12 September 2017
According to Netwealth’s 2017 Advice Tech Research Report, 71% of advisers surveyed use technology to create, send and even automate e-newsletters, and mass emails to their current and prospective clients.
This is estimated to increase to 93% by 2019. Over the next financial year, 79% of advisers will be planning to improve their customer engagement tools such as email management/automation software.
There are many email management tools available. MailChimp, XPlan and Microsoft Outlook are the most popular amongst advisers. The 2017 Email Marketing Industry Census by Adestra found that email marketing is a huge factor when it comes to return on investment (ROI), but many companies must be more proactive to better their results.[1]
Being proactive and consistent in communicating with your current and prospective clients via email works in building relationships. But to improve your ROI, you need to be flexible and continually monitor the results of your emails and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Effective email software includes reporting tools to show:
Hypothetical
Donna is an adviser who sends a monthly e-newsletter on Friday afternoons at around 3pm to all her current and prospective clients. Her email reports show the email open rate has steadily decreased over the last three months.
Donna decides to trial sending her monthly e-newsletter on Fridays at lunch time. She immediately sees increased open rates and experiments with other send times over the next few months. Using the data in her email reports, Donna determines that 12pm on Friday gets the best open rates, so she adjusts her strategy accordingly.
Donna includes links to articles on her business’s website in her e-newsletter. In the report she can view exactly what links her readers are clicking on, who they are, and what they’re interested in reading. This gives her better insight into which topics to focus on in future.
Donna sees her client Ben has clicked on the article How to create a household budget. Based on her own knowledge and CRM, Ben is 28 and saving for his first home deposit.
Donna recently introduced a new money management service that helps her clients create and maintain a monthly budget. She identifies that there’s a good chance Ben may be interested.
She contacts him directly about how her new money management service might help him. Ben is interested and decides to use it.
This is just one example of how a detailed reporting program can positively impact Donna’s ROI.
For more information on email marketing, download “Email Marketing for Advisers” and read our previous article “How to write engaging content that gets read”.
