There is a common misconception that financial advisor sales funnels are complete without email marketing. Though email marketing for financial advisors is fairly old compared to other elements of inbound marketing, it is an essential component of sales funnels, especially those used to steer potential clients to your financial advisory firm. If you have not yet implemented email marketing in your sales funnel, unsuccessfully attempted to do so, or simply do not know where to start, don’t fret.
Let’s take a look at how to best implement email marketing as a component of your digital marketing sales funnel.
Email Marketing Moves Prospects Through Your Sales Funnel
Put yourself in the position of someone in your local area in need of financial advisory services. You visit a local financial advisor’s website to get a sense of what they have to offer and whether their services meet your requirements. You aren’t completely certain you want to select the firm, but you would like to learn more about the firm's value proposition.
You spot an email signup form on their homepage or the contact page, enter your information, close the window and move on to the next financial advisor’s website. However, this second website lacks an email signup form. You spend a minute or two scanning through the second site’s content, get distracted and close your web browser.
Fast forward a week later. You are still searching for a local financial advisor and notice an email message from the one you first visited. You click on the email, read through the newsletter and respond to the call-to-action, by clicking the hyperlink to one of the firm’s website pages. You give serious consideration to the firm after spending additional time on its website, surf on over to the firm’s contact page and email the firm to schedule an interview.
Although the hypothetical situation detailed above does not move the prospect through the top of the funnel or moving him or her all the way down to the bottom, it does increase the chances of the prospect taking the all important step of reaching out to schedule an initial consultation. This transition would not have been possible had the financial advisory firm lacked an email signup form and a monthly newsletter or other type of communication.
Though some of those who sign up for email messages will not move through the sales funnel, those who proceed through the funnel as a result of the messages justify the effort invested in email marketing several times over. This is precisely why every financial advisory firm cannot afford to overlook the value of email marketing as part of their digital marketing strategy.
Worried About the Time Investment Necessary for Email Marketing? Consider Email Automation
Email automation has advanced to the point that it is now possible for computers to personalize email messages for specific prospects. Furthermore, technological innovation empowers financial advisors to send custom-tailored email messages in an automated manner. This means you and your staff don’t have to invest countless hours personalizing email marketing greetings for each individual customer and send each of those messages out.
Thanks to email advances, this laborious process can be completely automated. Invest the little bit of time necessary to automate the email marketing process and it will operate for you with minimal effort invested by you, ultimately helping you build your client base in a productive manner. In short, it has never been easier to move prospects through your financial advisory sales funnel, ramp up conversions and create a steady flow of new clients for your firm.
Provide Positive Reinforcement for Email Signups
There is no guarantee your website’s email signup form will succeed in encouraging people to sign up for your email messages. Though people certainly appreciate information about financial services, some will not enter their contact information into your email signup form unless there is additional value in it for them aside from gaining additional knowledge about the industry and/or your firm’s services.
Seize the opportunity to provide your email newsletter recipients with something of value. Dangle the prospect of exceptional benefits in the form of a small discount, a free eBook, a free whitepaper or something else of value and your email list really will produce increasing value over time. This is the growth necessary to move prospects into your sales funnel and through it, ultimately converting them into paying clients who spread the word about your financial advisory firm’s valuable services to friends, colleagues, family and others.
If you are hesitant to provide a complimentary consultation or another value-added service to those who subscribe to your financial advisory firm’s communications, you can limit the offer to what you are most comfortable with. Provide email subscribers with a complimentary whitepaper or eBook or another form of positive reinforcement within a specific timeframe and people will be compelled to sign up for your emails and take quick action to capitalize on the limited time offer.
Carefully Craft Your Email Messages
Your email messages won’t succeed in converting prospects into paying clients unless the content of those messages is presented in a beneficial, value-added manner. This is your opportunity to evaluate the merits of your financial advisory firm’s services.
Communicate the real value of your firm’s services in a persuasive manner throughout your email messages and you will expand the productivity of your sales funnel, moving those prospects down to the funnel bottom for conversions that add new clients for your firm.
Take Advantage of the Fact That Everyone Uses Email
Nearly everyone has an email account. In fact, most people check their email on an hourly or daily basis. However, those same people may not have social media accounts. Plus, many of those same people refuse to click ads on search engines and websites.
Seeing, clicking and reading through an email message is much more likely to move prospects through the sales funnel to the bottom where they convert into paying clients than social media ads and other forms of marketing.
Email is more of a covert and veiled means of marketing a financial advisory firm’s advice and services. Instead of overwhelming prospects with flashy, aggressive ads or direct sales pitches, email marketing messages presented in an artful manner are more reliant on the prospects taking specific actions.
A prospect at the top of the sales funnel who proactively takes the initiative to click and read through a financial advisory firm’s email messages has made a conscious decision to learn more about the firm’s value offering.
This means the prospect is genuinely interested in the firm’s services and giving serious consideration to paying for its services. The same cannot be said for those who are unwillingly exposed to advertisements and even certain forms of inbound marketing such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads strategically placed on search engine results pages (SERPs).
