If you open your email inbox right now, chances are you’ll see a lot of emails that you consider junk, or at the very least you will simply delete them and move on to the next one. And that doesn’t even include the emails that don’t make it past your spam filter! So why are we talking about email marketing as part of your financial advisor digital marketing plan? Because email marketing still works.
But, like most marketing strategies, it needs to be done right to be effective. If not, your financial advisor emails will end up like so many others – in the trash bin. So how do you get recipients to open your financial advisor emails? And once the email is open, how do you get recipients to feel compelled to click on your content?
First and foremost, having the right tools at your disposal is crucial. While there are many tools out there that can help with financial advisor email marketing, here is a list of some recommended tools you can start using today (some are free!) to take your email marketing to the next level.
The list below has been broken down into tools that help with actual email building, sending, and deliverability as well as those tools which can help with the email content itself.
What are the best email platforms for financial advisors?
While you can certainly email your clients and prospective clients individually through your regular email account (i.e., Outlook, etc.) – when it comes to email marketing, an email marketing platform is needed to keep track of important parts of an email campaign, such as unsubscribes, open rates, and other important metrics. Email platforms also allow users to create visually appealing and interactive emails that cannot easily be created through a traditional email program.
Mailchimp
As one of the largest email automation platforms, Mailchimp offers many tools to help financial advisors build and send marketing emails. The platform offers a free tool but can also be scaled based on the size of the advisor’s email list as well as the number of emails sent per month.
Their templates make it easy for users to get started sending emails right away, and the audience segmentation tools make it easy to target your audience. The paid plans offer more robust features such as A/B testing, customer journey mapping, and onboarding features, and allow for more emails based on your audience size.
Hubspot
While you’ve likely heard of HubSpot, there are many things the online digital marketing platform is capable of, and it can be overwhelming. When it comes to financial advisor email marketing, their free email marketing tool is a great place to start. As with other tools, HubSpot’s email marketing platform lets users choose from pre-designed templates and get started sending emails right away.
What sets HubSpot’s free tool apart from other email marketing platforms is that it allows you to manage your contacts on a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform. Having a CRM is a great way to follow your contacts (both clients and potential clients) through their interaction with your emails to gauge their engagement or interest level with your financial advisor firm – along with keeping tabs on other important email activity as well.
What are the best email content tools for financial advisors?
While any email marketing platform will likely offer email templates, you still need to have the appropriate graphics and content to add to your financial advisor marketing emails to reach their intended audience and make an impact. Below is a list of tools that can help turn your financial advisor marketing emails into lead generating missives in no time.
Unsplash
Stock photography is not new, but Unsplash offers free, high-resolution photography from photographers all over the world. Using graphics in your emails is a good way to highlight the quality content of your email. By using interesting (and relevant) graphics to support the body copy in the email itself, you’re enticing recipients to want to learn more.
Canva
In the past, if a financial advisor wanted custom graphics created, they needed to seek the services of a professional graphic designer. And while there is no replacing that role fully, Canva is the next best thing.
This tool offers thousands of templates and graphics, all sized for their specific use, whether that’s on social media channels or optimized for email. The platform allows users to drag and drop text and graphics, add logos, and much more. There is a free version as well with the paid version offering access to premium templates and high-resolution exporting.
Vidyard
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s the importance of communicating digitally when in-person meetings aren’t safe or even possible. Vidyard is a sales tool that can send personalized, sales-focused videos that can be sent via email. This tool requires little effort from the sender, and Vidyard offers a free version as well as affordable paid plans with additional features.
Loom
Also speaking to the need for virtual communication, Loom is a tool that lets you share your activity on a screen via a video that can be sent via email. This is useful for financial advisors who want to show clients how to log in to their account, or even just offer detailed explanations to a client or respond to potential client questions.
It takes the guesswork out of typing up a long list of steps and can be paused or replayed for further clarification which saves time for both you and your recipients.
Calendly
Coordinating schedules for meetings can mean a lot of back-and-forth emails that can be time-consuming and inefficient. Calendly can remove the guesswork and offer your email recipients a link to access your availability based on your actual schedule. This makes the process much more user-friendly for everyone involved and makes you look professional and organized to your clients and prospects with little work on your end.
Grammarly
When it comes to writing, even professional authors need a second set of eyes on their content. And when it comes to business, a simple typo can create a bad first impression. Grammarly is essentially a smarter version of spell check through the use of AI and can help not only eliminate typos but suggest improvements to the overall flow of your email copy. The free version offers the basics, and the paid plan offers even more such as sentence structure suggestions and plagiarism detection.
Now that you’ve seen what tools are out there, it’s time to kick your email campaigns up and notch. If you’re looking for even more information on how email can help your financial advisor digital marketing strategy, reach out today!
