Even with the influx of new digital marketing channels seemingly every year, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways of reaching clients. leads, and clients, especially for advisors who work in the financial service industry.
Whether you already have an existing drip email system or are about to start the effort, it’s essential to evaluate all aspects of your financial advisor email marketing strategy. Email marketing allows for customization, flexibility, and most important to this discussion, detailed measurement metrics.
Understanding how your financial advisor emails perform from campaign to campaign allows for a better understanding of what works for your audience, as well as what doesn’t. While not a fully inclusive listing of all email metrics that can be measured, read on for some of the most important results to monitor in your financial advisor email marketing campaigns.
Deliverability Rate
Imagine you have 50 holiday cards you’re mailing to friends and family. You assume all 50 will be successfully delivered. However, email doesn’t work the same way. Sending an email to someone on your list isn’t a guarantee that it made it into their inbox. One of the main reasons for a low deliverability rate is a high number of bounces.
A bounced email is one that results in an error after being sent. Bounced emails count against the total deliverability rate of that email. There are two different types of bounces.
A soft bounce is an email that didn’t get delivered due to a likely temporary issue, such as a full inbox, server issues, or something specific within the content of the email.
A hard bounce is a permanent issue such as the email address is no longer active or your email is being blocked by the recipient’s server.
In rare cases, a hard bounce is a result of a firewall setting that the intended recipient can address. However, in most cases, a hard bounce means the end of the line for that email address on your list. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore them.
In fact, removing hard bounced email addresses from your distribution list will help your deliverability rate by keeping your list free of “dead weight.” And since many email providers charge fees based on the email list size, this can make a difference in your overall service costs.
Open Rate
Once your email has cleared the deliverability hurdle and made it into the recipient’s inbox, the next metric to measure is the open rate. Simply put, this is the percentage of recipients who open any specific email. Understanding what types of emails get the better open rates will help you understand your audience and what types of content appeals to them the most.
Many factors contribute to this, including the subject line, the timing of the email, the frequency of your email sends, and how (if at all) you have your audience segmented for relevant communications. This level of analysis can go from very basic to a granular level which takes multiple recipient demographics and other factors into consideration.
When specifically talking about headlines, however, don’t be afraid to test multiple version of the same topics. Most email platforms allow for A/B headline testing. This means choosing two different headlines for the same email. Half of the audience gets the “A” headline, and the other half gets the “B” headline.
If there is enough variation in the open rates, there can be a clear winner. Keep in mind that it may take multiple A/B tests to determine themes for which types of headlines result in a higher overall open rate.
Click Rate and Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This click rate is defined as the percentage of recipients who clicked any link in that email vs. all of the people who were delivered the email – not specifically just those who opened the email.
Notice, that number is not the same as the number of people who were sent the email, as bounces need to be taken into account. For example, if 110 people were sent an email, and 100 of those emails were actually delivered with 50 people clicking on a link in that email, your click rate is 50%.
Helpful information, but you can take it another step further by measuring the click-through rate. This metric considers the percentage of opened emails in your analysis. For example, using the same email as above: If 110 people were sent an email, 100 emails were delivered and 75 people opened the email, the click-through rate would be calculated by taking 75 and dividing it by the 50 clicks, arriving at a 66.7% CTR.
Also, make sure you have the right click data when measuring email results. If you’re looking at click data, be sure you’re measuring the difference between total clicks and unique clicks. If joe@averagejoe.com clicked on a link in your email 5 times, those 5 clicks will get counted to your total clicks overall. However, it will only count once toward the unique clicks. Both sets of data are useful, just be sure you’re using the right set of numbers for your calculations.
Unsubscribe Rate
There is always going to be natural attrition of your email subscribers. Nearly every email will have at least a handful of unsubscribes each time – or more depending on the size of your email database. Keep an eye on this number. If you see it rise drastically after an email, it’s probably a good idea to check the content. Or maybe you sent out multiple emails within a relatively short amount of time. Whatever the reason, closely watching this number because it will help you understand how to produce more desirable results.
Conversion Rate
Every digital marketer can define what they consider a “conversion.” For retailers, a conversion occurs when someone buys a product. For financial advisors, that could mean signing up for an eBook or newsletter or making an appointment to speak with an advisor or anything in between. No matter how you define a conversion, be sure your email platform and your website are connected in a way that accurately measures conversions for your email marketing efforts.
