Email marketing isn’t flashy. It doesn’t come with viral hashtags or trending TikToks. But for financial advisors and most of the business world, it remains one of the most powerful ways to build trust, nurture relationships, and turn prospects into loyal clients.
Whether you’re just starting to grow your list or you’re leveling up with automated campaigns, email marketing can help you stay top-of-mind in a world where attention is hard to capture — and even harder to keep.
According to a recent post from OptinMonster, 88% of email users check their accounts more than once per day. 39% check 3-5 times per day. Only 3.5% are not daily users.
With stats like that, email is one of the most reliable ways to reach consumers.
Email marketing also has the potential to scale quickly with relatively little ongoing effort. It does require a time investment to set up and it can become more labor-intensive if you have the capacity and desire to make it so, but a simple welcome automation can be created, reused, and modified for years to come.
This channel is affordable, too. While an individual high-value lead bought from an aggregator could cost upwards of $1000, single sends for an email are less than a penny. Generating leads will cost more than that because not everyone will open or click on links in your email, but the cost of entry is still very low.
Finally, most modern email sending tools already have the basics set up for relevant compliance requirements, though you may still need to get the content itself approved by your internal legal counsel.
To get started you need two things: people who are interested in receiving content from you and an email service provider.
A best practice within this discipline is only building email lists from people who have opted in to receiving your messages. If you’re getting contacts from people completing a questionnaire on your website or otherwise interacting directly with your platform, add a disclaimer that says they consent to being contacted by email.
You may also choose to use a double opt-in system, which requires the person to confirm their interest twice. First with the disclaimer or checkbox on your website and again in the follow-up email they receive.
If you’re buying leads from a vendor, they should have a similar disclaimer on their website that says the consumer consents to receiving email (and other forms of communication) from their partner companies.
This kind of ethical list building helps ensure that your email spam and unsubscribe rates remain low because the people you’re emailing truly want to hear from you.
In addition to the leads you may be buying from aggregators, you will likely be acquiring contacts from internal sources. To encourage this internal growth, financial advisors can leverage the following:
Website forms: You probably have a Contact Us page; you can also interweave this link throughout your blog and general website content.
Lead magnets: These can be things like financial guides or templates that require contact information to access, financial fitness quizzes that ask for information to see results, or complimentary webinars that people have to sign up for.
Lead magnets can be used in paid advertising efforts either to collect user information directly from the ad platform (like lead ads on Meta) or to direct people to a landing page on your website that then asks for their information.
Think of your ESP as your command center – it stores your contacts and lets you send emails at scale, without getting flagged as spam. They usually offer automation capabilities, segmentation options, and have baseline analytics and authentication features built in.
If you were to try to send emails en masse from your personal email account, not only would that be impossible to scale, but your emails would also be more likely to encounter deliverability issues and get flagged as spam.
ESPs usually account for the most common regulatory requirements by default, which is not something your personal email does. Unlike common email platforms like Gmail and Outlook, bulk sending tools don’t have the same restrictions on the number of recipients you can send to per day, and you can create branded templates to give your emails more visual appeal. In short, you need an ESP.
Within the United States, the most relevant act for email marketing compliance is the FTC’s CAN-SPAM and the corresponding CAN-SPAM Rule for enforcement of the Act. Advisory firms using email will also be held to communication standards upheld by the SEC and FINRA.
What follows are some of the most important parts of CAN-SPAM and some relevant legislation from the SEC and FINRA regarding email communication. While this guide covers key points, your legal team can help you tailor everything to your firm’s needs.
The CAN-SPAM Act was created to protect consumers from false and deceptive advertising. While we’re writing about CAN-SPAM in the context of email, this act applies to all commercial messages. These are any electronic messages whose main purpose is advertisement or promotion.
Some key points (see the FTC’s CAN-SPAM article for their full list and more details):
Both the SEC and FINRA have similar rules that require advisors to archive records of communication and correspondence that have particular financial content. Different rules apply to RIAs vs broker-dealers and not all email content may be subject to these rules, but generally speaking, archive your emails and work with your compliance team for the specifics.
Marketing emails are those whose primary purpose is promotional. They aim to get the recipient to take action – to complete a form, to buy a product, to sign up for a webinar. Transactional emails are triggered by a specific action that requires a timely response. Password reset emails, shipping notifications, and event registration confirmations are all examples of transactional emails.
The three main categories of marketing emails used by financial professionals are newsletters, one-off announcements, and automated drip sequences.
Once you’ve settled on your ESP and you’ve added your customer data (you might need an engineer to help set this up), you can begin creating your first email marketing campaigns.
To make email campaign creation easier moving forward, it’s a good idea to create email templates that can be reused for similar emails. Basic templates will include appropriate branding, headers, and footers that include unsubscribe links, business location data, and relevant disclaimers.
If you have different categories of emails (like newsletters or holiday blasts), you can customize your basic template so that each category has its own format.
Within your templates, you can use merge tags to personalize the email for each recipient without creating thousands of email variations. A merge tag is a placeholder for a piece of information in your customer data. When you get a marketing email from a business that addresses you by your first name, they’re using a first_name field to pull in that information.
There are other use cases aside from Hi {{first_name}}. If a prospective client completed a form on your website saying they were interested in investing and estate planning, you could reference their exact interests by adding that merge tag to your email template.
We noticed you were interested in {{contact_reason}}. Here’s a link to our calendar to set up a call.
Personalizing content within the email template with merge tags is separate from personalizing which email campaigns the contact receives.
The latter is a result of segmentation, or the act of separating contacts based on one or more criteria within their data. You may wish to segment contacts based on which services they’re interested in, whether they’re clients already or still in the sales cycle, or how long it’s been since you’ve had some sort of interaction with them.
Your content for someone who wants advice on tax strategies could look very different from someone who has never worked with a financial advisor and wants to get started investing.
Your content focus and marketing intent will determine the details of your email, how many emails you have in the campaign, and how strong of a sales tone you have in each message.
For example, the messaging in a generic welcome email series will typically have more of a push to schedule an intro call than a newsletter whose purpose is mainly to provide information and maintain brand awareness. The welcome campaign might have only two or three emails, while a newsletter series could run indefinitely.
After you’ve created your emails for a campaign, it’s time to automate the process. At their most basic, automated email campaigns have an entry trigger, the emails on a scheduled cadence, and exit criteria.
The entry criteria for a campaign is what triggers the first email to send. This is based on the entry into a particular segment, or a group of contacts that you define (such as contacts who indicate they’re interested in wealth management).
Segments can be defined by multiple criteria, like investing interest, how long it’s been since they received an email, age, etc. Email platforms have different limits to the number of criteria you can apply when defining a segment, but you’re generally only limited by the data you have on your contacts.
When you set the entry criteria to membership in a particular segment, the campaign will launch the first time someone meets the criteria of that segment.
At this point, you’ll define when you want the first email to send after someone has met the entry criteria. You will also determine the interval between the first email and the next, and so on.
Do you want everyone who enters the campaign to receive every email in the series or should the emails stop if they take a particular action? If you’re trying to get a prospect to book an intro call and they do, you may want to take them out of the email flow.
Your email journey with a prospective client will typically start with a welcome sequence. This is where you introduce yourself and your company and encourage them to schedule an introductory meeting with you. There is a clear focus on one action: scheduling the call. Welcome sequences tend to be more succinct, with two to five emails in the campaign.
Once the contact completes the welcome series, they may move to a nurture sequence if they did not take the desired action. Content within a nurture sequence is intended to keep the prospective client aware of your brand while providing valuable information. There is not as much of a focus on taking action immediately.
Nurture flows can also be applied to existing clients, though the content might be slightly different.
Last, there is the re-engage or winback series. These email campaigns launch when a contact hasn’t been interacting with your content or never completed a desired action. This is often viewed as a last effort to bring the consumer back, though some firms may engage in several of these campaigns over an extended period.
If you’re just getting started, feel free to use the information in this section and customize it for your firm.
The following example assumes the lead was driven by Advisor.com for the fictional brand Quantro Advisors, but you can update this to reflect the messaging you want when someone submits their information directly to your website.
This flow is conversational in tone, yet still professional.
Many ESPs will have built-in analytics. These are some important metrics to keep in mind.
As you accumulate data, you can test different variations of your emails and campaigns to improve these metrics.
Email marketing remains one of the most reliable ways for financial advisors to build trust and stay connected with prospects and clients. With a well-built list and thoughtful campaigns, you can create meaningful touchpoints that strengthen relationships and encourage action. Whether you’re welcoming new contacts or nurturing long-term leads, a consistent email strategy can help you grow your business and keep your firm top-of-mind in a competitive market.
