7 Reasons why Email Marketing is Essential for Financial Services Firms

While it's easy to say that email marketing is the king of marketing, it's important to understand why, especially for 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 are seven reasons why email marketing is invaluable to your financial services firm and how it can help better your marketing efforts. 

1. INFORM CONSUMERS

Email marketing allows you to provide information to your consumers in a completely new way. Financial services firms are able to convey much larger amounts of information through an email that would otherwise take weeks of social media posts to convey.

If a financial services firm is looking to highlight their financial strategy services, which can be a highly personalized 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 on the other hand allows financial services firms to convey larger amounts of information, explain their services and illustrate customer value in a way that compliments the customer's needs.

2. PERSONALISATION

There's nothing like receiving marketing that you feel didn't have the time nor effort put into it to make it feel personalized. As people within the financial services industry know, no two customers are ever in the same situation, therefore 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 personalized to their unique needs.

3. BETTER WAY TO COMMUNICATE BRANDING

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

Through a powerful email marketing campaign, financial services firms can easily sculpt their branding more effectively and convey an image to the customer that reflects their core values better. Therefore, developing that trust and credible brand image is important and made easier through email marketing.

4. CAN CONTAIN MULTIPLE IDEAS

Many social media channels are limited to one idea or just one concept. This causes a limitation in both creative space and text thus reducing the ability of a business to convey multiple ideas succinctly and separately. For instance, in a social media post, a single photo can only realistically illustrate one idea clearly and while the text may be able to cover two topics, the picture does not. This mix mash can often confuse the viewer.

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.

5. LOW COST

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

The only expensive aspect of an email marketing campaign is when you are required to purchase a database. Therefore, email marketing campaigns are generally built around contacts that have already been collected by the company, which tend to be previous customers. 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, however, it can prove to be costly.

6. LEAD GENERATION

Email marketing often provides more data than most other marketing channels. Therefore, it can be an extremely effective lead generation process. By monitoring who has clicked open the email and how many times 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.

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 need not look further than email marketing.

7. SEGMENTATION

Last but not least, segmentation allows firms to provide marketing content that is unique and relevant to the client. As every customer is different, email marketing should reflect every individual’s need for financial services. Segmentation is a crucial way to bolster the ROI of email marketing and in turn, 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 devastating 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 biggest powerhouses in the marketing world today, with capabilities that allow businesses to send more targeted and personalized content growing by the day. If your business needs advice regarding your marketing strategy or a consultation, get in contact with our marketing team today.

Image: Shutterstock 765578707