By Marcus Roth, Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Data, Automation & Content.
Many financial advisor businesses are unaware of the attrition amongst their prospects over a year. Through opt-outs and outdated email lists in your sales funnel, you could be marketing to countless unqualified leads. As a result, it is crucial you keep adding high-quality leads to the top of your sales funnel.
The Issue
In a given year, an email list for a financial advisory with 10,000 contacts or less will lose about 200 to 500 contacts to opt-outs. They will also sustain a similar or larger number of individuals who become unengaged and uninterested in your offerings. Those contacts will likely not hit the opt-out button but simply fail to open or click an email for over 120 days or more. Although they haven’t opted out, they have effectively opted out by tuning you out.
So, lets do the math. In a single year, an advisory could expect up to 400-1000 emails in their database to “leave” in one way or another. And don’t forget, this is the healthy, expected rate of decline. But you can expect a lot more if you encounter some public relations issues or go through an acquisition or rebranding.
With that said, any given brand advertising via email and online should target a .2% opt-out rate. A quick way to determine your opt-out rate is to divide your total opt-outs for the year by your total number of emails sent. Anything above .5% is a red flag and a strategy should be put in place to reduce that number.
The Solutions
There are a few solutions to solving the email attrition rate problem. The first solution is the most obvious but is easier said than done, and that is to acquire more top-of-funnel leads. In other words, add more emails to your database. But this doesn’t mean cutting corners and purchasing an email list. That will result in robbing Peter to pay Paul and won’t solve the problem. In fact, see my article on the dangers of purchasing an email list.
- Generate Opt-In
So, what next? Instead of purchasing an arbitrary list of emails, generate emails the old-fashioned way through traditional opt-ins. The cheapest way to do this is to entice people to opt-in organically on your website. A customer would find your website through a search engine by searching for a topic they are directly interested in: someone typing in, “best retirement coach in Boston Massachusetts”, finding an article you wrote as one of the top hits on Google, then searching through your website to find an opt-in area to stay up to date and receive more of your useful content.
Search engine optimization is an entire beast of a project all on its own and the articles at the top of a Google search menu for a certain keyword don’t exactly get there on accident. The best of the best articles arrive at the top of a search engine because they are useful, engage the user, and most importantly, someone has spent a lot of time and money optimizing and strategizing how to get that content to the top of that Google search result.
- Run Paid Ads
Like most things in life, things get easier if you’re willing to pay. In this case, I’m talking about running paid ads on something simple. An ad with a call-to-action that does not require an enormous commitment, such as booking an appointment or attending a dinner event, often plays well on Facebook or LinkedIn. And this is where a white paper guide on a specific topic a retiree or a target prospect finds interesting can really pay dividends. If you can take the time to find a topic that your prospects will be interested in, then a paid advertisement using that content can get them to opt-in to your email list. White papers and guides are useful for this because the cost per opt-in for something simple like a white paper can be low and manageable.
- Understand the Nuances to Opt-In Retention
If you’re analyzing the ROI of your marketing initiatives, don’t fall into the trap of assuming everyone who opted in for the year will then opt out in that same year. A portion of your email list will inevitably opt-out when they sign up. However, a good portion of those who out do so for many other reasons over time. So, if you see that you acquired a thousand opt-ins but lost 500 opt-outs, don’t think that 50% of all marketing leads acquired in that year opted out because that is simply not the case.
- Don’t Underestimate Re-Engagement Campaigns
The last solution to increase your number of opt-ins and mitigate the number of opt-outs is to run re-engagement campaigns. These campaigns are a form of remarketing that utilizes the segment of your email database determined as “unengaged” and sends them hyper-specific content designed to get them to open or click an email, thus bringing them back into your general pool of qualified contacts.
Here’s where newsletter lead optimization turns to the science of re-engagement campaigns. Stay tuned for more on how to vitalize your email campaigns.
About the Author: Marcus Roth is Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Email, Data Automation & Content. Marcus has a unique experience in B2B and B2C start-up companies ranging from enterprise-level market research of Artificial Intelligence to self-defense eCommerce products. His experience in AI market research brought him, and his research, to INTERPOL, The United Nations and Harvard University.
