In this episode of Craft on Tap, Stephen Beach and Faustin Weber explore the nuances of email marketing, offering practical advice for RIAs to optimize their strategies.
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Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss email marketing tips for RIAs.
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Transcript:
Stephen Beach: Hi everybody, welcome back to Craft on Tap. We talk about growth marketing for RIAs. I am your host Stephen Beach, and my co-host Faustin Weber, who is one of our marketing strategists at Craft Impact.
Today we're going to tackle email marketing and all that that entails. We have a lot in the show for you. But before we get to that, just a couple comments. Thoughts and prayers to any parents out there with kids in school who are now out of school. I saw some LinkedIn posts about this the other day, just how much of a struggle it is for working parents with kids on summer break. I don't know if you've felt that pain, Faustin.
Faustin Weber: Oh yeah, 100%. I feel like all of May is just a complete crap shoot with whether or not the kids are going to be in school, or not in school, or 11:00 dismissal, or field day that needs every parent volunteering.
Stephen Beach: It's a hot mess.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, it definitely is a hot mess.
Stephen Beach: We had our kids do a hurricane makeup day that they were required to do, but it wasn't a day. It was an hour and a half. We literally dropped them off at 9 and had to pick them up at 10:30.
Faustin Weber: Get them ready, do the whole process in the morning, and then just pick them right up.
Stephen Beach: I mean, what is that, an hour and a half? You can't do anything for an hour and a half. But shout out to the school, we love our teachers, they do a phenomenal job. And I think when you take something away, it really shows you how much you appreciate it, so yeah you appreciate the teachers this week now more than ever.
All right, so let's jump into email marketing. Today we want to talk about a few different topics within the world of email marketing. I'm going to try not say the phrase "email blast," that's just a personal pet peeve of mine. If someone says email blast, I immediately stop listening - because we're not blasting people, that's the opposite of personalized, good, relevant marketing. We're not blasting people with anything. We're trying to reach them with a targeted, relevant message.
So within the world of email marketing, I'll tackle a few topics. Which audiences we're talking through, which topics we're going to lay out, different use cases for email marketing, best practices, and maybe some inspiration for what you can include in your email newsletter. What else did I miss, Faustin?
Faustin Weber: Yeah, I think just some common problems with segmentation that we end up seeing from our clients and some ways to think about that. I think you said it really well. Just like, what do you send your clients versus prospects that you have in a number of different lists. Or what do you send your prospects that are in your pipeline and that ghost you or drop off. So we're going to try to cover it all, as well as some pretty important email tips that we've picked up along the way. Just like, email best practices that might be helpful as well.
Stephen Beach: Ok excellent. So first step, maybe if the question is, "How do I effectively email market to my clients or my prospects, or people that I've talked with in the past that I'm no longer in touch with, where do you start?" Maybe we show a visual as we talk through this so we can make sense of it.
Faustin Weber: I would say too, I think it's important to talk about email as a channel to start, Stephen, just because I think email marketing is one of the oldest channels and there's so many hot new social platforms that I feel like are coming up every year, right? Who knows how many more social platforms President Trump will create, right?
Stephen Beach: His big beautiful social platforms.
Faustin Weber: Big, beautiful social platforms that he's going to generate.
Stephen Beach: Big and beautiful. Yeah, I love it.
Faustin Weber: But I would say, email gives you a sense of control, right, that social media doesn't. I think it's important to focus on that. You're not at the mercy of algorithm changes, right, like if you put all your time and energy into marketing in LinkedIn for instance, and LinkedIn pulls out the rug from underneath you, like they have over the past six to twelve months for creators, you're in trouble. I think email just gives you that control and ownership, that direct access that the social platforms do not. And I think you just get more of your focused time in an email newsletter or an email that you send out to your clients or prospects. There's just more of that level of commitment that they have to reading your content, to starring your content. There's just a better mechanism for them being able to engage. So I think that email's still one of the most valuable channels, whether it's B2B or B2C, just across all industries and the financial services industry is no different than that.
So some common challenges. I feel like starting with an unsegmented list, right? Like, when clients come to us, they have a group of people that sometimes they haven't even distinguished between the clients and the people that are not clients. And I think that's one of the common challenges that we're going to talk about how to solve. And then just another big challenge is what do you send to these different groups of people, right? Your clients versus people that are just old prospects that may be qualified or not, you're not really sure but they're on a list somewhere, versus people that come into your pipeline and ghost you.
So let's just start by talking about some segmentation, some ways that we think with our clients about how to segment. So let me go ahead and share here, see if we can get this pulled up. We have some nice visuals in our discussion today.
Stephen Beach: Taking our podcast to another level. What are we on, episode 8? And we're now bringing in visuals.
Faustin Weber: Rogan better watch out.
Stephen Beach: I had a friend text me, he said that Rogan better sleep with one eye open. We're climbing the ranks, Rogan!
Faustin Weber: All right, so you'll see this is a simple breakdown of some ways to think about how you might segment your group. I would recommend just starting with your contact type. Do you have clients and prospects segmented out whether on different lists, or if you have a field in Salesforce or whatever you're using that just distinguishes between clients and prospects. And then you can build out, do I have my COIs labeled, do I have my own team labeled so that I can make sure they get all the emails, and do I have vendors that are labeled. I think it's important to think about who are these people just from a very basic level. So I would start there if you're an advisory firm, just making sure you have that all figured out.
And then the next stage we help our clients with is thinking about, ok who are these personas themselves. Like small business owners versus executives versus tech professionals versus attorneys. I also think it's important to have your pre-retirees labeled, and this is going to be on a firm-to-firm basis, based on who you're wanting to target. So that would be the next stage in thinking about the segmentation. And then, this is actually pretty tough, we do have birthdates for a lot of our clients, but I found this to be difficult, just figuring out what their age is. And I think that matters if you want to get more personalized with who's going to care about the Medicare enrollment versus not, or early retirement and some things you can take advantage of when you're 62, or Social Security, what their age is. I think it's important to start thinking about that as well. And that's a little bit more difficult, perhaps that's down the road, if you focus on pre-retirees first, that would be a good thing. And then also, retirement status. A lot of times with our clients, when they come to us they have a lot of clients to whom they want to send out pre-retiree information, but they also have clients in their 70s or 80s who are already retired, so it creates a little bit less than ideal experience. So just having them broken up so that you know that if you're sending that kind of content it can go a long way.
Am I missing anything here, Stephen? What do you think about this in terms of the prioritization in terms of the segmentation.
Stephen Beach: Excellent, I think that's a good overview. I think some of this stuff is the grunt work, the foundational work that you have to do if you want to generate the best results for email. So, at the simplest level, even just assigning a tag of client versus everyone else would be helpful at the very basic level. But if you have the ability to do it yourself or if you can engage a firm like us, then ideally we dive in a little bit further and get into more of the tags and subtags.
Faustin Weber: I would say that one of the ways that we help with this is pulling in all your contacts into a spreadsheet and helping work through whether its a client services associate in your firm or somebody else - just doing that data input and that data entry. So a lot of times, the founders that we're working with directly or whoever is the campion of marketing is, is not going to have to handle this, it's more one of the service associates that can go through, and we guide you through what these fields look like. Since we're handling the email marketing platforms a lot of the time, we build the lists and everything. It's thinking through strategically what you want to start with and how you want to go about breaking up the list so you can send the most applicable content.
I feel like Kitces does a really nice job of this. He's got all sorts of different mechanisms when you sign up for his email lists. Like how to self segment, not only when you're signing up on one of his forms, but also in emails afterward. He really groups you into different lists as an advisor and gives you content that's specific to the challenges that you're facing. And that all starts with the way he set up his back end. So he's a really great model and I feel like a lot of people who may be listening to this or seeing this get great emails from Kitces and that's because he's grouped you into a category within his CRM so that he can send those nice personalized emails, and it starts with this process.
Stephen Beach: Right. And you see the drop downs on different forms. First of all, everyone say happy birthday to Faustin Weber. Congrats. You've made it to, what are you, 31. Oh, 38. Oh man. Okay. Getting up there. Catching up to me.
Yeah, the forms that have the drop downs that even, I'm sure everybody's filled out these forms that say, you know, what your job title is, or for business owners, it might ask you how many employees you have. That kind of thing. Yeah, they're segmenting you on the back end. So for the purpose of sending more relevant content so that you engage with it more than you would otherwise.
Let me just add one thing here. If you have an old list, like we get clients that come to us with a list that's been kind of gathering dust or they got it from a previous firm that they just haven't really been able to use. A quick, inexpensive step to run that through would be a tool called NeverBounce. This tells you if that email address is still valid or not, and it's really cheap. You can run thousands through it for, I don't know, 50 bucks or something. So it's a good way to just make sure that we're not doing the segmentation work on emails that don't even apply anymore 'cause people have moved jobs or changed email addresses or whatever it may be. So that's a quick hygiene tool.
Faustin Weber: $40 for up to 5,000 emails.
Stephen Beach: Okay. Nice.
Faustin Weber: Just rock and roll, sending your list through. Even some of your clients, right, that you think have been getting an email, but you haven't been checking in and they actually haven't had an updated email in the last year. I mean, it's good for hygiene for a lot of different circumstances.
Stephen Beach: Yeah, big fans of hygiene over here. Okay, so what do you send them then? Let's move into that. So we've got different buckets. Let's start with current clients. We always want to start with current clients, you know, marketing to our clients. And just in general as our approach. So let's put a lot of focus there. What do we send our current clients? Most commonly what we hear would be market commentary. You know, investment commentary either on a monthly or quarterly basis. A lot of firms are at least doing that. They may or may not be doing more. But you know, that's kind of where we're starting. So what other ideas do we have? How do we approach that? Faustin, maybe just talk through that a little bit, how we've done it for clients in the past or currently.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, well, the investment market events, like market updates, commentary, I mean, that's really important to continue doing, at least on a quarterly basis. We do have clients that like to send out something on a monthly basis. I would say too, you need to be prepared to be able to send out communications for any major market events, like the tariffs in April, the tariff announcement that caused the market to drop and there was a lot of chaos and confusion. Being well-equipped to be able to send out communications around that is key. That can go out to everybody on your list, but especially to your clients who are going to be asking those questions about what's happening and what's going on with their money.
I would say too that it's nice to be able to add a little variety into what those investment commentaries can look like. So the written text is really valuable, but I would encourage people to experiment a little bit with video when it comes to communicating the key insights, especially if you're working with a group of clients that is super busy, right? Corporate executives, for instance, that don't have the time. We've heard it from interviewing our clients' clients that they might not read the market commentary all the way, but the ones that are sending videos out, they sort of listen to them in the morning as they're trying to get ready for work, almost as a little mini podcast. So I would consider that a really valuable addition that you might be able to add, and that's something that we've helped a lot of clients with. So have the written commentary there, but then share out a video. You can put a little thumbnail where people know to click, and then they can just listen to your three to seven minute video talking through some of the key points that you're making.
I would also say, in addition to the investment commentary, just think about what your advisors are being asked, like the challenges that your clients are facing and the current questions they're asking, and also your advisory team. A lot of times this ends up being seasonal. We like to group the emails that are being sent out with the service calendar that the firm is doing, right? So preparing for tax returns or helping coordinate with CPAs in the spring, you could also share out some valuable tax information. Tax planning is done throughout the year, it's a relevant topic. Beginning of the year resolutions and setting goals, that's another good opportunity to share out some thought processes, some thought leadership around that, that you can either link back to your blog or just share it right in the email itself. We feel like retirement planning content is pretty valuable in the summer months when there's a little bit of a lull. We've seen a lot of great benefits election information go out in the September timeframe right before a lot of these companies will open up their benefits election period. Also a great time depending on your audience and your client audience around Medicare. When that happens when you elect Part A, Part B in October, end-of-year tax planning always gets a lot of great interest as well. So, think not just about the investments, but also especially most of our clients are holistic, comprehensive financial planning service offering firms. Think about all the different challenges that your client service team is helping with and see if you can coordinate that. 'Cause I feel like it actually adds to the service level, where you're able to communicate to a big group of your clients about the same thing that your individual advisors are talking about. It just helps supplement the points that you're making. Anything there that you would say, like just with the seasonal approach? Does that make sense, Stephen?
Stephen Beach: That makes sense. I think next, maybe talking about highlights, awards, individual spotlights, new employees, that kind of thing.
Faustin Weber: Sure. Yeah. It's not just all detailed financial planning content all the time. I pulled up a couple of examples from one of the firms that we work with, especially our bigger firms. There's constant movement, I think, in individuals that are working with clients that are client-facing. So just sharing those updates goes a long way with clients, giving them an update on the new client service associate they're going to be working with. Or a lot of times, advisors will continually be getting new certifications, like the RICP, or let's say an associate that you have gets their CFP, and you want to share that. That goes a long way with your clients to demonstrate that you're continuing to focus on creating more expertise with your team and also giving them a better experience so they know who they're talking to when they call. Setting up a consistent cadence in your emails allows you to throw in these rankings, awards, and recognitions that you get as well. A nice blend of client, like, team updates with awards and different things that are being shared about how your firm is recognized, and also financial planning and investment topics. You have this nice repertoire of engaging content that your clients are going to appreciate.
Stephen Beach: Only other thing I'd add maybe would be big firm changes. Like we've had a couple firms add a custodian in the past. And so, like you said, it's reflective of what the client service team and the advisor are telling the client in their meetings. But it just is a supplement to that, to reinforce the message, to make sure it's nailed down. You know, for example, for the custodian example, why we're adding this custodian, what it means for you, what it means for us, how it's gonna work. And sure, those conversations are happening live on Zoom or in person, but it is nice to have written communication about it as well. A lot of clients, I think we've gotten the feedback that the client enjoys getting it from different formats, and I think overall it's part of the change experience in that case, if you're making a big shift like that as a firm.
Faustin Weber: Yeah. I love that. One thing, we didn't pull up any visuals for this, which would probably be the biggest one that you would need a visual for, but just how to structure those emails. I think sometimes clients come to us for direction on that. And you can go a number of different ways, right? Like, a panel approach to start, where at the top you just say, "Hey, here's what you're gonna see in this email." And just have two or three highlights up at the top with the links so that people don't even have to scroll to see what you want to emphasize the most. So just throw it up there like, "Hey, we're gonna recognize this individual for getting their CFP. We have this nice Medicare planning topic for you to think about as you head into October, and we got this firm award." And so then you're able to communicate very quickly exactly what you want them to see. And then, we have short panels with a short description of what they can see with visuals throughout, where they can click into a longer form blog post or see the award criteria. So you have smaller segments and then you set off different parts as you work throughout. But something that we're also seeing is blending in longer form text content as well, which can be a nice way to keep them in their inbox. We've seen this rise over the last year of people, especially in our younger demographics of clients, who like to stay on the platform that they're in. So they're on their email client on their phone primarily. Some of our older clients are still predominantly desktop users. They want to stay in their app or they want to stay in their inbox. So it's okay to link out to different content that you have that you've shared, but also it's okay to provide a lot of value in the email itself. So the best thing to do is just to have a nice mix of those, like the nicely polished, panelized emails with a lot of visuals and ones that are more text-centric that keeps them in the platform themselves. More of like a traditional, old newsletter or blog article right in the email. I think a nice mix of those can go a long way in providing a nice experience for them.
Stephen Beach: Yeah. Nice. I'd summarize that by saying like, a table of contents with links down to the content inside the email so that, you know, you can kind of have the executive summary table of contents, and then if you wanna click to specific pieces, you can just scroll down or skim down.
Faustin Weber: Add a visual to that too, to this video. To all of our thousands of listeners if you are listening to this we have it up on our YouTube channel that you can watch and see the actual visuals themselves.
Stephen Beach: Or on Spotify.
Faustin Weber: Yeah. On Spotify as well.
Stephen Beach: Yep. Yeah, we're everywhere.
Faustin Weber: Okay. And then the last thing I'll just say is that it's nice to have a mix. If you're a bigger firm and you have a number of individual advisors, it's about figuring out that balance of what the firm sends out to announce versus what the individual advisor sends out. So, we feel like it's best when the firm is taking on a lot of those communications that are more of the content-specific pieces and the firm announcements. But then the individual advisor, you know, you're having those one-on-one conversations with your clients, those one-on-one emails. But if you can send out quarterly, or at least bare minimum annually, personal updates about you to your clients, like what's going on with your family and a couple of pictures, or sort of what you're pursuing in terms of your professional development. Those go a long way. If you're a smaller firm and you're just one founder/advisor and you have all of your clients, put those into your main emails. They go a long way. That's what your clients care about, right? 'Cause it's such a relational type business.
Stephen Beach: Yeah, Joel does a nice job of that. I'd say Joel from Certus Wealth Management out in California, he includes a nice, just sort of personal note at the top and saying something about what he's planning to do over the summer, or the trip he just made with his kids. And maybe he'll share a picture in there. And then we've got what looks like his signature. So it just feels very personal before you move into whatever the planning topics or the pre-retirees topic, whatever the content actually is. Just kind of a very personal note that way. So that it gives a good touch.
Faustin Weber: Yep. Nice. Okay, so why don't we talk about the prospects, right? Or the old lists that you've run through NeverBounce and you remember potentially meeting with them seven years ago or something like that, versus the ones that just came in and you have no idea what you're even doing with them. Let's talk about what to send them. 'Cause that's different than clients, right?
Stephen Beach: Correct. So these are people that you're not currently talking with about... you haven't had a discovery call with them. They probably haven't heard from you in six months or a year or longer. They haven't seen your firm or your brand. You haven't talked to them. That's the list we're talking about now, or the group we're talking about. Okay.
Faustin Weber: Yeah. And I guess the first thing would just go back to that segmentation. The more you know about them, the more effective whatever you do is going to be. I think that's a really key point. So, you probably don't know that much about them, but if you just have an understanding or an idea of what their persona is, like, are they a business owner versus a busy tech professional? Are they pre-retired or are they retired versus not? That can go a long way. So again, the more information, you know, the better. But understand, it's pretty common not to have that much information.
Stephen Beach: Mm-hmm.
Faustin Weber: I like to try to think about email in these groups. Your email channel is just a distribution channel that is an extension of your overall content strategy, right? Your overall firm strategy. So I would prioritize those people in your list that you have at least a decent understanding that they fit the persona that you're also trying to target with your other marketing. So you're creating content focused... let's just use corporate executives for instance. And let's say that you're creating content around deferred compensation planning that would be relevant to an executive who's facing that type of decision in their firm in terms of their compensation package. You're going to be creating long-form educational content that brings in stories that you're going to be either publishing on Substack or your blog or publishing as a long-form YouTube video, or creating social content with short clips. Those are all things that we can help you with as part of our overall engagement. Email marketing is just an extension of that. It's just a distribution extension of that. So if you do know that those people on your list fit that profile or fit that persona, then you can do whatever you're doing for that month or that week as you're going and publishing on the other channels. Just bring that in to your email as well.
You can see here on the screen we have, this is an example of how we might structure our content pillars for a target audience. This is not corporate executives necessarily, but this is something that we have put together for another client. And all of our content is going to be around these five different pillars. For those of you who are listening, we have a difference of like money and relationships versus the psychology of wealth, versus specific actionable strategies, versus systemic critiques, versus behind the advisor's desk. So we put this together for an advisor who was trying to improve her personal branding. And so she's going to be thinking of challenges for each of these items, and she's going to be writing content, she's going to be sharing content across her channels. She should also think about her email marketing in this way for those prospects, right? The same thing that someone might engage with on Instagram is probably going to be a similar thing that they might engage with on email, and you can go into a lot more depth. So we like to kind of kill all the birds with one stone, right? Obviously the platforms and the channels have different nuances in the way that they're treated, but for the most part, you can get a lot of leverage and repurpose the same content for your email. Does that make sense, Stephen?
Stephen Beach: Perfect. Yeah.
Faustin Weber: Okay, I would say that on a monthly basis is probably a good way to think about this, like, how can you consolidate on a monthly or quarterly basis the content that you're publishing across other channels. You can send that out and see what the engagement looks like for your prospect groups as well.
Stephen Beach: Right. So what's the goal here with this group? If it's a person or a group of people that haven't engaged with you in six months, a year, maybe several years. Again, first run them through NeverBounce or a similar tool for dirt cheap. Make sure that the email is actually valid still. And then second, what are we trying to do? Most people would say, "Oh, I need more discovery calls. I want them to book a call with me." So how do we get there? That's probably the best way to ask the question.
Faustin Weber: Yeah. I would say that for this group that has not necessarily been in your pipeline recently, I think the goal is just to stay top of mind for them. I know that seems like almost a cop-out, but based on our experience, there's a catalyst in an individual's life that causes them to reach out again to an advisor. It's an IPO event for a particular tech professional in a private company, it's a tax issue that they're having or struggling with at the end of the year and they don't know how to figure out. It's a worry about inequity, part of your compensation. It's a life event, or a home sale or considering a home sale that they're trying to get their ducks in a row. In the emails that you're trying to send out, to show all the value that you could offer in the way that you're establishing yourself as a trustworthy, credible source. You're trying to stay top of mind for them for when those catalyst events happen in their lives. They know who to start considering as a potential advisor. The goal with email marketing, right, is you're not going to generate a discovery call from every email that you send out. But you may be top of mind for them when the conversation of an advisor comes up in their household with their spouse, and they say, "Oh, I've seen that name, and they seem like they know what they're doing." When that challenge comes up, that's what's going to prompt them to reach back out to you. We've seen this happen with clients that have followed social media channels from a year and a half ago and have opened all the emails that are coming out to them, those newsletters that are coming out to them on a monthly basis, and then something happens in their life seven to eight months down the road, they reach out and book a discovery call.
Stephen Beach: Would that have happened without the email? Probably not. I mean, maybe, but most likely not. Because you just weren't top of mind that whole time. And they may never engage or respond. That's the hard part. You have to get little pieces of feedback and trust that it's working to some level. They may never write back and say, "Oh, I love your emails. Now's not the time for me, but please keep sending them to me." They're not going to say that. So you have to put this system in place and run it against hundreds or thousands of people. And then we'll see the results. And again, that's kind of what we've seen in the past. And that's part of why we're talking about it, because it does work, as long as we do it in a consistent way.
Faustin Weber: And I would say 80% of the content that you're sharing with them should be about their challenges and how you might solve them. But I would say 20% every now and then. This could even be in every monthly email, just at the bottom. Throw in a little value prop or comparison point, because you're going to have a lot of people on this list that are working with an advisor currently, and you want to be able to capture the demand that happens, or even maybe create some demand if they're feeling a frustration point with their advisor. Or if they're annoyed that they didn't get any communications about the tariff announcement, and they don't know what's happening, and you're sending communications out. And they're seeing how you're handling it, that's a good way to create the demand itself and take advantage of the challenge that they're having. So if you sprinkle in a little bit of that, what we like to call bottom-of-the-funnel type of content, like, "Here's how we're different in the space," or "Here's how we solve your specific challenges," not the actual educational content itself, it can go a long way.
Stephen Beach: Yeah, we've seen that. I think "sprinkle" is the right way to put it. A little salt. You don't want to put too much salt on it; it'll make the whole thing sour. But if you just do a little bit of salt, I think it creates the dish. So that could be something like arming the person who's receiving your email with a good question that they should be asking their advisor, or a question they should be asking themselves. We've seen our clients do this. Like, "Hey, if your advisor isn't asking you about this and this and this, if your advisor isn't helping you plan for taxes next year, starting six months prior, nine months prior, then you know, you should be thinking about that." It's tough 'cause you don't want to throw shade at people, but you also do want to help. So I think if we position ourselves as helping them, they could stay with their advisor, but now they just have more information to work with. That's helpful. So I think that's a good point. You could create some demand that way by showing them how you're different. That's a hard thing to do in this space, demonstrating how you're different than the next advisor. We know it because we know the space. We know wirehouse, broker dealers, RIAs, we know the full gamut. We know fiduciary versus not, etc. Most people don't know what that is. They don't know what it actually means for them. So I think a little bit of that could go a long way with helping them educate themselves effectively.
Faustin Weber: Yeah. I love that. All right, how about just a little rapid fire here of some tips before we start talking about your favorite topic?
Stephen Beach: Rapid fire. Oh hell yeah. Are we allowed to say hell on this podcast? Okay. Yeah. Rapid fire tips. Perfect.
Faustin Weber: Okay. All right, hold on a second here. Okay. So, what should you have as your email address, right? A lot of times you've already established an "info@firmdomain.com" or "news@" or "events@," and that's okay. We'll continue to leverage that, right? That's been in the inbox of your clients for a while now. You've built up the reputation in their inbox. They're going to show as your primary source. But we're seeing that, especially with all the changes to the apps that segment your emails into the primary inbox versus email newsletters versus promotions, it's much more effective to have a name that you're sending from. So if you're starting out from scratch, definitely would recommend like faustin@craftimpact.com to be the email that you're sending from. So position your managing partner, position your founder, whoever it is, if you're just starting out. That's going to get in the inbox with a much higher likelihood than an "info@." Now for the firms that are listening to this, that already have that info, it's okay, we can work with it. But generally speaking, if you're starting out, we're seeing the name get a lot more engagement.
Subject line: Lead with the key challenge in the subject line or the key topic you are sharing about. We typically would not use "newsletter." Sometimes clients are used to seeing "newsletter" and so that, you know, it's kind of on a case-by-case basis, but for the most part, we don't like the word "newsletter" as part of the subject line. It just, it feels, I don't know, dull or outdated, especially to the younger clientele in the space. Again, this is case by case, 'cause I'm thinking of a client right now who markets to a younger demographic that we include "newsletter" and we get 45-50% open rates. But generally speaking, it's not as effective to use the word "newsletter."
And then a data point: So those investment commentaries that you're sending out, include a data point from your investment commentary as the lead part of the subject line. Those get a much higher open rate, like 15-20%, just to include a data point itself. So that is one that you can take and apply right away.
If you're able to do this multiple times a month, sharing out emails with less content versus one email with all the content. That's a little bit of a debatable one, but one with four pieces of content is probably not as effective as two with two pieces of content, right? It's just because you're in their inbox more, you have a higher likelihood of your client base being able to see the email itself versus just one-off that might get buried and they don't see it. So more frequent is better.
We talked about different approaches of sending out short texts with a link versus longer form content.
Consider video whenever possible, especially market updates. We talked about it a lot. Just put the thumbnail of the video itself with the big play button. Even your older demographics of clients love to click and watch video.
Consider the size of your email if you're sending out a lot of content. Everything is part of the size calculation. So like the URL, if you're putting in a bunch of URLs or a bunch of links that have really long URLs and you're putting a bunch of images and text in there, if you get up over like 90 kilobytes, platforms like Gmail are actually not going to even share your email in the primary inbox. We learned that the hard way. We were creating this email and we were adding all kinds of content last year for an advisory firm, and their email open rate tanked like 30 or 35%. We were just like, "Oh my gosh, what happened?" It was because it was too large.
Stephen Beach: Too bulky.
Faustin Weber: It was too bulky. The email clients are scrutinizing emails a lot more.
Test on mobile. Just make sure you test on mobile. Most of your email platforms will have a way to test. Don't think of desktop, think mobile, mobile, mobile. Make sure that all of your content looks good on mobile before you send it out, because 50-60% of people who open it, or more, are going to be looking at it on mobile. That's something when you're creating the email, you don't think about that every time. And then just list hygiene. We've talked about how we love hygiene.
Stephen Beach: Big hygiene guys. Totally.
Faustin Weber: Just going in and making sure that people that haven't engaged, like they haven't opened an email or clicked on anything in 6, 9, 12 months. I know it's painful to take a prospect off your list, but just move them into a separate thing so you're not emailing them every single time. Because over time, the unengaged people actually hurt your email reputation. You're sending to more people that never open, so you have a less likelihood of the people that are engaging of getting your email each time. So that was a quick hitter of different tips before we talk about prospects. Did I miss anything, Stephen?
Stephen Beach: That's good. Pay attention to this: If you have an 80% open rate, you probably don't actually have an 80% open rate. We've found that depending on the tool, the open rates can be inflated. If you can, try to verify your numbers with another analytics tool. An easy example of that would be if you get an 80% open rate and you have a 50% click rate, and you send it to a thousand people, you should be getting 500 visits to your website. And then your website analytics should show 500 visits or something close to that. It's never going to be exactly perfect, but when your website visits show is 50, then you've got a real problem because now your email is just inflating the numbers. We've seen that with MailChimp in particular, it was a problem. So just verify.
Faustin Weber: I've seen it with like ConvertKit too. I mean, not to interrupt you, but I think you make a really good point. Don't just assume that the open rates are real. There's been so many privacy changes that have happened. These different platforms have embraced those privacy changes differently. Some are really conservative with what they report, and some of them are not conservative at all. You know, a 60 to 70% open rate is outlandish, right? I hate to say that, but it's just, it's not real.
Stephen Beach: Here's how we found it. I remember you digging into this. We switched from MailChimp to HubSpot, and the open rate went from like 65% to 35% or something. It's like, "Oh God, what did we just do? We completely messed up the whole thing." But then we go back to MailChimp and it's like, "Oh, well, 99% of those clicks were on the address in the footer," like the physical address. Which is just not realistic. No, there aren't that many people who are clicking an address. It's a bot, you know? So, I don't know what it was, a Russian bot, let's blame it on the Russian bots. But anyway, it just wasn't, you gotta just think about it common sense-wise, like people aren't doing that. So yeah, there can be a variance in reporting, and if you can, try to verify it with other tools or other analytics that you have. If not, just anecdotally, like asking your clients and getting some feedback for how many people actually open your emails. So that's one.
Okay. Yeah, so I think those are good quick hitters. The mobile one, I wish email newsletter providers would just enable mobile by default for us when we're building the email in the tool, because it's all desktop first, desktop first. But like you said, you gotta think mobile first. 'Cause we're getting 50 to 60% use on mobile. So people are just walking around with their phones constantly, you know, they're driving and they're opening your email at a stoplight. It's nuts. But that's how we should be thinking first, just making it a really good experience there.
Okay, so let's talk about, near and dear to me, lead nurturing for people who are in the pipeline. So this is a kind of a third set of contacts that you have: people who are in the pipeline, or they were in the pipeline recently, like in the last six months, let's say. What can we do? Email newsletter, email nurturing with these folks that can help supplement the sales process. I would label this section like sales enablement via email. So let's talk about this a little bit. What have we found that works well? What have we found that's a complete waste of time? And kind of how do we think about it? So, third visual. We're killing it on the visuals. Just shout out. Props.
So, if you're listening on Apple Podcast, or what else? Spotify? No, on Spotify you got the visual. So anyways, if you're listening on Apple, check us out on Spotify. It's, it's just, the show's lit. I think that's what the kids say. So Faustin, talk through this timeline here. What are we looking at? What are the red boxes?
Faustin Weber: All right, so the blue boxes are, so this is just a sample pipeline. This is also something we, I mean, this is like a whole other episode just talking about what your pipeline looks like. But this is something that we help a lot of our clients with, just thinking through all the different steps and then how to keep track of all the discovery calls coming in, where they're at in the process. So you can see that we have a discovery call booked phase, and then you qualify the prospect, then you send them the financial plan. This is for a firm that would do an assessment or something before they signed. And we have firms that do things much differently. They ask for a contract after an initial call, and then do the financial planning legwork. But we also have clients that do a preliminary plan. So financial planning documents sent. Then you get an assessment meeting where you show them a little bit more about exactly what you could do for them. Then you send them the account paperwork. They come in, you say, "Okay, they've signed the documents. Now the assets are in transfer." And then finally, closed/won, right? The assets are within the custodial account, and now you're officially managing them. So this is just a sample pipeline, and there are points of friction here where your prospects will drop off. So you can see those in the red boxes.
First of all, once you've qualified the prospect, getting their documents sent so that you can create the assessment meeting notes and get an assessment meeting on the calendar. That's a huge point, right, where people will meet with you initially and then they'll just drop off, like they'll lose interest, or maybe it wasn't as great of an experience as they could have hoped, or just things happen in their life and they just stop responding to you. And then there's also a point of friction, just people needing more time, right? Like, they may love you, but they're like, "Oh, I'll circle back with you. This is not the right time. I'll circle back with you in six months or 12 months." So those are times that we feel are best just to start with a cadence. And this is something you need to work on with your team of what is the one-to-one follow-up of whoever's meeting with these prospects, or whoever the rep is, what's the one-to-one follow up cadence look like. And so here's a sample: three days after when they haven't taken an action, seven days after, 15 days, 30 days. Those are best not enrolling them in any sort of automated emails, but just following up with them. And Stephen, I know this is something that you love video for, thinking about Loom.
Stephen Beach: I think video's perfect for this. If you've just met with them, probably on Zoom or in person, then it would be a natural segue to say, "Hey, it's me again. Hi. Yeah. Remember me? I'm from three days ago. Great talking with you." When you get a chance, please fill this out, whatever it may be. And honestly, that can be a templated video and a templated email. We're just saying it shouldn't be auto-drip, because you can create the template. Let's say it's three days after the discovery call where you're waiting for them to send their documents through. Three days might be early, but it depends on the firm. You send the video that's generic, says, "Hi there, so glad we could meet. Really great learning about your pain points, and happy we could kind of talk about what our firm could potentially help with. If you get a chance, here's the link to upload your documents. Then we'll get into our full financial planning for you, and after that, we'll meet again to review." And that is all templated, including the text above and below the video. Then ideally, you add a little note to it as well, something that you learned in the meeting that is custom to them. Like, "Congrats on your daughter's recent graduation from college. That's so awesome." Just something like that so they know it's a personalized piece. So that's an example. I would say template, but not auto-drip in this case. So creating those templates ahead of time would be a huge time saver.
Faustin Weber: Nice. So this is something agreed upon with your firm, right? You send the template after one to three days, and then you follow up with them seven days, 15 days later. If you want to be really sophisticated about it, you can share an article or a news story that reminded you of them, just to check back in with them. But then there's probably just an agreed upon day or time after like 15 or 30 days, and probably 30 days I would say is the time that you want to think about shifting from the personalized follow up to just staying top of mind. That's where you see on our pipeline here, that yellow quarterly email drip could be a monthly email drip, where you would move them into that stage of the pipeline, and then they would get some sort of automated follow up that you've already put together. I'm helping a firm right now with this exact thing where, just having a monthly email that goes out once they hit a certain stage in the pipeline, the managing partner is going to drop them in that stage, and then it just queues them up for an email every month for like the next 12 months. And it's the same kind of goal as what you were talking about with your old, what we were discussing with our old list, where you just want to stay top of mind for them if they ever have the driving point of reaching back out to you and booking another call.
Stephen Beach: Perfect.
Faustin Weber: And then it's the same thing too, with the one-to-one, like holding "needs more time." That's going to be so custom to the individual, right? So let's say they need six months. You just need to set a task or something for yourself so you can follow back up with them. Videos, to your point, Stephen, are another great way to do that, right? "Hey, remember me? I'm managing partner so-and-so, we talked about this. You had said to reach back out in six months, love to get another call so we can, you know, keep working on your plan or keep working through what it means for you to be a client." But all of this, unless you have a system in place that you've established, it's very difficult to execute on these, right, Stephen?
Stephen Beach: Yeah. And I'll say that last piece, again, you're just trying to give yourself the best chance at being there when the catalyst happens for them. You know, whether it, maybe it's the spouse that says, "Hey, did you meet with that advisor again? We met with them a while ago, I forget." That could be the catalyst, but as long as you're in the inbox with a personal video, you have a higher chance of engaging them when that time comes. So I think that's just something I'd add to that.
One other thing I would add to this example we're showing here before the discovery call, ideally you send an email and even more ideally, you send a video that says how excited you are for the call. Gives them some resources that they can dig into ahead of time. Maybe even asks for their top one to two concerns that they want to discuss on the call so that we can maximize our time together. Something like that. The firms that are really on top of this are putting together that kind of pre-discovery call email, and it goes out once a calendar invite has been scheduled. That can be really helpful. So you can kind of cut through the standard talk track of, "Here's what we do and how we do it," and, "Here's all of our services." They've already educated themselves on that if they've engaged with your pre-discovery call email, which I think is really important for them. You're giving them the option to do the research themselves, to kind of educate themselves on your services and get a feel for your voice and your resources on your website and things like that before you even spend time together. So it's a really efficient way to do it, to kind of warm them up and then really enable them so that they can come more prepared for the call as well. So I would add that.
One other thing I would add, just as a tip when you're following up with people that are quiet or slow to respond and you don't want to feel pushy. You don't want to feel salesy. There are two things that I would say have worked really well. One is a simple one-line email that says, "Hey, I'm not sure if you got my last email. Can you just let me know?" That email has the highest open rate and reply rate of any email we've ever designed for a client. Because you're really just double-checking it didn't go to spam, you know, but it's so short and it's just like, "I just want to know that you got this, basically. Can you confirm?" People will reply to that if you put that email together.
And then the other thing I'd say as a tip would be, if people are kind of quiet or ghosting you or you feel like you're being ghosted, send them—well, first, in the discovery call—ask them when they want you to follow up with them. "Hey, I don't want to be a huge bother. But I loved the conversation today and we'd love to help you. When should I follow up with you, or will you reach out to me?" Ask them, then you have an agreement in place of what the follow-up is going to look like. And if you don't, if you forget to ask them that, or if that doesn't come up, ask them in an email, or say something like, "Hi there, great to meet you. Looking forward to the next steps. Here's our link. You can upload your documents. We'll get into financial planning. I don't want to be a bother, so if I don't hear from you, I'll reach back out to you in another week or another two weeks. Does that sound fair?" Something like that. So that they know you're not just going to bombard them with emails and you're not just chasing them and being a salesy, used car salesman out there. So I think something like that is a way that you can provide a follow-up touch. It's very personal, and with a lot of brands or a lot of firms, I think that falls in line with how they like to work. We're not jumping down people's throats to try to get the next meeting 'cause we're on a commission basis. It's not that for RIAs, right? So it's a way to stay engaged with them without being too pushy. I think some kind of wording and timing like that.
All right. I think that about wraps it up. I know we went through a lot. To kind of summarize this, when you're thinking about email marketing, I think there are two primary objectives. One would be staying top of mind with clients where you can demonstrate your authority and your expertise, and secondly, staying top of mind with prospects or people who've been in your pipeline more recently. So that when they have a catalyst in their life, they'll re-engage with you in another follow-up call.
So, first step, clean your list; second step, segment into clients, old list or old people who haven't heard from you in a while; and third group would be prospects. And then from there, try to pin down personas, interests, topics that they'd be more interested in. You want to optimize for open and reply and click-through rates. And then, try to document as much of this as you can in a written plan so that you can execute on it consistently. I think that would be the overall summary here. What else did we miss? Anything I missed?
Faustin Weber: It was, truly a big, beautiful, summary, so that was excellent.
Stephen Beach: That's a big, beautiful one. Thank you. Wow. Yeah. I'm humbled. Yeah. great.
Alright guys, well, thanks for listening. If you have any more questions about email marketing, please send us an email, send us a note on the website, and we'll address it in another episode. Or actually, probably what we'll do is send you a personal video back with our thoughts and our opinions as it relates specifically to your firm. So please feel free to ask us any questions along those lines.
Faustin Weber: All right. Thank you.
Stephen Beach: Thanks all.
Key Takeaways:
Here's what Faustin and Stephen discussed regarding email marketing for RIAs:
Why Email Marketing Still Matters: Email provides a sense of control and direct access that social media platforms lack. And of course, it allows for more focused engagement compared to the fleeting nature of social media.
Segmentation Strategies: Start with basic segmentation: clients versus prospects.
Dive deeper into personas: small business owners, executives, pre-retirees, etc.
Use tools like NeverBounce to clean and validate your email lists.
Crafting Engaging Content: Mix investment commentary with seasonal and personalized content, and experiment with video to make your emails more dynamic.
You can highlight team updates, awards, and firm changes to build trust and connection.
Staying Top-of-Mind with Prospects: Use email as an extension of your content strategy.
Share educational content tailored to your target audience, and don't forget to sprinkle in value propositions to differentiate your firm.
Sales Enablement via Email: Follow up with personalized, templated emails after discovery calls and consider using video to add a personal touch and reinforce your value.
Implement a quarterly or monthly drip campaign for long-term engagement.
Shameless plug for Craft on Tap
Email marketing is still a thing, and, in a sea of changing trends, it's a consistently effective way to reach potential and current clients.
This conversation is only a starting point. For ongoing insights and practical strategies for RIA growth, listen to the new Craft on Tap marketing podcast. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts. Ready to chat? Get in Touch
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