How Finance Services Are Using Email Marketing

While it's easy to say that email marketing is the king of marketing, it's important to understand why, especially for those companies who require a very concise and unique marketing delivery. Financial services firms require marketing like no else; the information, the delivery and techniques are all vastly different. Here's why email marketing is incredibly crucial to financial services firms and how it can help better their marketing efforts.

Information Delivery

Email marketing allows for information delivery in a completely new way. Due to the fact it's an email, financial services firms can convey much larger amounts of information through an email that would otherwise take weeks upon weeks of social media posts to convey. A financial services firm is intricate, and the amount of information conveyed through every touchpoint should reflect that.  

If a financial services firm is looking to highlight their financial strategy services, which is a highly personalised and complicated subject, customers will struggle to understand the value and features in a short 280 character long Twitter post or a Facebook post where only a short preview is shown.

Email marketing allows financial services firms to convey larger amounts of information, explain their services, and illustrate customer value in a way that compliments what the customer's need.

Personalised

There's nothing like receiving marketing that you feel didn't have the time nor effort put into it to make it feel personalised. As within the financial services industry, no two customers have the same situation, it's the company's job to emulate this through every touchpoint. Businesses must ensure that all marketing tactics illustrate a personal touch, affirming that their services will also be personalised to their unique needs.

Better Communicate Branding

Due to the length that email marketing can take, and the form it's delivered in, the sky (email size limit) is the limit when it comes to creativity in an email marketing campaign. For this reason, the brand can use templates, creative designs and imagery that they would not otherwise be able to communicate through social media posts or press releases.

Through a powerful email marketing campaign, financial services firms can sculpt their branding more effectively and convey an image to the customer that reflects their services and core values better. A financial services firm is much more than just a shoe brand. The firm is responsible for the loss or profit of potentially millions. 

Therefore developing that trust and credible brand image is important and made easier through email marketing.

Multiple Ideas

Many social media channels are limited to one idea or one concept. A limitation in both creative space and text limits the ability of a business to convey multiple ideas succinctly and separately. For instance, in a social media post, a single photo can only generally illustrate one idea clearly, and while the text may be able to cover two topics, the picture does not. This mix mash confuses the customer or draws attention to only one of the issues.

By comparison, in an email marketing campaign, the design elements of the email allow ideas to be broken up and complimented with visual elements in each unique section. Links can be placed at the end of each section, allowing customers to easily match the link up with the topic and learn more about the issue.

Because financial services firms tend to offer a broad range of services from accounting to financial strategy, it is important to ensure that the company's marketing reflects that.

Low Cost

Email marketing is low cost, which is one of the main reasons why ROIs remain high. The resources required to run a successful email marketing campaign are very low, with services such as MailChimp that automate the process making up the bulk of the resources.

The only expensive aspect of an email marketing campaign is when purchasing a database is required. Due to the fact, email marketing campaigns are generally built around contacts that have already been collected by the company, which tends to be previous customers, the limitations of expanding into new markets with an existing database becomes apparent very quickly.

For companies looking to expand into new markets or gather email marketing data they do not have, purchasing a database may be your best course of action, but it can be a costly exercise.

Lead generation

Email marketing provides more data than most other marketing channels. Therefore marketing it is largely effective for an effective lead generation process. By monitoring who has clicked open the email, how many times and if they have clicked through, companies can identify who is more likely to purchase their services and potentially create a new email marketing campaign specifically for those people who have interacted with previous emails most.

It's these very statistics that bolster the average ROI of email marketing. Financial services firms looking to develop their lead pipeline further and feed their sales pipeline should look no further than email marketing.

Segmentation

Similar to the previous point about personalisation, segmentation allows firms to provide marketing content that is unique and relevant to the client. As every customer is different, each carrying a different need for financial services, email marketing should reflect this. Segmentation is a crucial way to bolster the ROI of email marketing and make customers feel like the services and products being offered to them are relevant.

If you use generic email marketing, you may find yourself marketing products to your existing client base that has already purchased said products. The effects of this can be disastrous on your client base, as they feel you have not taken the extra time to provide them with relevant and unique content.

Email marketing is one of the largest powerhouses in the marketing world today, with capabilities that allow businesses to send more targeted and personalised content growing by the day. Especially for financial services firms who are looking to make a name for themselves in the industry, failing to acknowledge email marketing will result in slower marketing traction and slow company growth.