Your best tool for communicating with clients is right in front of your screen: email. In fact, an overwhelming 73 percent of investors say email is their preferred method of communication.
But not all emails are created equally. It takes effort to make the most of email and maximize its impact on client relationships. Here are five email best practices for financial advisors.
1. Communicate Frequently, but Not Too Frequently
Clients want their advisors to be in contact with them. One of the most common reasons clients switch advisors is if their advisor lacks communication skills and doesn’t communicate frequently. However, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. If you over-communicate with clients, you risk them being overwhelmed by email and ignoring your requests. Nearly 70 percent of people feel overwhelmed by their inboxes. Sending too many emails or including too much information can overwhelm clients and cause them not to respond or even open the email.
The first hour after someone interacts with your brand — whether by signing up, downloading, or asking a question — is when they’re warmest. You need to have a process in place that starts the conversation immediately. Drip on them that hour, then the next day, then the next week. Show up just enough to stay relevant without becoming a nuisance.
The goal is to keep your name front and center before they’re ready to act, so that when the moment comes, they already know where to go and who to trust. A good rule of thumb is to strike the right balance: too many emails, and they’ll unsubscribe. Too few, and they’ll forget who you are. At a minimum, consider sending an email every month or every quarter based on your audience’s preferences. Tie your content to relevant moments — like tax season, market events, or year-end planning — and supplement with personal touches when it makes sense.
2. Personalize
Email is crucial to strong communication and relationships. But it can’t be the same mass message sent to every client. Clients can see through a mass email and will know that it isn’t personalized.
Effective email marketing is targeted and relevant to each client. A client getting ready to send their child to college will likely need different messages than a client months away from retirement. Personalize emails so that clients get information that’s relevant to them.
That doesn’t mean you have to write a custom email to every client. Group clients in similar life stages or with similar demographics, and then send personalized emails to each group. What sort of personalized emails can you send?
- Industry updates
- Product highlights
- Links to webinars, articles, and classes
- Recommendations for various life stages
3. Automate Emails
It may seem counterintuitive if you want to send personalized messages, but automation can be a powerful tool for email communication.
To keep your clients engaged, deliver the right content at the right time. Personalizing emails with your clients’ names is a simple step, but if you want to provide custom-made content for your clients, automation is essential. And automation saves you time! Automation allows you to set behavior rules that will trigger emails based on clients’ behavior. For example, you could set a rule that automatically sends a series of welcome emails when a client subscribes to your email list.
Segmenting your client lists can help you personalize your content to your clients even further. You can create groups within your contacts based on your clients’ ages, interests, careers, income, or any other categories you prefer. Then you can target certain groups and create drip campaigns with content uniquely suited to their needs
4. Consider the Layout
With all the email templates on the market, there’s no excuse for bad graphic design. Your email layout should be easy to follow, consistently branded, and structured to highlight your most important content.
The presentation of your text is also vital to visual interest. To facilitate online reading, include headings to break up long blocks of text, put essential information at the beginning, and use bullet points rather than long paragraphs.
To increase the odds of your emails getting opened, carefully consider subject lines. A/B tests of different subject lines can help you determine which subject lines are most effective.
5. Stay Compliant
Like most things advisors do, client emails have regulations they must follow. Email communication falls under recordkeeping rules, meaning advisors have to archive email correspondence correctly.
According to the SEC Books and Records rule, emails and other records must be kept for at least five years, with the most recent two years’ worth of content easily accessible at all times. To comply with this rule and other SEC/FINRA email regulations, advisors should use a reliable storage platform like Docupace.
Client email is crucial, but it doesn’t need to become your full-time job. Lean into the power of Docupace to organize records and documents. Our cloud-based document storage system keeps data protected, organized, and compliant. Click here to schedule a discovery session.
