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Why should email marketing be a cornerstone of your financial services business, and how can you harness its potential to boost engagement and conversions?
In this article, we’ll dive into the importance of email marketing for fintech and financial service providers and provide practical insights, valuable tips, and real-world examples to help you supercharge your email marketing efforts.
How Effective Is Email Marketing?
With over 4 billion daily email users, email is a great way to achieve maximum reach and access individuals’ limited attention spans! In 2023, email marketing revenue is set to reach $10.89 billion and grow to over $12 billion in 2024.
It generates an average ROI of $36 to $42 per $1 spent, making it one of the most effective marketing strategies. Businesses that employ email marketing have seen remarkable increases in revenue, with some experiencing growth of up to 760%.
High-performing financial service providers are converting up to 23%, with average conversion rate of 4.3%.These numbers demonstrate the power of email marketing and why it continues to be one of the lucrative marketing channels available.
Email Marketing Benefits For Financial Service Providers And Fintech
Email marketing is an indispensable tool for financial service providers. It establishes a direct line of communication to share timely updates on economic trends and offers valuable insights to customers. This kind of communication promotes trust and strengthens the crucial bond between financial service providers and your customers in an unpredictable financial environment.
Consider the benefits email marketing provides:
1. Qualify and Nurture Leads
Emails can educate leads on the services you provide and who these services are for. This ability to use content to allow a prospect to “self-qualify” without a direct sales team touch saves your sales team time and energy (and money). Once a lead is qualified, you can nurture their purchase journey with timely and personalized emails.
2. Cross-Selling And Up-Selling
Through proper customer segmentation, email marketing enables numerous cross-sell and upsell opportunities. You can sell similar products and services, upsell to higher levels of subscription, and more. You can leverage automated drip email campaigns to further nurture these leads and customers and smartly drive increased customer lifetime value.
3. Targeted And Personalized Marketing Messaging
Targeting and personalization are key differentiators in how financial service providers can stand out in the inbox. You can segment your email lists to deliver personalized content to customer segments, improving relevance and engagement. Subscriber segmentation is seen as the most effective email marketing strategy!
4. Compliance With Regulatory Bodies And Liability Protection
There are a variety of regulatory bodies that enforce compliance. Businesses want to avoid finding themselves in a sticky situation where their marketing efforts comply with local law. Your emails can be tracked and archived for compliance, ensuring regulatory requirements are met. If there are ever suspicions about your email marketing compliance, these archived emails can be used to prove your compliance.
5. Improve Customer Awareness With Educational Content
Email marketing for banks enable them to share educational content, such as financial tips, investment insights, and updates on economic trends, to establish themselves as experts in the field.
6. Improved Customer Engagement
Regular email communication helps maintain customer engagement and fosters trust, especially during economic uncertainty. Providing timely emails communicating your solutions and efforts to protect and increase individuals’ money will reassure your customers and improve your reputation. When customers know you and your company are a trustworthy source, they will continue to return to your resources, email, and services as a solution they value.
7. Feedback, Analytics, and Data Gathering Opportunities
Financial institutions can use email to collect customer feedback, insights, and campaign performance, helping refine offerings, marketing strategies, and address customer concerns. These robust analytics enable you to continue improving the performance of your campaigns and make data-driven improvements.
8. Ability To Utilize Email Automation And Optimization
Email marketing platforms allow for automating specific processes, such as sending out periodic statements or account updates, abandoned cart emails, birthday offers, and more. These automatons save time and ensure consistent communication.
9. Brand Building
Trust and confidence are vital for all businesses, especially finance and fintech businesses. Influence your brand reputation through personalized and informed marketing messages.
Build a reputation of reliability, innovation, and performance. Customers stay with financial service providers and fintech companies they trust to perform well and protect their data.
Email Marketing Regulations
Consumers everywhere take their privacy extremely seriously. Any break of data and privacy can spell disaster for a business. With this in mind, ensure you follow the regulations of the countries you intend to market.
The following regulatory bodies and laws guide email for marketing purposes:
- CAN-SPAM Act
- CASL Laws Canada
- Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations of 2023 UK
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU)
Ensure your marketing efforts meet these regulations and laws in a nutshell:
- Have the individual’s permission to email them.
- Use your company’s domain for your professional emails and verify your domain to protect your business and subscribers from scammers posing as your company.
- Don’t use misleading headers or unclear language in your emails.
- Identify your email as an ad if it is.
- Ensure your email address is visible.
- Include a visible opt-out/unsubscribe option.
- Include any legally required notices and information in your email.
Specific regulations and requirements for financial service businesses:
- If you provide marketing materials on financial instruments or investments, include the specific anticipated performance.
- Prominently display warnings about the risks. Write these warnings in the same font type and size as other content in your email.
Financial institutions are held to very strict standards for communications. Before you send out your first email, complete your due diligence to avoid future problems.
And remember, even if you outsource your email marketing efforts, your business is still responsible for emails sent out on your behalf. If you outsource your financial service email marketing efforts, choose an agency or professional who understands the regulations and reviews all emails they create before sending them out.
12 Effective Financial Email Marketing Campaign Examples
Finance and fintech email marketing doesn’t have to be complex and drawn out. It also doesn’t always have to be boring. But, simplicity is greatly appreciated by subscribers and often improves engagement. We’ve put together some excellent Financial email examples to spur your creative thinking as you work on your next campaigns.
1. Welcome Newsletter Series
With welcome emails, you’ll want to introduce your business and product or service offerings, as well as set proper expectations for what’s to follow. You can also confirm email preferences and collect those responses for future email personalization.
Aikido’s welcome letter is straightforward. The email begins by introducing the writer and explaining the content readers can expect to see. Further down, it links a video along with Aikido’s social media channels and the legally required information at the bottom of the newsletter.
2. Investor Updates and Market Commentary Emails
Timely and relevant content is essential for investors and customers to make informed decisions. News and update newsletters should include new financial and investing information.
M1 Finance provides a great example of an investor update and market commentary email.
There is no fluff content–the email immediately summarized recent news on the Nasdaq-100 and how this may affect investors.
3. Invitations and Events Announcements
An educational webinar attracts your subscribers to interact more with your brand and establishes your business as an authority.
GroundFloor Finance is an excellent example of a webinar invitation email. The email design catches readers’ attention while the content is straightforward. The email includes three buttons or graphics to click to register for the event as well as an opportunity to download the app.
4. Promotions and New Product or Service Announcements
Customers in all industries love a good sale or new product (or both). Providing both the value of a promotion and a new service offering together can turn a hesitant subscriber into a new customer.
Atom Finance sent out a promotional email announcing a new feature. The email included a promo for two months free to encourage subscribers to demo their platform. The email is simple, with short paragraphs and three buttons to make the promo easily accessible.
5. Earning Brief And Payout Schedule Emails
Investors want to know when they can expect their investments to mature. However, keeping up with these dates and dividend payment deadlines is time-consuming. These briefing emails inform your customers and save them time.
We come back to Atom Finance for their fabulous newsletter promoting their earnings season subscription offering. It’s straightforward, easy to scan, and easy to act on.
6. Informative And Education Emails
There is a lot to learn in the finance and fintech industries. Informative emails help readers increase their knowledge and position your brand as a reliable authority. When your business has built rapport as the expert, you are well-positioned to capture the lead when the individual decides to work with a financial services provider.
Heavy Finance sent out an informative email on Green Loans. The email includes a brief introduction, a video interview educating subscribers on Green Loans, and multiple graphics detailing current investment projects.
7. Performance Reviews
Performance reviews are vital emails for finance companies to provide to customers. These emails can be a simple overview of the company’s recent performance or a summary of a client’s investment portfolio performance.
Take a look at this performance review from Heavy Finance. The company summarizes its impact and returns for the month using a couple of paragraphs and a few graphics.
8. Stock Market Newsletters
This newsletter regularly updates readers on stock pricing, trends, and analysis. These insights can inform a stock purchase and increase customer appreciation.
Morning Brew is one of my favorite daily newsletters–it’s great for finance and non-finance people like me (and no, they’re not paying me to say this). This daily email provides a stock market overview with pricing and market changes. The newsletter includes different sections to appeal to a reader’s specific interest. The email covers the local economy, US stock exchange, world, and industry-specific news.
Benzinga follows a similar idea and sends out regular stock and market updates; look at this comprehensive example.
9. Life Events And Stages Emails
A wedding, new home, or rewiring cost money. These are huge life events for individuals and an excellent opportunity for financial service providers to help them navigate. With inflation and job security on the minds of millions, purchasing your first house or considering retiring can be overwhelming.
The Dollar Stretcher sends newsletters that help subscribers deal with life events and sudden changes. The newsletter links to various articles so readers can focus on topics that interest them.
10. Automated and Triggered Emails
Automated and Triggered Emails are powerful tools businesses can use to send relevant email content based on triggers and activity completed by the customer.
You can use email automation to send content based on birthdays, website clicks, and so much more. Having this knowledge about your customers, you can send these emails to remain top-of-mind and strengthen brand recognition.
In this example from The Street, you can see they’re leveraging readers’ interests and activity on the website to personalize the automated email. The email begins with “We noticed you’ve been reading about Microsoft ” and then provides links to related articles.
The welcome email mentioned earlier is an example of a trigger email. A site visitor clicking “Subscribe” triggers this email. Another example is Spread Ex’s Thank You For Signing Up Email.
11. Re-Engagement Emails
Re-engagement emails are sent to inactive subscribers who no longer engage with your regular newsletters. They are meant to spark renewed interest from inactive subscribers, and can be automated or sent on an ad-hoc basis.
Unlayer provides an example template financial service providers and fintech companies can use.
12. Company Announcements Emails
Company announcements keep your subscribers updated on your business’s innovation and value. These newsletters maintain top-of-mind and cross-sell subscribers. These announcements can feature partnerships, expansions, tech innovations, and new offerings. Take a look at Atom’s announcement example.
Wrapping Up
Email marketing for financial service providers and fintech businesses is an invaluable tool. When leveraged with insight and consistency, your business can see unprecedented growth.
InboxArmy helps businesses create impactful email marketing campaigns. With strength in both execution and strategy, we can ensure your email marketing campaigns resonate with your audience and drive meaningful results.
