Outbound email marketing is an essential marketing strategy for asset managers looking to benefit from the digital age. Email is both a direct and personal line of communication to your prospective investors and a solid e-mail marketing campaign can quickly engage prospects and generate leads. In fact, email has been found to be almost 40% more effective in acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter. With numbers like these, it’s no wonder asset managers want to up their email game.
So, how can asset managers optimize emails for marketing?
1. Segmenting
The first step is to segment your audience. The typical “spray and pray” approach of most email campaigns assumes that one size fits all. But nobody wants to subscribe to an email list that’s irrelevant. Study and categorize the different personas that make up your audience before you send out an email.
This isn’t very hard. Most brand-centric marketers have already done the work of outlining their clients’ basic demographics like age, gender and income. Want to find more female clients? Then learn about why women invest and tailor your marketing strategy to include those interests. Want to find more investors? Then profile your current clients. It’s a must for any asset management marketer to understand their typical customers’ risk profile, education and job title. Even incorporating some of your client’s personal interests in an email will heighten your email’s response rate.
The next step is to tag existing content, or create new content, that’s best suited for each of your customer segments. Your communication to each persona will be far more relevant than before and engagement rates will soar.
2. Testing
After identifying the relevant investor group, asset managers should measure an email’s success before sending it to investor prospects. With any marketing effort, you want to be able to track, measure and understand the results so you can answer questions like: Which subject line gets the most reads? Which email layout or text gets the most clicks? And why?
Run A/B tests at every opportunity to find the highest performing emails, then double down on the best. This testing can be automated with programs like Pardot, but regardless, it is crucial to optimizing your emails performance.
Timing
One of the most important parts of testing is experimenting on timing. Think about the average workday of your client base. Finance types are typically early birds and are known for clearing out their email inbox for the crack of dawn. It’s likely that dispersing an email in the early morning will have greater performance results. But if asset managers want to optimize audience engagement, they cannot guess. To see performance gains, asset managers have to run tests to find the best day and time to email that is specific to their client base.
3. Design
Next, it’s essential for every email in a marketing campaign to be clear and concise. Finance people don’t generally have a lot of time to sit and read their emails, so emails that are easy to scan are ideal. Try using lists or blocked layouts that segment information for quick to consume information. Also, using different font sizes and font decoration to emphasize important content directs the reader to those point within the email and can draw the audience to read in more depth.
Asset managers should use these layout and design tips to emphasize the email’s call to action. Attractively displaying the email’s CTA as a “download/read/watch” button within the email is a great way to create a focal point, which the rest of the email should be designed around.
Another tip — use photos and infographics. Asset managers should incorporate charts or data visualizations into emails to break up textual information. Emails with eye catching content will keep the readers attention and lead to better engagement!
4. Compliance-Friendly BCC
Making sure all communication is compliant is ingrained into everything an asset management marketer does. With that said, it is essential for asset managers to get compliance right, which requires an audit trail. The SEC requires financial companies to retain and index transactions, which can be a hassle for asset managers attempting to manually track records. There are email service providers with a Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) function that can audit a dedicated email inbox automatically. By collecting and archiving emails, BCC can meet all compliance requirements for financial service marketing. But getting compliance right is critical for financial services’ email marketing campaigns.
Asset managers who optimize their email marketing should expect to increase investor leads. For more information on asset management marketing, check out five ways to transform email marketing.
