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You're listening to Financial Adviser Marketing, the best show on the planet for financial advisers who want to get more clients without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal. James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisers grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard. [00:31.7]

James: I know you saw that title, financial advisor and title of this episode is Financial Advisor Sets 14 Clients From A Single Email. Your fingers were probably shaking you are like, Oh boy, time to download this one. I'm going to get into the episode. I'm not going to tease you or anything. We're going to talk about what is arguably my favorite topic, email marketing, and I have long shared that email marketing is one of the most effective appointment setting strategies a financial advisor can use, nothing else comes close. All the other marketing strategies like content marketing, seminar marketing, social media marketing, all that, they're great. If you can't do email marketing, but if you can do email marketing, it's next level, because you can strengthen your social media with email, you can strengthen your seminar marketing with email, or I should say webinar marketing. You can strengthen your content with email and guess what? You can get people to sign up to your email list through your content, through your seminars, through your social media, you can link to, to your emails. You can share them. You can repurpose content. It is ridiculous, ridiculously effective. [00:31.7]

So today I want to compare two different emails I received from financial advisors. They're both about the same topic, which is email marketing, of course, and they illustrate how it can be used effectively to get more clients. Now, the first email goes like this. I'm going to read it verbatim. I've got it in front of me. So, let me find it. I run my own independent RIA and I've been looking at going through your email marketing system. I know your emails are amazing and I also know that you've helped other advisors with emails, but I feel like it wouldn't be worth the time for me. [02:14.8]

Jonathan: Hmm. It works, I don't want to use it.

James: I get it like I, or I don't get it, I should say. But he proceeded to go into a bunch of reasons why email marketing wouldn’t be worth his time. It was like almost like he was trying to convince himself.

Jonathan: Yeah.

James: Not me. That's kind of what it was. And it was pretty much a list of excuses and various forms of projecting his own misguided beliefs onto his business and onto my business, both of us. The key word in that email is feel, he feels like it wouldn't be worth his time, that's the exact word. I feel like it wouldn't be worth the time for me. Well, that's interesting because the last time I checked feelings, feelings, I don't have any impact on email's effectiveness. None whatsoever, because here are the facts about email marketing. [03:09.6]

According to campaign monitor, email average is a 4400% return on investment. So please tell me, financial advisors, whatever marketing you're doing right now, is it getting that type of return? Because like just being straight up with you, if you get more than a 4400% return on investment on average, that's assuming you're dropped at average. I want you to be above average, but just being conservative here. If, if you're doing something else, that's getting a 5000% ROI. First of all, let me know what it is, so I can do that too. And keep doing that. But if your marketing isn't getting that, then you should probably leave your judgment and your feelings at the door. According to McKinsey and company, email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring clients in Facebook and Twitter combined. [03:58.9]

Jonathan: And.

James: Combined. Facebook and Twitter combined. I know a lot of financial advisors on Twitter and I love some of these people, they're amazing. Like I interact with them. Several of them are inner circle members. Like the financial advisor, Twitter community, it's just the cool people, but they're mistaken. And their belief that Twitter is effective at acquiring clients, like they're just straight up wrong, like wrong. And Oh, well I've got one client from Twitter. So that obviously works to say, yep, if you don't understand, you could have gotten 26 or 46 or 76 in the same time with the same amount of effort that you put into Twitter, had you done it with email. That's like, they just don't get it. Some of them don't get it. Some of them were awesome. Inner circle members, like I love you, you know who you are. According to Forrester, people are twice as likely to sign up for your email list as they are to interact with you on Facebook. [04:47.8]

I know in the last episode I talk about TheAdvisorCoach.com/ads, where I'm giving away a free 42-minute online ads training, where I'm basically it's titled How Financial Advisors Can Run Profitable Ads. You don't have to opt in for anything. You don't have to sign up for anything. There's no webinar to register for. You literally type the URL, TheAdvisorCoach.com/ads, click enter or click search or whatever it is that you use and watch the video like it's that easy. So, I'm saying, Hey, I want to help you with your ads, if you're running ads on YouTube or Google or Facebook or LinkedIn, I can help you and I can help you make them better. If I can’t help you make them better, I'm going to refund every single penny, because it doesn't make sense for me to keep your money, if I can't help you, but I'm being straight up with you. Email is more effective than Facebook ads like on their own, holding everything else equally. [05:37.3]

Now, obviously the trick here is to combine both of them, is to take Facebook ads and make sure they're sending people to your email list. But I don't have time to talk about that, that's kind of what you want to do. But people are twice as likely to sign up for your email list as they are to interact with you on Facebook. So, when you're posting on Facebook about your email list or about your content, or maybe you're running an ad, don't be discouraged, if you see like, Oh, nobody is interacting, nobody's liking my thing, nobody's commenting, whatever. People are probably still signing up for your email list. So really pay attention to that. [06:09.9]

According to constant contact email has a higher conversion rate than social media and search. Oh, that's combined too. And according to y- charts email is that the number one preferred communication channel among financial advisors, clients. All of those stats are 100% verifiable. You can research them yourself and you can come to your own conclusion. Like if you don't believe me, if you're like, Oh my God, that James guy is full of crap. You can go to Google. You can type in Forrester email list, statistic Facebook, you can type in McKinsey and company 40 times more effective at acquiring clients. You can type in campaign monitor 4400% ROI. You can come to your own conclusion. That's why I say that email marketing is the best appointment setting strategy for financial advisors. And when I say that I'm speaking the truth because good marketing doesn't care how you feel about it. Your feelings are irrelevant. Think about it like a, your financial advisor. [07:01.6]

I want you to imagine that your clients, they came to you and they told you that their feelings told them that they should try to time the stock market. What would you tell them? They come to you and say, ah, I feel like the market's going to crash tomorrow. I want to get to a hundred percent cash. Oh, I feel that the bucket's going to skyrocket in the next week. I'm going to take out another mortgage, my house. Hmm. What would you tell them? What would you tell these people? I hope you would tell them to ignore their feelings and to follow a proven investment methodology. I hope you would tell them to put on some blinders, ignore the talking heads, keep contributing to the investment accounts. That's very similar to what I am telling you here. When it comes to your marketing focus on results, which brings me to the second email I want to discuss. [07:53.3]

This comes from an inner circle member who also went through appointments on autopilot. Now keep in mind, this is all based on what he said. So, I have no way of verifying it, I didn't get behind the scenes. I didn't see his like email account or whatever. So, I have no way of knowing if this is actually true. These are, this is his report number, right? I said up in autoresponder using the outlines you provided in your program, as well as tweaking some of the emails you provided in your newsletters. Because I provide, sometimes I provide provide word for word emails so financial advisors can use in my newsletters, but back to the email. [08:27.9]

So far, I only have five emails in my sequence, but it seems to be doing the job. The second email is the one setting the most appointments and it's modeled after the example you gave about something, I discussed in the December 2020 issue, I'm not going to discuss it here. So far, I have been able to book 14 appointments from that one email alone. Thank you very much for opening my eyes to a better way. What a difference. Here, you have a financial advisor who realized that there was something better for him. He invested in himself and most importantly, applied the information to get results. And the beautiful thing about doing email marketing, like this is it's so easy to set up. All you're doing is you're putting together a sequence of 5 to 10 emails. I mean, you could do more, you could do less. If you do less or fewer, you could do fewer emails. If you do fewer emails, it's going to be less effective. If you do a lot more, it's going to be slightly more effective. [09:21.4]

But there is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to a sequence, but you get five to 10, you're putting them in an auto responder, like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Lead Pilot's got one. You could use drip, Infusionsoft, whatever. And autoresponder is something that will send out emails to your email list in the sequence you determine every single time. So, it doesn't matter if someone signs up today or someone signs up two weeks from now, it also doesn't matter whether you're working, whether you're sleeping or whether you're on vacation. Both people are going to go through the exact same sequence and the exact same way every single time. And Jonathan, I know this is, this is easy for you. This is like first grade stuff. Cause you've been doing email marketing for years. [10:06.5]

Jonathan: Oh, come on now. I I'm always learning. I think we both kind of learned from one of the, one of the same sources.

James: You recently did an email marketing campaign where you did a giveaway of actually the exact microphone that I'm using right now. And I saw it with my own eyes. With that one giveaway you got close to or slightly over 2000 people to sign up for your email list.

Jonathan: It was it was interesting. It was interesting. And the Mic brought in an interesting crowd, but yeah, w we, we added a few people to give away. It was, we’ll find out, you know, because people don't convert so quickly. So, we'll find out the true value of that over time. But yeah, it was pretty simple, landing page offer something people want. [10:50.3]

James: But I imagine that you probably got a lot of, or maybe you did say this, maybe this is why I'm thinking of it. That you would have gotten a lot of like music artists or like basement rappers who want to be like, wanna be rappers.

Jonathan: Ahh…You know what? I wasn’t expecting that.

James: Hey bro, I need that mic.

Jonathan: Yeah, I wasn't. So, you, you had, you, you saw that perhaps, but I wasn't expecting it. And, and I wasn't expecting it specifically because I thought that I was writing copy that excluded them, like the number one podcast mic. But you're right, we got a ton of musicians. I was actually surprised by how many musicians we got. [11:23.0]

Hey, financial advisors – if you’d like even more help building your business, I invite you to subscribe to James’ monthly paper-and-ink newsletter, The James Pollard Inner Circle.

When you join today, you’ll get more than one thousand dollars’ worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren’t available anywhere else.

Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more. [11:45.3]

James: But even if let's say all, but 100 of them were musicians and they're not right fit for the right fit for you. Even with a small amount of people, like 100, you can still see incredible results with email marketing. And I think that's the part that like financial buyers specifically don't understand. So, when I, if you've ever been through the email marketing webinar, financial advisors, you know, one of the things that I talk about is you don't need a big email list in order to see results. Like, I don't want to get too deep into like the metrics and like give out rules of thumb or whatever, but let's say you have 500 people on your email list and let's say 600. So, I can do the math in my head. So, you have 600, you have an open rate of 33%. So that's 200 people who are consistently opening your emails and you set appointments with 5% of those people over time. Like not all at the same day, but over time you, because sometimes it'd be right for the one person. The other time will be right for the other person like they'll come around, right? [12:46.3]

So, 5% of 200 is 10 appointments. So, you set 10 appointments with these people and let's say that you're “closing” percentage. I don't like using that term, but that's really what it is, is 50% that you have gotten five clients as a result of email marketing. Now that could be great for you. That will be terrible for you, but I'm telling you email list of 500 or 600. The math works out to where you could probably get the, these clients are five new clients. Let's say that you make on average $2,500 per client. So, we'll do the math here. Five times 2,500 is $12,500. So, the appointments on autopilot program costs 2495, we'll round up $2,500. By going through that, if you have an email list of 600 people, and those are your numbers, and that's how it works out, appointments on autopilot basically puts $10,000 in your pocket. [13:46.6]

So, and the beautiful thing about doing email marketing is like, like I said, it's so easy to set up and there are many reasons why financial advisors struggle with email. But one of the biggest is that they don't have these appointments on autopilot sequence and not necessarily talking about the product I'm talking about the sequence here. They don't have a systematic repeatable sequence designed to take someone from a lead to a client. That's what the autoresponder sequence does. And the other thing financial buyers will struggle with is knowing what to say in the emails to get results. That is my specialty. I've been helping financial advisors with their email marketing for years and if you're interested in learning more about that, go to theAdvisorCoach.com/webinar, register for the webinar there, because you can have a massive email list. You can have fancy software, or you can have all the cool gadgets and tools, but if your messaging isn't right, none of that matters. [14:41.8]

Your messaging has to be on point and I've already done all the hard work for you. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to bang your head against the wall, trying to figure stuff out. I already know what works and what doesn't. And my strategy has been replicated many times over. So, the process goes like this. I'm giving you the high-level overview you here. You're welcome in advance. The advisor has an opt-in designed specifically for people in his niche. People in his niche bind that opt-in, they subscribe to his email list. When they subscribe, they're added to his auto responder sequence. I think he's using Constant Contact, but I could be wrong. Like I said, there's a bunch of them out there. You could use Drip, Constant Contact, MailChimp, Lead Pilot, to name a few. If you don't know where to start, go over to Google, Ava search engine and search email autoresponders and start reading. There are tons and tons of resources online. [15:31.4]

But people in his niche go through his sequence. And I imagine the first email in the sequence is the welcome email. I talk about that in the appointments on autopilot program, it tells people a little bit about him and it gives them the free gift that was offered when they opted in. For example, if you offer a PDF download or something or a report, you want to include that in your first email. And if you're on my email list, you'll notice I do the same thing, the same thing I'm telling financial advisors to do. I do the same thing. There's a little tweak that I make for financial advisors that I'm not going to discuss here. It's, it increases the likelihood that someone would set an appointment with them. I don't do that in my email because I'm not trying to get someone to set an appointment, but if you're a financial advisor, trying to get someone to set an appointment, you want to do that. So, it's something that like, it just blows people's minds. I don't want to get into that. And the reason that most of the appointments happen later in the sequence is because as you build trust, credibility, and rapport, by having people go through the gift, whatever you're giving them, they're opting in for something. [16:32.7]

They consume it. It better positions you as the authority. I mean, if what you offer is better than all the other financial advisors on the market, especially for your niche and that's relatively easy, easy to do. That thing you give them when they opt in and it's going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Now, according to the inner circle member of this advisor who sent me the email, the magic for him happened in the second one, the second email. This makes sense because the email that gets sent out on the second day does ask for the appointment right away. Think about the psychology of this for a minute. Everything he does in his process is niche specific. It doesn't have to be, you can still get appointments with email if you don't have a niche. Infact there’s a very specific way that you can do it. Sometimes it's even more effective this certain way, if you don't have an edge, but most of the time I do recommend niching down. [17:24.3]

The interested people are going to consume your gift. They're going to spend time with whatever it is that you created. They're investing their time into you and psychologically speaking; people give more weight to things they spend time with. It's sunk cost. They also give more weight to things because it's theirs because of your gift. You are a part of their world. So, they go through your guide, they spend a little bit of time with you. They're like, Oh, this is the guy who gave me this gift, I'm reading about it in his world. And finally, they're likely “in heat” and Gary Howard, arguably the greatest copywriter ever used to talk about porcupines being in heat. So, it sounds strange, but hear me out. Apparently, porcupines may only be in heat for 10 or so hours in the entire year. But during that time, yeah, these porcupines do whatever it takes, whatever it takes to find a mate, bro, they are in there. They're in the game. [18:29.8]

Jonathan: Get it.

James: That's very similar to how people hire service professionals. Just think about it yourself. There's a period of time where you will read a bunch of articles, watch a bunch of videos and learn a lot of stuff about how to hire a certain people or a certain person. And once you get it down, then you don't consume as much information. The second email takes advantage of your prospective client being in heat as strange way to put it. But you're going to get the message and you're going to remember this later tonight and tomorrow; you're going to remember this concept. Because people opt into your email list for a reason, they're at least somewhat interested in hiring a financial advisor. So, when you pounce, you're taking advantage of this short window of opportunity. Seriously, think about it in your own life. Let's say that you you're looking for a painter, someone hire to paint your kitchen. So, you start looking up. What are some of the things I should look forward to painting service? How do I, I asked for them to prove that they have insurance or that they're bonded? [19:27.8]

You start researching and watching all these videos. You do more work because you're “in heat” for a painting person. The minute you hire the painting person, or you set an appointment with someone, you don't look for information anymore or as much information. And the point is that this advisor wrote the email once. He wrote it one time and it continues to work for him. This is how you build a real business that attracts clients independently of you. So far, you said he set 14 appointments as time goes on, he's going to set more. And some listeners might be thinking, well, how is he tracking this? How does he know he's gotten 14 appointments from that one email? Well, that's an easy, easy answer. There are a few ways to know. One is to use a specific calendar link and associate it only with that email. So, you've got calendar link, number one, counter link, number two, calendar link, number three. And you put numbers one in that email, number two in another email, number three in another email, that's like a convoluted way to do it, but it does work.
Whenever someone sets an appointment through that calendar link, you will know for sure that the appointment came from that email and only that email because you're not using the link anywhere else. A much easier way to do it is to use a tracking code, a piece of tracking code on your thank you page of your calendar. Most email marketing software can provide you with this code. You take that code and you put it on the thank you page of your calendar. And it will automatically track all the behavior from the clicking to the booking and it will attribute it to your emails. That way all you have to do is log in and see which emails are the ones setting the most appointments. So, your email, depending on the software you use, obviously it does depend, but some of them will basically say your thank you page came out five times for email number two, your thank you page only came up three times for email number three. So, you'll be able to see, Hmm, email number two is set more appointments than email number three. And that may sound complicated, but it is super easy. [21:25.9]

If you're confused about this stuff, don't hesitate to reach out to whoever you're using as your autoresponder service, they are in business to help you. Their interests are aligned with yours because the easier and more effective they make their services, the longer you're going to pay them. So, if you're confused about this, definitely don't hesitate to reach out to them and ask for help. My job with this podcast episode is to open your eyes to the possibilities. Let you know what's possible for you. You can have a system like this. So, to recap, you want an autoresponder in your business. You want to see a series of emails that get sent out in a predetermined order and without separating your client, getting efforts like this, where it's working for you, whether you're sleeping, working on vacation, your income is limited. There is no other way, but when you separate yourself, you are more productive. You can increase your income more effectively. So that is it. And speaking of being effective, I'm going to give the teaser. I'm not going to let you ask this time producer, Jonathan. [22:24.8]

Jonathan: Hmm, okay.

James: What we're going to talk about next week is Five Effective Ways to Generate Leads with Content Marketing.

Jonathan: There it is, another Financial Advisor Marketing is in the can. Thank you, guys, for tuning in and we will be back in your earbuds next time. [22:41.4]

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