Email newsletters are enjoying a renaissance and remain the most effective marketing tool available to financial advisors.
“Email newsletters, an old-school artifact of the web that was supposed to die along with dial-up connections, are not only still around, but very much on the march,” says media columnist David Carr in The New York Times. “Bloomberg, Fast Company, The New York Times, Politico and many other news organizations are finding that they can grab attention — and readers — in the inbox.”
According to Carr, readers drowning in the flood of information on the Internet yearn for organized information to bring order to the chaos. “At a time when lots of news and information is whizzing by online, email newsletters — some free, some not — help us figure out what’s worth paying attention to,” Carr says.
So I am pleased that Constant Contact, the world leader in email marketing, has partnered with Advisor Products. As a result of this partnership, advisors are able to conduct educational email marketing campaigns with content that UHNWIs actually value. While Advisor Products has had an email newsletter since September 2001, integrating Constant Contact is a game-changer for our users.
Trey Byrnes, Inverness Financial Group
Our email newsletter content combined with Constant Contact's technology, templates, analytics and personal coaching gives our users new marketing capabilities to attract new assets and communicate with clients regularly. Here, in his own words, is the story of Trey Byrnes, CPA-turned-wealth manager and the founder of Inverness Financial Group of Newburyport, Mass. Since late 2008, Byrnes has been sending contacts a branded newsletter created by Advisor Products, and he shares his experience of those five years. Keep in mind, he's not yet benefited from the Constant Contact integration.
I go to my website and sign a couple of people up for my email newsletter every month – referral sources and prospects. About 10 of the approximately 140 people I signed up to receive the newsletter over the last five years became clients. Many are people I barely know. This is the best marketing tool I have ever used.
This quarter, someone became a client who I met five years ago and added to the email newsletter list way back then. It’s a $1 million client if it all works out over the next few months. She sold a piece of real estate in early June. She had been receiving my email newsletter every Friday afternoon since I added her to the subscriber list five years ago. She called me two weeks before the closing, scheduled an appointment, and signed up as an advisory client shortly thereafter. I never had a single conversation with her in that five-year period other than sending her the weekly email. She lives in another state.
Earlier this year, a local prospect signed up for the newsletter. After receiving the newsletter for about three months, he called and set up an appointment. At our first meeting, he decided to become an advisory client and transferred $400,000 in assets. He also mentioned the effectiveness of our newsletter.
How do I explain the success of this email newsletter? It’s just a touch, a weekly touch on Fridays. But people love it. To the best of my knowledge, fewer than 15 people unsubscribed in five years — and most of those were people changing their email addresses. That’s unheard of! Everyone gets so many emails every day, but people love the market recap grid at the top of the email, the weekly news coverage and concise presentation.
Clients don’t realize the email newsletter is automated. So I get emails asking me why I am at the office late on a Friday night. It’s an amazing tool to remind people I am here. It has also proven to be a very easy way for subscribers to make a referral by simply forwarding the newsletter to a friend or colleague that might be interested in my services.
It will be interesting with constant contact because I will be able to see which articles each person reads. I’ve hired consultants for marketing, and I’ve done mailings, and I even led a series of webinars a few years ago, but nothing I’ve ever done has been as effective as the Advisor Products weekly email newsletter. Advisor Products is so far ahead of everyone else in the space. I was with AdvisorsSquare before API and was disappointed. While my BD at the time was promoting other vendors, I switched to API anyway. It is more expensive, but for me it has been worth every penny. After comparing products over the years, I feel API is a in whole different league than its competition.