In our experience, if there’s one thing most financial advisers seem to want, it’s a decent client newsletter. However, the trick is delivering a newsletter which actually:
- Engages your clients meaningfully
- Leads recipients to refer you, thus creating new business opportunities
- Keeps you at the top of your audience’s minds over decent periods of time
Not an easy feat, for sure. Yet it is completely possible to design a compelling, effective financial newsletter which achieves your goals.
Here are 6 top tips from the marketing team here at CreativeAdviser, for your financial newsletter:
#1 Determine Where Your Financial Newsletter Sits in Your Marketing Strategy
It might sound like a silly question, but it’s a crucial one: “Do you actually need a financial newsletter?”
Many IFAs seem to think they need one, simply because most other financial advisers they know of seem to have one. Yet just because they common in your industry, doesn’t mean you should have one.
Don’t get us wrong – we’re big advocates of financial newsletters in general, as a great way to engage new clients. However, a newsletter needs to sit appropriately within your marketing strategy, if it is going to work and make sense to use it.
Consider your business goals, both short and long term. What is the objective?
For instance, is it mainly to retain existing clients, or are you actually looking to drive new business and grow the company significantly?
Most IFAs will be after a mix of the two, with emphasis on one or the other. In which case, a financial newsletter will be a great option. You will need to ensure, however, that the frequency and content reflect your overarching goals.
#2 Determine The Kind of Financial Newsletter You Need
The problem with many financial newsletter is that they’re trying to do too much.
For example, the content is often cluttered and lacking in focus. Perhaps there’s just too much information in each newsletter, covering both company news and a disorienting, wide range of topics.
Email marketing needs to be focused, with unified purpose and clarity, in order to work properly.
That’s why many IFAs we speak to are often disillusioned with many financial newsletter providers. Because they provide white-labelled, off-the-shelf content intended for a wide range of IFA firms, the content they buy often feels impersonal and inappropriate.
By including tailored content suitable to YOUR own clients, however, and reflecting your brand image and voice, a financial newsletter will feel more natural and work a lot better.
#3 Keep A Good Balance In Your Newsletter
It can be very tempting to be overly-promotional with your financial newsletters when you start one. Company news, offers and deals – they might sound good to you, but they aren’t to your readers.
It always runs the risk of offense when we say it, but it’s true. People generally don’t care about what’s going on in your firm, or want to hear about your services or financial products.
In general, they’re open to hearing about information or topics they find interesting or useful to know about. For instance, how Brexit in 2019 might affect their pensions or investments.
We all know of those companies who, after we “signed up to their newsletter”, bombard us continuously with “buy, buy, buy” emails. Don’t be that company.
#4 Manage Subscriber Expectations
For instance, on your signup web page, tell your readers what your financial newsletter will contain. Let them know how often they can expect to hear from you.
You might even want to include a preview of your newsletter content on your landing page as well. This gives them an idea of what it will look like, and helps them recognise your email in their inbox when they do eventually decide to sign up.
#5 Have a Clear CTA in Mind
Most financial newsletters will feature many different articles (or article snippets, in our case), and therefore will likely feature multiple calls to action (CTA). This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but you need to give careful consideration to their prominence.
In particular, you should have one main, specific call to action in mind for your readers. What is it you would like them to do, after having read your content in the newsletter, or on your web page?
Maybe, the main CTA in your newsletter is that you want your readers to click onto your website. Or, many you want them to refer / forward the email to a non-subscriber friend or relative.
#6 Be Careful With Copy Volumes
One thing we’ve found consistently across marketing campaigns, is that people generally do not want to spend lots of time reading a newsletter in their inbox. No matter how good it is.
That’s why lots of other financial newsletter providers often struggle to deliver value here. Quite often, they will stuff each newsletter full of articles and information – often in the form of an attached document, in order to make it work.
However, not only do these kinds of financial newsletter often struggle with delivery rates (due to attachments not getting through), they also fail to address how users tend to consume newsletters.
In general, the best approach is to keep text in your newsletter minimal. Consider a short, introductory paragraph and then article headlines further down the page.
The latter could also each have a 4-5 line snippet of the main body of the article, therefore whetting the reader’s appetite to click on the link and read the whole article on your financial website.
Final Thoughts
Above, we’ve outlined 6 top tips for financial advisers looking to start a client newsletter. There are many other things you need to take into consideration when starting this kind of campaign, but we can only mention so many in one blog post!
If you are interested in starting a bespoke IFA newsletter for your clients, please get in touch. One of our team would be happy to hold a free, no-obligation marketing review with you, to determine the viability of a newsletter and digital marketing for your particular business.
