Asset Managers – focus on the ’social’ aspects of your email marketing for excellent ROI

from:http://www.stevepnewman.com

Regular visitors to my blog have noted that much of my recent comment has revolved around social media and how it could be utilised by financial services companies. Comments such as these make me reflect on why I cover certain topics in such details. With hindsight, I think it is fair to say that I, like much of the other media out there, (and no I don’t consider myself the next Woodward or Bernstein by a VERY long way), have to a certain extent been caught up in the ongoing hype around social media. Having said that as I have commented in the past, I review my blog analytics regularly and would say in my defence that these posts have been extremely popular with Asset Managers, Banks, Publishers and Agencies alike.

My recommendation however, particularly to Asset Managers, is that they should first of all focus on their email marketing strategies. I say this with a degree of justification from my perspective as much of the email marketing work I see in the Asset Management space both here in Europe and the US could be improved in many ways.

Of course working with my own clients, this is something I am always working with them towards and, rather bizarrely, I have been able to scratch the social media itch for many of them through simply analysing the results of their mailings.

To explain, one of the areas I pay particular attention to is the extent to which messages are seemingly opened and clicked on by individuals. As a general rule of thumb, I say that if an email recipient has clicked on a link on more than five occasions the email has likely been forwarded on to their team or colleague for review.  In some instances this ‘peer’ endorsement (they have after all judged it worthy of forwarding on) can be integral in the communication going viral – sometimes to such an extent that clients are simply astounded at the reach into the marketplace they are able to achieve.

To quantify this, I did some long term campaign analysis for a client recently and out of the 10,000+ clicks their campaigns had received over the last 3 months, 12% could be attributed to one individual email address. Simply put, should this person unsubscribe or move companies, this particular Asset Managers email marketing efforts would be significantly damaged. Needless to say this particular individual is now receiving V.I.P treatment from the Asset Management Sales Manager in question.

Careful management of your email marketing particularly those of you involved in the B2B adviser space can prove extremely lucrative for your businesses. Indeed, I have written about this in detail previously and have included links to relevant articles below: