Senior Content Editor
Director
As a busy broker, you’re probably wondering whether nurturing leads through an ongoing email campaign is worth the time and effort, especially when it eats into your fee-earning schedule.
Finding the time to hunt for new business can be challenging when you have endless cases to deal with, but email marketing is often touted as one of the most cost-effective ways to nurture prospects, maintain client relationships, and drive repeat business.
It’s often building a subscriber list and creating informative content that takes considerable time and effort. However, AI is now able to help with the latter, making composing emails much more efficient.
The benefits of using email marketing for lead generation
Email marketing offers significant advantages for financial professionals when executed correctly. Here are some of the major benefits it can provide:
Direct personal communication
Unlike social media, where algorithms dictate who sees your posts, emails are delivered directly to your target audience. As email contact lists generally consist of people who have already shown an interest in your services, this drastically reduces the cold calling element of silent contact.
Modern email platforms also allow you to heavily tailor and personalise your content, so you can ensure the right topics reach the right people, and address them by name.
The ability to build long-term trust
Mortgages and financial products are high-emotion, high-trust purchases. People typically prefer to know who you are before sharing their financial history with you. Email marketing gives you the ideal opportunity to build trust.
Through consistent contact, your prospective clients will become familiar with your name and brand, even if they don’t spend much time looking at the email content. Educational content, without direct sales messaging, can also help build confidence in your ability to help them. They’ll come to understand that you know what you’re talking about, which will help when the time comes to actually provide the services.
Low upfront and retention cost
Setting up an account with a standard email marketing platform costs relatively little and you can get some great free templates. If you already have an established client database, either past clients or those who have opted-in from web content, you have a good basis to begin an email marketing campaign.
While fresh enquiries are often best generated through other lead generation activities, email campaigns tend to maintain existing clients with very little additional expenditure. As repeat business is integral to the ongoing success of financial advisers and mortgage brokers, simple communications such as interest rate and legislation changes, make for a great retention plan.
What are the challenges?
Of course, while there are many benefits, there are some drawbacks to pretty much all lead generation methods. Email marketing can be challenging because:
Data collection hurdles
Under strict UK data protection and GDPR rules, contact details can be like gold dust. People are often, understandably, guarded with their data, and you have a responsibility to be compliant with any information you collect.
This can make building a compliant database of ‘opted in’ prospective customers incredibly time consuming. You’ll also struggle to do so without significant web traffic, which also takes time and effort to build.
Delivery issues
Sending an email doesn’t always lead to delivery, and being delivered doesn’t often mean it’s being read. Spam filters are more hostile than ever, as competition for every type of industry floods inboxes daily.
Even those emails that make it through the spam filter are often delivered to a promotions tab, never to be opened. In fact, it’s never been more challenging to get your email read by the intended addressee.
For the percentage that gets through, it’s possible that many of the recipients will still be cold prospects. While repeat clients may find your monthly updates useful, someone who signed up for a PDF guide last year may no longer be considering whatever financial product the guide was about.
The time consistency takes
Consistency is widely known to be the best way to see positive email marketing results. However, creating high quality, relevant content on a regularly scheduled basis can be incredibly time consuming. Even with the help of AI, consistent marketing efforts can be challenging for individual brokers, or a small finance firm.
Compliance risk
Because financial promotion must strictly adhere to FCA guidelines, every email you send will need to be reviewed for compliance and include suitable risk warnings. This adds further time and complexity to maintaining a consistent email marketing campaign.
What are the alternatives?
If, like many finance professionals, you don’t have the time or resources to build a subscriber list, manage content creation and manage database compliance, there are alternative lead generation strategies that can deliver more immediate results.
Paid and Organic Search
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) put your brand directly in front of active searchers at the exact moment they need financial help. Because you’ll need at least one high traffic website to build an email subscriber list, using these techniques together can help to build a robust and long term marketing plan.
Social Media Lead Generation
Social media networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube can connect you with specific demographics. They are also important tools for targeting a younger audience, many of whom prefer this method of communication.
However, much like email marketing, social media marketing relies on consistency and is most likely to be successful over time.
Lead Generation Marketplaces
For the vast majority of mortgage brokers and financial advisers, outsourcing lead generation to a specialist financial lead generation marketplace, like LeadCrowd, is the most efficient choice, particularly for new brokers and smaller firms.
If you don’t have a digital marketing team, or time to build your own email list, providers like LeadCrowd connect you instantly with pre-screened, high-intent consumers. Qualified leads generated by those actively looking for mortgage, pension, or insurance advice can be purchased quickly, easily, and at a relatively low cost.
With LeadCrowd's self-service platform, leads can be bought 24/7 that match your own highly targeted criteria. You can filter by location, postcode, or lead type, ensuring you only pay for enquiries that match your business needs. This saves considerable time that would otherwise be spent on much slower lead generation techniques, leaving you to focus your time where it really matters, closing deals.
Why a combined effort is best
So, is email marketing worth it? Absolutely, but it works best as part of a broader marketing strategy. Much like with investment, it’s never to focus on a sole prospect. When it comes to implementing a full marketing strategy, elements of each lead generation technique can play an important role in your business.
For example, LeadCrowd could be used as an initial acquisition engine, and help when other leads run cold. Email and social media marketing could be excellent retention tools, and SEO/PPC can help you build up an organic list of clients over time. Together, they create a highly resilient, profitable client pipeline.