We interviewed Don Kwak, our Director of Marketing Technology and Analytics, to find out about Simplicity Lone Beacon’s strategic approach to email marketing. Email marketing is an essential part of the marketing ecosystem: It can drive website traffic, promote events, bolster PR efforts, and showcase content. It can also generate value to prospects and clients as they continue to learn about an advisor’s services and increase their financial knowledge. For advisors, it’s an opportunity to speed up the amount of time it takes prospects to move down the sales funnel.
Some people think this means they should send out a lot of emails, or as many as possible, but that’s actually not the case. While welcome emails have huge potential with an 82% open rate,[1] later emails can be less impactful if they’re overwhelming a consumer’s inbox. Too many touchpoints, meaning any digital interactions with clients or prospects, can become an issue for two main reasons:
- Email services like Gmail continue to develop sophisticated algorithms to filter out undesired emails. For example, if you keep emailing someone who isn’t engaging with your emails at all, the algorithm will pick that up and use it as a flag to lower your email reputation score. Once your reputation score decreases enough, less and less of your emails will reach the inboxes of those in your database, even those who would have engaged with your emails. So, continuously sending unopened emails can hurt your overall ability to deliver content and other important information to interested prospects and clients.
- Too many emails can cause “fatigue”. Email fatigue is what happens when consumers get tired of receiving a business’s emails and ignore them, delete them, unsubscribe, or move them to their spam folder. This can be caused by too many emails or emails with content that is not relevant to them. For example, your prospects might not care to receive alerts saying when your office is closed, and your clients likely won’t want to receive information about dinner seminars.
What Do We Do to Prevent Email Fatigue and Maintain A High Email Reputation Score?
We segment databases into lists, which is one of our 7 steps for email marketing success. These segmentations could be clients and prospects, or hot leads and cold leads, just to name two. This allows us to send the right emails to the right people. For example, if you have a client-only event coming up, you want to be sure that none of your prospects receive that email, and vice versa.
We also identify unengaged consumers and segment them to protect the email reputation score and provide unique content to re-engage them. We create metrics that bucket individuals into an “unengaged” category based on the number of emails they haven’t opened over a certain time span. We then email them at a less frequent rate and then run a nurture program to re-engage them. We give them the option of opting out of specific types of emails – like office alerts or event emails – without subscribing altogether.
In the end, our goal is to help generate revenue for our advisors and value for their clients and prospects. Focusing less on click-through rates and focusing more on the big picture, such as how email marketing impacts clients, prospects, and their movement down the sales funnel is how we’re delivering long-term results for our clients. Get in touch to learn more about the details of our email marketing practices and how it could help your business!
For a more in-depth look into this information visit our affiliate Avasam.com – and read their recent article on this topic Email Marketing Statistics You Need To Know in 2020.
