Prospecting emails can play an important role in your marketing funnel as a retirement plan advisor. Other than your blog, email is the only marketing platform that you truly own (sorry Zuckerberg). It also helps that it’s inexpensive, easy to implement and readily allows for automation and integration into your CRM. Moreover, a thoughtful email campaign can help cultivate and strengthen your relationship with potential clients over time — or, it can have the opposite effect if you carpet-bomb their inbox or saddle them with spam.
Divide and Conquer. A persuasive prospecting email is highly relevant to its audience. There’s no one-size-fits all template for effective email marketing for the retirement industry or any other, so don’t look for one. Instead, strive for a greater level of specificity by segmenting your mailing list and then tailor your messaging to each group. You can segment by many types of variables: demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral. Craft one communication to a direct referral from an existing sponsor client and another to someone who’s requested or downloaded information from a landing page on your website.
Focus on Your Funnel. Your emails should also be tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey from awareness to interest to desire to action. Newsletter and informational emails are more top of funnel — while highly promotional or transactional emails are near the bottom. If you jump the gun and ask for your conversion too early, you may risk turning prospects off. At every stage, it’s important to keep the focus on your potential client’s needs versus your own. Explain how your offering addresses a specific problem or pain point — in other words, clearly convey benefits, which leads to the next important consideration …
Offer Immediate Value. Whenever possible, provide value upfront. Marketers do this in many ways with free trial offers or freemium software versions. A PlanFees subscription lets you also offer something of value for free by allowing you to easily create a professional and customizable benchmark report in two minutes. The PlanFees Prism™ benchmark breaks down the four main components of a retirement plan’s total fees: investment, record-keeping, TPA/administrative and advisory/consulting. And the revolutionary fintech platform offers an unprecedented degree of accuracy: The PlanFees benchmark universe is based on a live-bid quote database of over 60,000 retirement plans with more than half a trillion dollars in total assets. If a plan sponsor is shopping for a new advisor, you can start a conversation with the offer of a quick benchmark to help evaluate whether their fees are in line with similar plans. And from there you can easily expand the discussion to how you could help lower their costs — or provide better service or outcomes for the same price.
Flexible Contact Options. Most likely, you’re trying to arrange a phone or in-person meeting to close the deal, so give clients plenty of ways to set that up either by calling, replying to your email, texting or scheduling an appointment directly on an online calendar. Similarly, offer a choice of an in-person, phone or teleconference follow-up.
Avoid Missteps That Undermine Credibility. Consider enlisting the services of a pro to write — or at least edit — your emails to avoid embarrassing grammatical errors that can quickly tank your credibility and perceived attention to detail. You don’t have to be Shakespeare — and you want to come across naturally, not scripted — but typos are never a good look when you’re prospecting.
Test and Track. The best way to gauge the efficacy of your email marketing strategy is to split test (also called A/B testing) and track your results. This is done by comparing open, response or conversion rates between two different versions of an email campaign to see what works best. Keep any changes relatively minor or it will be harder to tell exactly what made the difference. Subject lines are particularly important to split test — just a small wording tweak can sometimes have a big impact on your open rate. And if you split test regularly, your campaigns can gradually become more and more effective every time you run them.
Set Yourself Apart
PlanFees can be a valuable addition to your email marketing strategy. Don’t let your voice get drowned out in a sea of “buy now” messaging. Distinguish yourself from the competition by offering something of value in your prospects’ inboxes by signing up for PlanFees today.
