Drip marketing for financial advisors: spend less and sell more.
Producers attracting new prospects using email marketing already know it offers the best ROI of any digital channel ($40-1!). Drip Marketing—an email marketing technique—is an ideal way for developing and retaining current clients, and soft-selling new leads.
Also known as automated email campaigns, drip marketing involves sending a planned series of targeted emails to prospects or clients over a period of time. This method allows advisors to stay engaged with their audience without a hard sell. By providing valuable insights, you can encourage engagement and conversions.
Drip marketing is an extremely efficient method for advisors to communicate personally and directly with their email list. Also as your list already “opt-in”, regulatory communication issues are averted.
In short, drip marketing can turn your business into a marketing machine that never sleeps.
Segmentation is the key to a targeted and automated email campaign. Dividing your leads and clients into groups based on age, income, assets etc, allows you to create relevant value-added content for the group and improves the chances of engagement.
Effective client segmentation enables you to tailor services to individual clients. While this personalized approach may initially appear time-consuming, it ultimately streamlines processes and provides standardized and replicable methods once you have built a body of work.
Ultimately your business gains efficiency, empowering you to serve a larger client base without incurring additional costs.
As always, each email needs to include a specific call to action (CTA). However, as this is an iterative approach it is inadvisable to jump in with a “buy annuities now!” link in the initial communication.
There are numerous different ways to plan a drip campaign but typically four emails will be sent over a month at a weekly cadence, culminating in a final email with a closing CTA. How to approach this depends on your market and what you are ultimately selling. Here is one suggested example of an email content plan:
- Some industry news relevant to the recipient group and prompts the recipient to ask questions.
- A downloadable white paper on lifetime income in retirement.
- Some guidance on what annuity products tend to be popular with people at different life stages and varied incomes.
- By now hopefully interest has been piqued. The final email refers to the previous three and adds CTA to schedule a meeting via a calendar link.
The advantage to the advisor is that the process can be automated. Once you have created and scheduled the content the hard work is done. However, to extract full value from the process looking closely at the results—responses, open-rates, downloads—will provide valuable insight in how to improve your method and hints as to who might be the warmer leads.
Drip Marketing can help you increase client retention, up-selling, and cross-selling. There are numerous software platforms that will facilitate, and even help you set up a drip campaign. You may be using one of them as your email marketing provider already.
The optimal way to get started is to look at your client and lead lists and think of how you might converse with them in a normal meeting and lead them to a close: ask a question, tell a story, show the benefits. Express these as a series of short emails and you will be on your way to enhanced client retention and improved sales.
Ready to harness the power of drip marketing and significantly boost your client engagement and retention? Explore Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or HubSpot to find the platform that suits your needs and start building your automated email campaigns today!
A Few Email Platform Options
Mailchimp: Mailchimp is a user-friendly platform that offers a wide range of automation features, including drip campaigns. It allows advisors to design visually appealing emails, segment their audience based on various criteria, and track campaign performance through detailed analytics.
Constant Contact: Constant Contact provides a variety of tools for email marketing, including drip campaigns. It offers customizable email templates, list segmentation, and automation features to help advisors engage their audience effectively.
HubSpot: HubSpot offers a comprehensive marketing automation platform that includes email marketing capabilities. In addition to drip campaigns,