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Email Marketing

Email Marketing by Financial Advisers

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I’ve been really impressed over the last few months by the excellent use of email as a marketing tool by some financial advisers. While some “digital experts” suggest that email has been replaced by social media, I’m not an advocate of that point of view. I firmly believe that email should play a leading role in the marketing mix employed by financial advisers. This blog post sets out a few general observations and thoughts to enhance your email marketing activities.

 Data Quality

To start, for the purpose of this article I’m going to assume you have a valid email database under data protection rules. The next important point is to ensure that every opportunity is taken to improve this list. Every customer contact should include a quick check to ensure you have the client’s correct email address. Email offers a low cost and effective route for financial advisers to reach their customers, so maximise the opportunity! Good data will help you do this.

However email is not for everyone so ensure you respect your clients’ wishes. If someone wants to unsubscribe, make sure you have a robust process to manage this. Otherwise you risk really undermining your relationship with these clients.

You’re Ready to Start…..

Get organised and get going! Otherwise you run the risk of what has been described as “The Bad Relative Strategy”. This is where you seek permission from your audience to send them great content……and then do nothing. For ages. Until you’re looking for something – for example to make them aware of a really great product opportunity. This is compared to the distant uncle who only turns up at Christmas looking to be fed and watered! If you say you’re going to email your clients, be ready to do so. Have a plan.

When you’re ready to go,  launch your email campaign. Tell your audience what to expect in terms of how you want to add value to them, the type of content they can expect and the frequency of your communications. And then have a plan to deliver as you promised.

I’m always asked how frequently you need to be communicating to be effective. Personally I think you need to be communicating at least monthly with original content. You can then supplement this with interesting content that you curate from the web. That is, interesting to your audience! And don’t fall into the trap of only sharing other people’s content from the web. Your audience want to read your views and opinions too!

Some financial advisers easily achieve this. I receive a brilliant email blog from one financial adviser every Friday. Very well written, interesting to me, a bit quirky and I always read it!

It’s all about the Content

As mentioned in the last paragraph, it’s the quality of the content that will engage your audience. And this is what it’s primarily all about; engagement, not selling. If you start just pushing product sales messages out there, expect your unsubscribes rates to soar. No-one wants to be constantly sold to. If you over-sell, you’ll lose your audience forever.

However you want a return from your email marketing. Your best chance of achieving this is by engaging your audience, making them aware of your expertise and how you add value, with a view to ultimately positioning yourself  for when those sales opportunities arise.

So what’s the secret to developing engaging content? Well it starts by putting in the hard yards at the outset. And this means spending time at the outset planning out your content for the next couple of months at least. This will take the pressure away of trying to dream up a new topic each month. When this happens, inevitably you’ll struggle and eventually your communications will stop happening.

Having a schedule of content takes this pressure away each month. You’ll find then that your problem is finding room in the schedule for your latest, interesting topic. A nice problem to have.

More good news in relation to email marketing is that less is more! Links to blog posts or short newsletters with one or two articles are best. Frequent & short content rather than seldom & long content is the way to go.

And finally, read your content a few times before you send it. Tweak it, make sure there’s no typos and best of luck. Give it a year and then survey your audience to get a feel for whether  you actually are engaging them or not. I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

Effective Newsletters for Financial Advisers

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I know that quite a number of financial advisers like to communicate with existing clients through newsletters which can be effective if the required level of commitment is put into them. I’m going to start by pinning my colours to the mast….. I’m not a huge fan of them as too often they fall by the wayside.  However for those out there who are ready and committed to making a success of their newsletter, here goes on 5 tips to maximise their impact.

 1. Be Clear on your Objectives

Why are you sending out the newsletter? Unless you’re very clear about this, it’s unlikely to have the desired effect. Often newsletters are used as a tool to reconnect with existing clients – a good reason for doing them! If this is the case, don’t oversell. Focus on the reader and what will engage their interest. Are they worried about protecting against a life event or are they concerned about how they will fund their later years? Focus on these types of needs, the approach that you take to helping clients plan to deal with these events and the benefits of your approach. Only after this stage do you talk about your product as the solution to addressing the need.

Too many newsletters talk only about products. This won’t be of interest unless the reader can make the jump themselves to the need that the product provides a solution for.

 2. Make sure you’ve enough Content and are Committed

Hands up how many of you have had plans to send out 3 or 4 newsletters a year and ended up sending out just a single edition a year……or a single edition ever? This is a very frequent occurrence and usually is down to 2 factors.

Often it is because there is great enthusiasm to produce the first edition and this energy then wanes after the effort of producing the first one. Don’t start with newsletters unless you (or someone for you) is going to put the effort into producing the future editions.

The other factor is that all the good ideas go into the first edition and you end up stuck for good content for future editions. The way to avoid this is to plan at least 75% of the content for the first 4 editions before you start at all. This will help you avoid “writer’s block” with future editions.

3. Have a time sensitive article

It’s a good idea to have an article that is based on very current analysis or relates to a current issue. This will show the timeliness of your newsletter and usually will be of interest. The challenge that this creates is that once this article is written, you’ve got to quickly swing into production and also to get the newsletter in front of the reader quickly.

If you’re not going to be able to turn the newsletter around quickly or indeed want to use the newsletter over a long period of time, leave out the time sensitive article.

 4. Have a Call to Action

Make every effort to get the reader to engage in some way with you. Obviously encourage them to ring or email you as a follow-up. Find a way to encourage them to visit your website – maybe there’s more detail on one or a number of the articles on your website? Ask them to send in their email address to allow you send them more, relevant information by email. Maybe consider a competition? Use the newsletter to start an ongoing engagement.

 5. Use all Distribution Channels

Many financial advisers will post out their newsletters as they don’t want to exclude clients for whom they don’t have email addresses. However also post the newsletter on your website. When you’ve done this, send an update to your LinkedIn connections, pointing them to your website. If you use Twitter, tweet the link too. Finally, email all your clients too, encouraging them to read it. Online distribution costs nothing so use all these channels!

Newsletters take effort. If you’re willing to commit and produce excellent content, they can be very effective. If they under-deliver in terms of frequency of issue or indeed quality, they will turn your client off and should be avoided. It’s up to you which camp you’re in!

5 Tips for Engaging Presentations by Financial Advisers

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A popular sales tool used by financial advisers is hosting seminars for both prospective and current clients. In this article I’m assuming that you are crystal clear on your objectives for the presentation and on your message to be delivered. Here are 5 tips to maximise the impact of your presentation at the seminar and to keep your audience engaged.

1.     Cut down your number of slides, and then cut them down again!

The number one presentation killer…… You have a very good message to deliver, an excellent product to sell but you can’t understand halfway through why people are starting to nod off! More often than not, it’s because your presentation is just too long. The audience has just got bored!

A useful rule of thumb is to allow at least 2 minutes per slide (excluding the cover and end slides). That means if your presentation is 20 minutes long, there definitely should not be more than 10 slides. Otherwise you’re just flicking through slides and not engaging anyone, or else you end up rushing through the last few slides. Often these are the important selling slides too!

2.     Reduce the content on each slide

There should not be more than 5/6 lines of text on a single slide. Why does this make sense? Because the audience have come to listen to you, not to read your slides! Otherwise they could just have asked you to email them a copy of the slides the next day. You are the main act and your slides are a summary of what you’re saying, not the other way around! Also if you don’t give them every little detail, this increases the chance of an engaging Q&A session afterwards.

If your presentation requires the audience to be given every detail, give them a hand-out at the end – how bad is it if they ring you the next day with a question?

3.     Make your presentation engaging

OK, so now you’ve cut your content right down to the minimum amount of points. The next thing to do is to make the presentation more engaging. The last thing your audience wants is a load of slides with just a series of bullet points on each. I’m not suggesting you use lots of meaningless pictures and cartoons. However everyone loves some visuals so bring in graphs and diagrams to make points. A single video (no more) can add a lot but only if it is very relevant.

This can be a lot of effort but is really worth it. If you don’t have the PowerPoint skills yourself, use someone who does. You’ve gone to the bother of getting a room full of people together, it is so important now that you engage the audience fully. Oh and talk to your audience, not your slides!

4.     Make sure everything works at the venue – perfectly!

Check out the venue beforehand and then on the day, get to the venue with loads of time to spare in case time is needed for any unforeseen problems. Nothing will damage your confidence and ultimately the delivery of your presentation more than rushing to try and sort out issues…. If possible, have someone there as a support to deal with any potential problems for you.

Is there enough parking nearby? Is the sound good enough in the room and are there enough chairs? What about the temperature in the room? Also, do a complete run through of the entire presentation with someone at the back of the room – not just the first few slides. Can they read the slides or is the typeface too small? Is the projector strong enough? Do all the links in the presentation work and will your video play properly? Once you see everything working perfectly, you will relax and can go and greet your guests.

5.     Practice, practice, practice

I know, this is really obvious but so often ignored! The benefits of practice? Well first of all, the more prepared you are, the more confident you will be and the better your delivery will be! How many times have you finished a presentation and thought “I meant to say…… but just forgot”. This is less likely to happen if you practice. If you practice, you are more likely to stay on track in terms of the message and also your timings so you’ll probably finish the presentation stronger.

Finally spend some time thinking about the Q&A. What are the likely questions and how will you respond? What are the potential curveballs and how will you deal with them? How will you deal with any unexpected and very negative question – think how you’ll cut this off cleanly and quickly and enable yourself to move on. Listen to the news that day. If there’s a current and relevant story, develop a position on it. If you want an easy start to the Q&A, plant a question in the room to get the conversation going.

5 Common Marketing Mistakes by Financial Advisers

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In this column, I look at 5 of the most common mistakes I see financial advisers making when it comes to Marketing.

 1.   Unclear Objectives

Since the recession really began to bite, many advisers have realised the importance that Marketing plays in attracting and retaining clients. However a lot of money has been  wasted on activities that unfortunately were doomed from the outset. The main reason that I have discovered is that there was no clarity around exactly what was to be  achieved from the marketing activity – was it to increase the brand presence, attract new clients or hold onto existing ones? If you’re not clear about what you’re trying to achieve, unfortunately you’ve little chance of achieving success…

2.   Content – or lack of it

I think we all know this one… “Let’s do a Newsletter” says someone with a burst of enthusiasm! Two torturous months later, Issue 1 is finally sent out. Everyone is relieved but exhausted and yes, Issue 2 never sees the light of day! As a result, it becomes a nagging sore and really, you’d be better off never having started on it at all. For all your marketing activities, you need to think through the future content or indeed find a source to write the content for you. If you’re going to start a regular activity, you’ve got to commit fully to it for it to say positive things about your business and your brand. By the way, the same applies to out of date content…how up to date is your website?

3.   Focusing too early on the Product

As I work with more and more financial advisers, I see another quite common theme. A huge amount of work going into presentations, brochures, websites etc. that set out in great detail the products that we want to sell without ever engaging the audience first by putting yourself in their world. Trust me; we’re all guilty of this one! The problem is that you need to engage the audience first and then slowly reel them in, instead of launching straight in to the solution. Identify their need to stimulate their interest and then engage them in the benefits to them of addressing that need. Now they’re ready and want to hear the solution – your product!

4.   No Measures or Focus on Results

A good number of advisers have expressed strong views to me in relation to previous Marketing activities that they’ve carried out. However when pressed, they’ve had unclear targets set around the activities and little or no analysis of the actual results. I often hear “I think we got 10 leads out of that, but would need to check”. The actual results are often wildly different – sometimes much more positive, sometimes more negative. When I ask what result they had hoped to get, there often was no target.  The problem is that if you don’t set targets and rigorously measure the results of each activity, how are you supposed to know next year which activities to repeat and which ones to ditch?

5.   Poor Production Quality

Finally you get your content together – be it written content or speakers for your seminar etc. But then the newsletter goes out with typos on it or on wafer thin paper that looks and feels terrible, or at your seminar no-one can read the slides because the typeface is too small or the projector is not strong enough…we’ve all been there. Your audience disengage and in a worst case scenario, will place a big black mark against your brand. Make sure you’re really proud of what you produce – or else get an expert to look after it for you! Wow your audience, don’t disappoint them!