Engage Your List: 10 Quick Tips for Financial Advisors to Help Your Emails Come Alive so Clients & Prospects Will Want to Read Them
Email is the unsung hero of content marketing. Your list is full of people who signed up to hear from you. And yet I still see advisor after advisor sending boring emails that no one wants to read. Then the advisor turns around and asks why their open rate is so bad and complains that they can’t even get their clients to read the emails they send, let alone their prospects, like somehow it’s their subscribers’ fault for not wanting to read the latest recipe for honey glazed shrimp and another generic article about saving money.
Here’s the thing: Your clients and prospects want to hear from you. Or at least they did at some point. But after a few boring, irrelevant emails they either unsubscribed or just started deleting them without opening them.
But it’s not too late! You can bring your subscriber list back to life by making the emails you send more engaging—and here are just a few quick tips on how to get started:
1. Include Statistics
Statistics help people see that you are not just waxing philosophical—you’re sharing cold, hard facts with them. Prove that you’re someone who knows what they’re talking about and people will be more inclined to listen when you speak (or read when you send an email).
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2. Give Your Thoughts on Current Events
When you weigh in on current events, your readers will be even more likely to open your emails.
Josh Brown is a great example of this. Every time he sends an email, I open it just to see his take.
3. Tell Stories
Everyone prefers a story to dry educational material. Change the details of clients stories and share those (with permission), or create hypotheticals. The more your emails include stories, the more opens you’ll get.
4. Ask for Reader Feedback
Asking your readers to reply to your emails makes it feel like a conversation rather than a soliloquy. When your readers feel like part of the conversation, they’re more likely to open your emails.
5. Answer Reader Questions
Survey your readers to find out what’s on their mind. Don’t just ask, “What do you want me to write about?” Go with a more pointed question, like “What is your most pressing financial concern lately?”
6. Share Local Resources
Include links in your emails that point people to local resources they might not know about. For instance, I wrote an email about Medicare for an advisor a while back and then included a link to the local Medicare assistance group.
7. Segment Your List—at Least Into Client/Non-Client and Life Stage
Segmenting your email list enables you to send more relevant info to everyone. When it comes to segmenting, you can get really in the weeds, which I think is why so many advisors don’t even try—it’s pretty intimidating to think of all the ways you could slice and dice your list into smaller categories.
I recommend starting simple with these two basic categories:
Clients & non-clients – this makes it easier to speak only to clients or only to prospects. Bonus: If you use Hubspot or another tool that allows you to put “smart” content in your emails, you can insert paragraphs and have them only appear in emails that go to clients, and vice versa.
Life stage – you could break them down by the decade of their age (clients in the 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.) or even just by retired and non-retired. This eliminates the prospect of accidentally sending your 85-year-old clients an email about how to save up for their first house.
8. Give Away Free Resources Early
Hopefully you have some lead magnets that provide value to your readers, whether they’re ebooks or fact sheets or worksheets. Rather than requiring your subscribers to enter their information to download your latest lead magnet, send it directly to them.
Imagine ending an email with this:
“P.S. – We’re about to release our latest ebook on when to claim Social Security, and I wanted to share it with our faithful readers first. Here’s the direct link—you don’t have to put your email in or anything!”
Doesn’t that sound great?
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9. Obsess Over Subject Lines
It is impossible to overstate the importance of subject lines. They are the bait that gets your readers to bite. No matter how great your email is, a bad subject line will prevent most of them from opening it in the first place. According to Hubspot, 64% of people report using the subject line to determine whether they will open or delete an email.
That being said, resist the urge to go down the clickbait subject line path—it’s the dark side of email. I can’t find it, but I read a post on LinkedIn the other day where someone shared a screenshot of an email they received with the subject line “A sexual harassment complain has been filed against you.” Then when they opened it, it was an email selling a sexual harassment training program for businesses. That kind of stuff is unbelievable.
10. Deliver the Promise the Subject Line Made
Whatever promise your subject line makes, your email better be able to cash that check. Nothing gets people to rage-unsubscribe faster than feeling like they were fooled into opening an email by a clickbait subject line that has nothing to do with the actual email content.
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