If you send a weekly or monthly newsletter, congratulations, you’re in the 43% of advice/planning firms making a great choice.
If you monitor your open rate or click through rate, here’s a bonus point.
But how many of these six hidden benefits and opportunities are you taking advantage of?
Opportunity #1: Improving your conversion rate by nurturing prospects
In our experience, most new enquiries won’t immediately become clients. Those who don’t fall into a couple of categories:
- Wrong-fit: They’re unlikely to ever become a client
- Right-fit: You’d like to work with them, but they aren’t ready to engage.
Let’s focus on the second group for a minute. You could ignore them, but doing that means the time and money you’ve spent creating the opportunity are wasted. So that’s the wrong choice.
The right option is to nurture them, adding value and demonstrating knowledge, so it’s you (not another adviser/planner) they come back to when they’re ready to engage.
That means you should add all prospects to your newsletter database. Are you already doing that?
Opportunity #2: Using data to target warm prospects
If you know where to look, there’s huge value in your newsletter data.
Prospects (people who aren’t yet clients but receive your newsletter) give subtle “intent” signals that they might be ready to engage, including opening your newsletter and clicking links to read the articles.
You’ll improve conversion rates if you, or your team, follow up on intent signals by regularly creating a “hot prospect” list and then emailing or calling the prospects to re-engage with them.
Using your newsletter data to improve conversion rates is a massive, missed opportunity. Are you doing it?
Opportunity #3: Use exclusions to clean your data
If you use a bulk emailing system such as Mailchimp, HubSpot or DotDigital you can easily get monthly reports summarising what we call “exclusion data”.
This data includes people whose email addresses have bounced or who’ve unsubscribed. It’s incredibly valuable as, for example, you could:
- Contact clients who’ve unsubscribed to ask what the issue was – their feedback could help improve your newsletter
- Check email addresses that have bounced – there could be typos in there which can easily be fixed
- Check both bounced emails and unsubscribe lists for people who’ve changed jobs – then update your database and contact them to see if there are planning opportunities after their move.
How many of these things are you doing each month?
Opportunity #4: Turning newsletter content into social media posts
We’re often told by advisers and planners that coming up with ideas is one of the main barriers preventing them from posting more frequently on social media.
Your newsletter provides the answer.
Ideally, your newsletter should contain links to blogs and articles on your website, which you can also promote on social media.
But we can do better than that.
Advisers/planners who use social media most effectively are the ones who post consistently. I know what you’re thinking though; to be consistent you need more ideas, which takes us back to the original problem.
Again, your newsletter has the answer.
Let’s take an article with the headline: “5 effective tips that could help you cut impulsive financial decisions”.
You could break this article up into a series of five social posts, each containing one tip, with a call to action at the end encouraging people to click the link and read the other four tips.
One blog/article, giving you five social posts, is a huge opportunity to save time, educate your audience and maintain consistency.
But are you doing it?
Opportunity #5: Demonstrate reliability by keeping your website up to date
As I said earlier, your newsletter should contain links to blogs and articles on your website.
One of the hidden benefits is that it keeps your website up to date and, if the blogs are dated, the consistency of publishing every month will help potential clients feel confident in your reliability.
You’ll lose this opportunity if your newsletter only sends people to third-party websites, such as the BBC, Economist, Financial Times and so on. If you’re doing that please stop. You’re a financial expert, not a bloody librarian!
Opportunity #6: Make webinar projects easier
As we said in our definitive guide, webinars are a great way to communicate efficiently with a relatively large group of people. Unfortunately, deciding on the topic and building the presentation can often be a barrier.
Again, the articles and blogs you use in your newsletter provide the answer.
Let’s take the headline I mentioned earlier: “5 effective tips that could help you cut impulsive financial decisions”., This would be very easy to turn into an incredibly valuable webinar.
Then…
- Add the webinar recording to your website
- Cut the recording down into short videos to promote on social media
- Call everyone who registered for the webinar, who isn’t already a client.
All of this comes from a blog or article you included in your newsletter, but are you doing it?
It all starts with a newsletter
If you don’t have a newsletter, you don’t benefit from these opportunities.
When producing newsletters, you have two options: DIY or outsource.
Some of the best financial services marketers produce newsletters week in, week out. Others, though, don’t have the time, skill or inclination – and this is where outsourcing can be so valuable.
Our package is called Yardstick Membership and includes:
- A “done for you” service
- A choice of syndicated or bespoke articles
- Direct liaison with compliance (where they allow it)
- Articles added to your website, so it’s kept up to date
- Management information provided to you every edition
- A free Budget newsletter, produced and sent on the day of the Chancellor’s speech
- A regular guide, in your branding, taking a deeper dive into a financial or lifestyle topic
- Unlimited email sends, so everyone you want to receive your newsletter gets it.
If you’d like to learn more about Yardstick Membership, including the cost, please click here or call 0115 8965 300, we’d love to explain more.
