Many advisors don’t realize the importance of email marketing or follow-up. Some don’t even collect emails or have a list! This is essential to constantly getting higher turnouts, more appointments, and fewer people falling through the cracks. It can also be more cost-effective (especially when compared to mailers) and less time-consuming. Here are tips we have learned through our own success with email drip campaigns. 

• You can email people a lot more frequently than you may realize. A lot of advisors are afraid to continuously email people because they may get annoyed or unsubscribe from the list. We have found that you can email people every other day for months and still have a close to, or exact, 0% complaint rate. 

  • You should still be emailing prospective clients that are booked on your calendar. We send 5 emails to remind people of their appointment. This is what achieves a higher attendance rate. Think of it as a medical appointment. Your dentist or doctor's office sends many appointment reminders and you should too for your financial practice. 

• Content in the email is essential. Make it less newsletter and more emotional, personal email. While people do care about the market, stocks, etcetera, they could just watch the news or search for that information. They want to read about having a better retirement and how taxes might impact that. Sending them information on topics they have an emotional connection to is more likely to achieve your call to action.

  • Keep it casual. Don’t ask for anything right away, instead offer. Something along the lines of “Hey John Doe, I saw you were interested in taxes in retirement, here's a free book that can help you learn more.” If they click to download that book then you can move them into a different funnel where you offer a webinar and eventually get to asking for an appointment.

• Email drip campaigns make your phone calls more effective. People don’t want to get phone calls from people they don't know or have never heard of, right? Sending them multiple emails or text messages weekly puts your name or business in their mind. When you call now, they can recognize that this is someone I’ve given my information and been interested in previously.
  

You may be skeptical about this and that’s fair. You may think it takes too long to curate a large email list. Well, when starting this in February of last year we had around 2500 emails. We now have almost 9000 from Facebook ads, seminars, and webinars. In just over 1 year we have almost quadrupled our list, and you can too. You may think it’s not worth it and doesn’t generate enough results. Well, Dave, another advisor, achieves 6-8 appointments weekly just from his drip marketing. It’s worth it and Dave has realized the results.

It took us a long time to figure out the specifics. There are a lot of moving parts and hard questions, as you know. What is the right sequence? How often can you email people? Where’s the balance between bugging people and being effective? Now, while we have a lot of this answered and shared with you above, it still is trial and error. Some people will unsubscribe but who wants a quitter as a client anyway? If you’d like to learn more about our system or want help, go here!