and transparent. Think about what your audience would find most interesting about the email and entice them to click. Considering asking a compelling question or teasing the email’s contents.

Take note of your subject line’s length. All email clients, on both desktop and mobile, have a subject line character limit. This limit varies, but subject lines should generally be between 9 characters and 60 characters—the cut-off for most desktop email clients.² If you see that most of your recipients open your emails on mobile, consider making your subject lines even shorter.

4. Get Personal

Once a recipient opens the email, they need to find content that they care about. Personalize your email copy and make it relevant to your audience. Why should that specific recipient care about what you’re sending them? What makes it helpful and relevant to their lives? Once you can answer these questions, you can write your subject line and email copy in a way that highlights the email’s unique value. Personalizing your emails may take a little extra work, but it’s well worth it.

5. Include a CTA

Emails should never be a road to nowhere. Always use a call to action, or CTA, in your copy. Give the recipient an opportunity to reach out and engage you.

Your CTAs don’t have to be overtly promotional or forceful, especially if the email’s primary purpose is to provide them with helpful content. Instead, consider including a softer CTA like, “Let me know if you have any questions about your finances.”

6. Keep Copy Short and Sweet

Another thing to keep in mind when writing email copy is length. The average person spends 11.82 seconds reading an email.⁴ If they access the email from mobile, that time bumps up to 12.56 seconds.⁴

Keep your emails short, sweet, and to the point. But make sure your key message shines through loud and clear. Tell the recipient what you’re offering, how it benefits them, and then provide a CTA. No bells or whistles required.

7. Leverage Marketing Automation

Like many financial professionals, you’re probably busy. Finding the time to put together an entire email campaign, with its supporting assets, may prove difficult.

Marketing technology solutions that include automated campaigns can address this problem. They not only help you scale quickly and efficiently, but also offer workflows that already account for marketing best practices. This helps you create better, more engaging campaigns—all without the heavy lift.

Learn More About Email Best Practices

Want to learn more about developing email marketing for financial advisors? Sign up for our free six-day email course “Understanding the Customer’s Journey and Decision-making Process” to learn how the digital marketing funnel works and how to integrate this knowledge into your digital marketing strategy.

Sources:

1. The Case for Digital Marketing, Fidelity, October 2020.

2. “Best Practices for Email Subject Lines.” MailChimp n.d. https://mailchimp.com/help/best-practices-for-email-subject-lines/.

3. 2020 eMoney Consumer Marketing Survey, September 2020, n=2,000.

4. “2020 State of Email Engagement.” Litmus, 2020. October 1. https://www.litmus.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/2020_State_of_Email_Engagement.pdf.

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