Introduction
When putting together financial services marketing strategies, marketers have many options. And even though it’s been around for decades, email marketing for financial services is still an important part of that strategy, especially considering the huge amount of money getting ready to move into the pockets of younger generations — roughly $124 trillion.
And do you know who gets the biggest cut?
If you guessed millennials, you’d be right.
As a bonus, millennials have something in common with other generations when it comes to marketing preferences. An overwhelming number of them report a preference to receive marketing via email (68%).
And that means if you’re a financial marketer and you create a strong email program, you have a pretty solid advantage. The challenge is that there are many pitfalls when executing an email marketing strategy, starting with making your customers cranky before the first message lands in their inbox.
Importance of Consent in Email Marketing for Financial Services
As a financial marketer, you’re responsible for following a pretty long list of regulations that impact your email marketing. These include broad laws that apply to all marketers, such as the CAN-SPAM Act, CCPA, and GDPR. Then you have to comply with rules specific to financial marketers, like FINRA Rule 2210, SEC advertising and marketing rules, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
So, before you move ahead with financial services email marketing, it helps to start with a strong foundation, and that begins with consent. Without it, you won’t only have potential compliance issues, but you could also run into email deliverability problems.
Make sure your forms include advanced features that allow you to add opt-in checkboxes (for example, “Yes, I’d like to receive emails”) when someone fills out a landing page or form. It’s also helpful to give people an easy way to manage their preferences so your email acquisition efforts don’t accidentally result in sending emails to contacts who haven’t actively agreed.
You’ll want a solid way to track these efforts so if compliance issues do come up, you can prove you did everything correctly. For example, Act-On offers marketing automation for financial services that include features such as Global BCC that automatically sends a blind copy of every email to a dedicated archive mailbox for auditing purposes. With it, you’ll always have a record of every email you send.
Capturing Attention in an Inbox Full of “Junk”
With your compliance boxes firmly checked, your next step is to stand out in your customers’ inboxes. And this isn’t always easy. The simplest way we know is to match your email content to their exact journey. But to do that, you need more than just logical guesses. You’ll need some data and intelligence.
For example, imagine a prospect visits your refinance rate page. That action shows clear intent to refinance a mortgage. From there, you can launch a nurture email stream that speaks directly to where they’re at in that journey. Maybe they’d benefit from a refinance calculator to see how today’s rates could impact their monthly mortgage payment. Or perhaps they’d like to speak with an advisor to explore potential scenarios and decide if refinancing makes sense right now.
You can nurture them through this process and also sync that activity with your CRM to make the handoff to humans easier. Our favorite tool for this process is marketing automation, which can make the entire process much smoother.
And if you want some inspiration for exactly what to write in these emails, we love Kelsey Yen’s 420 email examples for financial institutions that are anything but boring.
Speaking to Multiple People Authentically
It’s likely your marketing team isn’t sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They’re super busy and need workflows that perform and don’t take a lot of time. As your financial customers move through their journeys, one way to make this possible is with dynamic content.
For example, maybe you have two segments. One includes customers who are looking for a home but have never owned one. The other includes customers who have owned homes in the past and are looking to purchase again. Are they both looking for a similar product? Possibly. But that doesn’t mean you need to talk with them in the same way. And the more personalized you get, the better.
Act-On marketing automation for financial services lets you segment based on lifecycle, product interest, or interaction history. You can then swap out content in a single campaign (called dynamic content) to make it more personalized. One campaign acts as the shell your team builds but can be adjusted to serve multiple audiences while still speaking directly to each.
Then, as you build out email marketing for financial services, you can monitor click-through rates by segment, allowing that data to guide any needed changes.
Asking for Permission (Again) to Improve Results
Have you ever signed up for an email list and later stopped reading the company’s emails? We’ve all done it. In most cases, the reason isn’t really that personal. The customer has just moved on and no longer connects with your products or services. But it’s important to plan for this pivot, because it can be an opportunity to either re-engage them or remove them for a healthier email list. This helps prevent deliverability issues that can make it harder for people who still want your emails to receive them.
For example, if someone hasn’t engaged with you for 180 days, you might send an email that basically says, “Hey, do you still want to hear from us?” If they don’t reply, it’s probably a good idea to delete them from your list following a standard email sunset policy.
Try running these campaigns quarterly to keep your list clean and make sure the people on it are still interested in your products and services.
Becoming the Emails Customers Actually Want
As you press on with financial services email marketing, one thing is clear: Your customers are only going to receive more emails in the future. After all, an estimated 376 billion emails are sent and received every day, a number that has steadily increased each year since 2017.
But when you focus on your customers’ needs and capture the data points that show exactly what they want to see in their inboxes, you can avoid being relegated to the dreaded spam folder. And you can create happier financial customers and reach your marketing goals more easily.
Do you feel like you could use a little more guidance getting started?
Our detailed Marketing Automation Strategy Guide breaks down how automation can support email marketing for financial services. It will help you connect with your customers, deliver value, and build deeper relationships that earn more of their business.