Category: Marketing Strategies & Tactics

Marketing emails get results. And those results can be pretty big wins. Michael H. Baker of Vertex Capital Advisors uses our plug-and-play content to build relationships with his email list.

“Snappy Kraken’s consistent drip of awesome content makes me look top notch with my followers,” he said. “Recently, their Retirement Success campaign led me to a $1.5 MILLION client!”

And that was after he sent his first email campaign. His experience isn’t an isolated one. An email list is your bridge into your prospects’ and clients’ personal inboxes, bringing you closer to them. And having access to your target audience’s inboxes is important because email generates more clients than most other platforms—social media, banner ads, etc.—by up to 92%.

Well-crafted emails can help you nurture prospects and turn them into loyal clients—and those loyal clients become referral machines. But before you can send those emails, you need a list filled with qualified prospects.

Emails Bring You Closer to Your Prospects and Clients

Your email list gives you a way to reach and nurture your prospects and clients in a more personal, less cluttered space—their email inbox. And lead nurturing is important because it produces 50% more leads who are ready to book a call with you—and for 33% cheaper.

Imagine trying to talk to someone 10 yards away in a park full of people who are doing other things. That’s what social media is like—screaming into the ether, hoping someone might hear you. But more often than not, your prospects walk away without even noticing you. Emails, on the other hand, land right in your prospects’ inboxes, bringing you closer to your target audience. Instead of being 10 yards away in a crowded park, you’ll be on the same park bench in a less crowded area.

And the data proves it. In the financial services industry, emails see an average open rate of 24.94% and a click-through rate (CTR) of 3.22% (almost three times higher than social media’s CTR of 1.2%). It’s time to expand your contact list.

Build Your List in 3 Easy Steps

A lot of financial advisers think that getting an email list started is a daunting task. But in reality, you probably already have an email list, no matter how small that may be (even if it’s just one person). And better yet, you can grow your email list with ease by taking advantage of Snappy Kraken’s ready-made content and our Cold to Gold Framework.

1. Look Through Your Existing Contacts

Your clients need to be on your email list; otherwise, you can’t nurture them with relevant content. In a similar vein, when you meet new people, and they give you their contact information, they expect YOU to reach out to THEM, not the other way around.

Start building your list with information from your clients, event attendees, and other instances where you received contact information. If you still don’t know where to start, try these places:

1. Client information sheets. Look at your client information sheets and make sure that all your client email addresses are on your list.
2. Event logbooks. Next, look at your logbooks from past events. Add attendee email addresses to your email list.
3. Business card collections. Every time you meet someone who gives you their business card in order to connect about your services, ask them if you can add them to your list.
4. Client referrals. If your clients are happy with your services, they’ll send their friends and family your way. Add their referrals to your list, as well.

After you’ve found all your long-lost email list entries, add them to a spreadsheet or upload them to your email marketing tool.

A word of caution: According to several global laws, including the CAN-SPAM Act and the GDPR, you need an explicit opt-in from non-clients before you can send them marketing emails.

Before you send marketing emails, reach out to non-clients with personalized messages detailing where you met, what you talked about, and how you think you can help. If they respond that they’d love to chat with you, then invite them to your email list and nurturing sequences.

2. Generate More Email List Entries With the Cold to Gold Framework

After you start building your list, it’s time to generate more leads with our Cold to Gold Framework. We analyzed over 32 million data points to bring you a marketing framework built specifically for financial advisers, designed to generate qualified leads and foster client loyalty.

First, get noticed. Use unique, attention-grabbing graphics—not boring, overused stock photos—that will make viewers feel something and want to click on your social media posts and ads. For example, we used the cover image of our “Retiring in Uncertain Times” campaign to reflect what pre-retirees are feeling—worried, scared, even terrified.

 

Next, earn contacts with a free lead magnet for your target audience. A lead magnet is a downloadable guide or other free resource created with your target audience’s interests in mind. Going back to our previous example, if you are targeting pre-retirees who are scared of not having enough during their retirement, you might choose to run our “Retiring in Uncertain Times” campaign.

The lead magnet for that campaign is called “The ‘Dos’ and ‘Don’ts’ to Help Safeguard Your Future.” It includes a short explanation of why pre-retirees are worried about retirement and a list of three “dos” and two “don’ts” that all point back to working with a professional.

 

Lastly, house your lead magnet on a landing page with a tripwire. Your landing page should contain a thought-provoking headline, a short description, and a “Download now” button or other call to action (CTA) that makes a lead form appear.

 

Put your lead generation machine on autopilot by designing the content and then automating all three steps.

3. Segment Your Email List

By now, you should have a list of at least 10 people. If you have more, great. If you have less, be patient. The last step to building an email list that converts is to segment your contacts into relevant categories.

Your prospects and clients have different interests, financial needs, and purchasing intents. You need to create groups within your list so that you only send your prospects the most relevant messages. After all, you don’t want to send your pre-retiree contacts an email about tuition planning.

We recommend segmenting your clients and prospects into at least seven categories.

1. Their likelihood to become clients
2. Their likelihood to refer new clients
3. Their professional and recreational interests and hobbies
4. Their financial needs and goals
5. Their occupation
6. Their age
7. Their motivations and behaviors

This stage is also where you can qualify your contacts. If you notice that you’ve emailed a contact multiple times and have received no response from them, they probably aren’t interested in becoming your clients. If they do respond to you and need a service you don’t offer, then they’re not a good fit for your business. You can either remove those contacts from your list or add them to a dormant segment that you send emails to occasionally.

Build Your Email List With Ready-Made Lead Generation Campaigns

You should now be on your way to a segmented list of email addresses. Don’t just let your list sit and collect dust. Continue growing your list and nurturing it regularly to really build that relationship with your prospects and clients.

But we know that nurturing takes a lot of work. More than half—56%—of brands take one to three weeks to produce one effective marketing email. We’ve got your back—we spend hours creating ready-made campaigns for financial advisers so that you don’t have to.

Book a demo now to see our lead generation machine—the Cold to Gold Framework—in action.

Social ads aren’t meant to get you instant clients.

In the same way that you don’t buy everything you see on social media, your target audience won’t sign a contract with every financial adviser who has an eye-catching ad.

Social ads are meant to grab attention, build brand awareness, and plant that seed that might someday bloom into a beautiful, loyal client.

Effective social ads can get prospects halfway through our Cold to Gold Framework—from getting noticed to building credibility.

 

The most successful advisers turn those leads into loyal clients by following up, starting conversations, and genuinely building trust and relationships.
Continue reading Maximizing ROI Of Social Ads For Financial Advisers

How long do you think you need to work at your marketing to get results? A month? Three months? What if we told you it takes a lot longer than that? Probably a lot longer than you’d like. But that’s ok; you’re in this for the long haul because you want more than just leads—you want paying clients.

One of our members shared with us that he “just scheduled a meeting with a $1.2M prospect” he’s been emailing since 2018. After three years of nurturing and building the relationship, he finally got a call booked with that high-net-worth (HNW) prospect. Even though it won’t take all your HNW clients three years to convert, you need to invest in that relationship with a considerable amount of nurturing to get on their radars.

So the right answer to our question in the first paragraph is: it depends. We recommend using our holistic lead generation strategy for at least six months before giving up—but it could take up to three years (or even longer) to net the big fish. Remember, you won’t get results immediately, and expecting instant gratification will hurt your marketing success.

Stay motivated with consistent efforts and marketing metrics that actually matter to get more marketing wins—paying clients who are loyal to your business.

Continue reading Why Is My Marketing Not Working? Here’s Why

According to the traditional lead generation mindset, marketing is deemed successful as soon as you get a lead. But you can’t deposit leads in the bank.

To get real wins—i.e., loyal clients—you need a strategy that goes beyond traditional lead generation. Our Holistic Lead Generation strategy takes the whole client journey into consideration to help you generate more leads and convert more clients.

Traditional Lead Generation Only Gets You to the Starting Line

Continue reading Convert Leads Into Loyal Clients with This Strategy

Only 22% of affluent prospects become clients within a week. On the other hand, 38% need a month to decide on purchasing, and another 32% need up to a year or more.

If your marketing goal is to get clients right off the bat, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Your prospects go through different stages of awareness before they decide to work with you as their financial adviser—and not all of them will start at step one. Your marketing goal, therefore, should be to take your prospects on a journey that will help them come to the conclusion that they have a problem and that you are the solution—no matter how long that takes.

To make your marketing more effective, we’re going to introduce the five levels of prospect awareness, what content they want to see from you at each stage, and where you can find them. Continue reading 5 Levels of Prospect Awareness for Advisers

As a financial adviser, you probably find the science behind finance super interesting—and we agree with you. But we also have to acknowledge that most people find financial matters confusing, mind-numbing, and even scary at times. Sending your clients weekly emails on investment tips or retirement planning is useful, but it also gets repetitive—kind of like someone who won’t stop showing you pictures of their kids.

Educational emails are great for establishing expertise and providing value, but all of that value is dead in the water if your clients never open your emails—which you risk if you flood them with too much nothing-but-finance content.

Break the monotony and increase engagement by adding a financial spin to topics your clients already care about. It’s also an opportunity to add some personality and fun to your brand and your relationships. Talk about celebrities. Talk about travel. Talk about financial scandals or how personal finances might work in your favorite sci-fi universe. We love putting this into practice— one of our favorite (and top-performing) campaigns was about celebrity money mistakes.
Let’s break down why this works so well.

Financial-Adjacent Themes Create More Engagement

In our 2020 and 2021 State of Digital Reports, we gathered data from 52,906 campaigns and 16,214,916 emails that our members sent to their clients and found that more than half of the top-performing engagement campaigns contained financial-adjacent content.

Clients opened emails that they could relate to or were interested in. For example, we found that many clients see themselves as “News Readers,” meaning they are interested in current events. It only follows that one of our top-performing campaigns in 2020 was “25 of the Most Interesting Things That Happened in 2019.”

Additionally, in 2020, our top five email subject lines (based on open rates) didn’t even mention money or finances. In fact, one of our best-performing subject lines was “Practical advice (and Frodo’s lesson).” Continue reading Alternative Content Marketing For Financial Advisers

Marketing on autopilot is every financial adviser’s dream. Everyone (not just financial advisers) wants a magical marketing hack that continuously generates qualified leads, referrals and new clients without them having to lift a finger.

We’ve got good news—the “magical marketing hack” exists; it’s called a viral loop or referral flywheel. A viral loop is a marketing tactic that relies on delighting clients enough that they share your service or product with friends, family, colleagues, and other people in their networks. These set-and-forget viral loops are all about the prep work. After investing some time and effort into your system’s initial momentum, your marketing will start to run itself.

We used data that we collected from millions of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of emails to create a viral marketing loop specifically for financial advisers: The Cold to Gold Framework. We’re here to help you get the ball rolling so that, eventually, you can spend way less time every month on your marketing and focus on growing your business.

Continue reading Viral Loops and Referral Flywheels – A Marketing “Hack”