You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”—the best show on the planet for financial advisors 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 advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: In this episode, I want to chat with you about a few of my favorite ways to attract retiree clients, and I know retiree means someone who is retired, but I'm also going to talk about pre-retirees as well, people who are about to retire. The reason I didn't include “pre-retiree” in the show title is because it would've made it look weird and I didn't want to do that. [00:52.1]
But before we get into the episode, I want to share something about email marketing with you. I want to give you a blueprint for how to add an extra $100,000 to your business with email marketing. I didn't want to put this in the title or really reveal this, because I didn't want people to click on a clickbait title and say, “Oh my goodness, how can I make $100,000?” If you're here, you're here for a reason. Take this as a sign that you should listen to this.
Okay, here's how to add an extra 100k. According to multiple sources, the average conversion rate for an email marketing campaign is 15.11%. If you google “average email marketing conversion rate”, you will see this number for yourself. I am not pulling it out of my butt. I am not making it up. You just go to Google, type in “average email marketing conversion rate” and see what it is. It's from multiple sources, from reputable places like ActiveCampaign, which is a company that literally tracks this stuff for a living.
However, that number is skewed by e-commerce brands. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that your conversion rate is going to be that high. I'm not going to pee on you and tell you that it's raining. I'm going to be conservative. I'm going to tell you like it is. 15.11% is pretty high. I mean, it's not unachievable, but it is pretty high for an email marketing campaign. [02:02.7]
Still, I want you to keep this in the back of your mind. Your conversion objective isn't getting people to buy something like it is with e-commerce. It is difficult to get people to pull off their credit card or to put their credit card information in or their debit card information. That is difficult.
But you're not doing that. Your objective is not getting people to create an account with a lot of friction, where they have to put in an email address and a password, and maybe their address, and go to Step 1 and Step 2 and Step 3. It's not that. It's merely getting people to set an appointment. Modern schedulers like Calendly and Acuity, they have invested millions of dollars to make this process as frictionless as possible.
However, let's play it safe and assume that your email marketing conversion rate is a third of the average, so that's 5%. The reason this is extra conservative is because according to WebFX, the average conversion rate for the finance industry is 5.1%. This number is across all marketing efforts, good and bad, and email marketing is definitely one of the good ones with a track record of higher conversions. [03:07.0]
So, I'm taking the entire conversion rate for the finance industry and I'm applying it to email marketing, okay? You can google this. You'll see the 15% number for yourself. The average conversion rate across all the stuff is 5% in the finance industry. I'm just going to assume the 5%.
Now, let's assume you make an average of $5,000 per client. Average client values vary wildly in the financial services industry, so run your own numbers. You might do a financial plan for $3,000. You might charge based on AUM and you make a heck of a lot more than $5,000 per client per year, but I'm going to assume you make $5,000. Okay? Got it? Good. This means you need 20 extra clients to make an extra $100,000.
Now, let's assume that out of every three appointments you have, you get one new client. This means you need 60 appointments to get 20 extra clients. If your email marketing campaign sets appointments with 5% of your subscribers, then you need 1,200 email subscribers. [04:12.7]
Now, where can you get these subscribers? You can get them through your website. If you're creating content and you're optimizing for the search engines, then people are going to find your website anyway. How much traffic do you get on your site? Okay? If you get 400 visitors, then go ahead and use your googling fingers. What is the average conversion rate for email landing pages for email opt-in forms? Let’s say it’s 2%. Then you do the math and you figure out, how many email subscribers are you getting from there?
You could get email subscribers from social media. That's the second best way I’ve found. You could get them through online ads. That's the third best way I’ve found. You could get them in forums, in groups, and guest posts and podcasts, webinars and seminars, and direct mail. There are so many ways to get email subscribers. Honestly, getting subscribers is the easiest part of email marketing. [04:57.0]
This also means, in order to add an extra $100,000 to your business in a year, all you need is a strong autoresponder sequence, which is the hardest part, just figuring out what to say in the emails to get the people who set appointments—that is what I help financial advisors with—and less than four new email subscribers per day, because 1,200 divided by 365 is less than four. It's actually 3.28 something, so less than four new email subscribers per day.
If that seems like it's a lot or intimidating to you, then you have bigger problems than I can help you with, especially if you're posting content on your website or through social media, because all you have to do really is put a solid offer in front of people as a landing page. If they want it, they're going to opt in. If they don't opt in, it means your offer sucks or your audience sucks.
Anyway, I just wanted to get the wheel spinning in your head about that topic. If you're ignoring email marketing, you are making a huge mistake. This is your blueprint for adding an extra $100,000 to your business through email marketing. This is literally it. I'm just showing you exactly what you should do. [06:04.9]
All right, now let's talk about marketing to retirees. The first thing I love to include when marketing to retirees and pre-retirees is brutal honesty and transparency. Yes, you should be honest with everyone. That's table stakes. Yes, you should be transparent. However, I’ve found that this audience appreciates it even more, especially if they're on track to retire. They just want to know that they have enough to sustain their lifestyles comfortably in retirement. You are the guide. You are the person helping with that.
Imagine you hire a guide to take you on an African safari. I just saw the movie Beast a couple days ago and it was a really good movie. I loved it. I saw Cujo the night before to prepare myself for it and it was very Cujoesque. But good movie, highly recommend. [06:53.2]
Would you want the person on the African safari, your guide, to beat around the bush and just say, “Well, we could kinda sorta of take this way,” or, “Well, people, most of the time they do this, but it's okay, you can make a decision,” or would you want the guide to be like this? “Dude, that's a Cape buffalo. We call that thing black death. It can run faster than you and it will gore you. Don't mess around. You've been warned.” That's the guide I want. I want the guide to just be straight up with me, tell me, “Look, don't go near that animal. You’re going to die. Right? I don't want that.” People's nest eggs are involved here, so there's no time to mess around.
I don't know how else I can explain, be honest and be transparent. If you're having a hard time understanding what that means, then, really, please just turn the podcast off because this is table stakes. Be honest. Be transparent. Be straightforward. Just keep it real with these people. Keep it real with your clients. The retirees, they just want you to get down to it.
Now, I'm going to move on to the next tip because there's really not much else I can say. Be honest, be transparent. The second thing is to have extra emphasis on trust. Again, life savings are at play and trust-based marketing is incredibly important. Yes, you're going to be focused on trust no matter who you're helping. However, it is even more important when you're dealing with retirees. [08:09.8]
It's like someone with a vitamin deficiency. Getting that vitamin is important for all of us because we need vitamins to live. We need vitamins, minerals, foods, macronutrients, micronutrients. However, it is extra important to someone with a deficiency. I released a podcast episode about 10 or 11 episodes back titled, “How to Build Credibility in Your Business”, and it talks about how to build trust. If you haven't listened to that episode, make sure you do so.
Essentially, people need to trust three things. They need to trust your character. They need to trust what you say, and they need to trust your capabilities. If you miss any one of those three things, then you're not going to get as many clients as you otherwise could, because you could be a wonderful person, everybody loves you, people love spending time with you. But you are incapable. [08:56.4]
I know a lot of people like that. I've got people in my social circle like that where these are wonderful people, they tell great jokes, they tell great stories, but they just, they just flop at business and they flop at their professional careers. I mean, I love them, but it is what it is, or you could be the most competent person in the world, but you're slimy and despicable. Those scenarios don't lend themselves to good working relationships. Trust needs to be in all three areas.
Another thing I want you to understand is that trust is not rational. Again, I repeat, trust is not rational. You cannot approach it rationally. People trust all sorts of things for strange reasons, and it's better to go with the flow. Sometimes you just can't figure these things out. Think of superstitions. People trust their lucky socks on game day. Maybe baseball players love wearing the same pair of red underwear when they hit a home run, I don't know, or think about home remedies that have no empirical evidence. People still trust them. You must work with these things as they are, not as you want them to be. [09:59.8]
This is bad news for financial advisors who have companies that aren't exactly trustworthy when financial advisors google them. If you're at a big financial services firm, I want you to google the name of your company, plus, reviews, and start clicking around. Your prospective clients will see the same things you are seeing. This means you might be the most amazing and most capable person in the world, but these reviews will still cut you off at the knees, because, unfortunately, some people will trust reviews more than what they can see and hear with their own eyes and ears.
People will see what some stranger from three years ago wrote about your company online, and they will trust that person more than they trust what you are saying, what they're seeing, what they're hearing, and it just is. You cannot really work around it. You can prepare them for it. You can elaborate on what they're going to see and those reviews. You can explain why it may or may not be valid, but people are going to do it. It's going to influence their behavior. It will be stupid of you to assume that it won't. [11:00.4]
The final thing that I'm going to share about trust, because this is not a trust-building episode, but this is important. I want you to know that trust can be transferred. This is one reason why referrals work so well, because trust is being transferred from a client to a prospective client. If Joe says, “Bill, I really like working with this financial planner, you should check him out,” then a lot of trust has been transferred in those two sentences. That can do more for you than most marketing campaigns ever will, especially with retirees and pre-retirees, because they are more likely to find their financial advisors through referrals than any other age group.
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 $1,000 worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren't available anywhere else. Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more.
The third thing I like to see when marketing to retirees and pre-retirees is more in-depth content. I don't have any studies or research to back this up, but I will tell you what I have noticed. You can take it or you can leave it. I'm just sharing with you what I've noticed. [12:17.0]
I've noticed that all age groups like doing research and looking at websites and stuff like that, but when retirees are given a thing, something they can hold, check out, skim through, they're more likely to use it. For example, if they're given a book, they're more likely to read the book from beginning to end. Are there exceptions? Sure. A younger engineer is more likely to read an entire book than an older plumber, but as a rule of thumb, they like to get involved with stuff. They go into more detail. That's one reason why there are so many books for annuities. It's been a tactic for decades. You give people a book, let them learn about it on their own, and they will come back to you. [12:59.2]
Now, leave your opinions about annuities at the door. I want you to examine why this works and think about what is actually happening. People get a book, they get a thing. It's pretty in-depth, 100 pages, 200 pages. They go through it. They're questions get answered. Their objections are, quote-unquote, “handled,” and they come back and they're ready to do the thing. They actually consume the material.
Compare that to someone else. Maybe it's a working mom or a working dad, or someone fresh out of college, someone in medical school, whatever. Is that person going to have enough time to read the book? No. Is that person going to have enough time to sit through a 90-minute webinar, even a 45-minute webinar? Maybe, maybe not.
I'll give you another example of a marketing campaign outside of financial services, because when I give examples outside of financial services, strangely enough, people tend to absorb them a little better. Do you remember the Sunsetter Retractable Awning commercials? They were on all the time 10 years ago. I mean, I still see a couple every now and then, but they were on all the time 10 years ago, 15 years ago. They were everywhere. [14:03.5]
Those SunSetter Retractable Awnings were typically bought by people in the fifties and their sixties who wanted to do improvements to their, quote-unquote, forever homes. Do you remember how those retractable awnings were sold? The commercial would come on and would show a happy couple. Yay, they love the retractable awning. And what would it offer? It would offer a DVD and it contained what was essentially a long, informative sales pitch for the awning. And guess what? They watched them.
It's a classic lead-generation campaign and the DVD is the lead generator, and they're still doing it today. If you just google SunSetter DVD or I think it's EasyShade, the name of the actual product now or maybe it always has been, I don't know. My memory is getting kind of mixed up, but they're still offering it today. Yes, they're still offering a real DVD.
Amateur marketers would think, Oh, nobody has time to watch a DVD. We're not going to offer that. But professional marketers know that the DVD was making it work, and making it in-depth, making it long was an essential part of the sales process. There's a reason why they did this for so long. There's a reason why they're still running the darn thing today. Pay attention. Success leaves clues. [15:14.7]
The fourth thing is a little bit more tactical, and it's layering retirees with something else when targeting them. Let me be clear, retirees is not a niche. There are tens of millions of retirees in America, and even more pre-retirees. If you want to do better, when you get in front of prospective clients, you need to make your marketing specific to them.
What are some ways you can layer/filter them? Maybe by geography. You could work with retirees in the Houston area, for example. Maybe by hobby. This is another great way to do it, in my opinion, especially if you're a financial advisor who wants something of a lifestyle business and you enjoy doing things with your clients. The sky is really the limit with this. It could be golfing, hunting, fishing, cooking, boating, classic cars, exercising sports, wine, books, bourbon, and so on. There's so many things you could do. There are lots of ways to layer your audiences and it gets very easy with online advertising platforms. [16:12.2]
For example, let's say you want to target high-net-worth investors and you want to run Facebook ads. You can literally, right now, you know you can stop this podcast right after you hear this and you can do it right now. You can google “wealthiest zip codes in America” and then start running ads to those zip codes. Guess what? Alpine, New Jersey, Saddle River, New Jersey, if you're a financial advisor in New Jersey and you're running online ads and you're not targeting those zip codes, you are dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, because they have wealthy investors there and you can get more clients there.
You can target them and then you can target by things like interest. If you're running a lifestyle business and it involves classic cars, then put a classic car in your ad and make it known. This is not difficult stuff. Remember the pepperoni pizza rule. If you're offering pepperoni pizza, talk about pepperoni pizza. If you run a lifestyle business and you do classic car stuff with your clients and it's just a way that you bond with them and it's a way that you draw them in. Put classic car stuff in your marketing. Really, it's not that hard. [17:15.1]
The fifth thing is showing them the way. Now, retirement can be a scary topic and a scary time. The future is unknown and financial advisors help plan for it. Retirement is a big life step and it's similar to other major life transitions. When you get married, you want to know what the happiest wedded couples know. When you have a baby, you want to know what successful parents do. You want someone who can give you information about the transition itself.
If you're a financial advisor who, how do I say this? I guess, provides information about what retirement will be like, how certain fears are normal, and how to respond to those fears, those feelings, then you will be the trusted authority.
What's interesting is that even though a lot of financial advisors work with retirees, and many of them mistakenly think it's a niche, not many of them take advantage of this. They have a lot of knowledge. They have a lot of evidence about what makes a successful retirement, but they don't share it as much as they should. Share that information. Share what you know. Share your gift to the world. [18:18.0]
While we're on the topic about what makes for a good retirement, I want you to think about these findings from a book called You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think: The Five Money Secrets of the Happiest Retirees by Wes Moss. He found that unhappy retirees are prone to making big purchases at precisely the wrong times. Hmm, isn't that something a financial advisor could help with? I mean, someone who takes a bunch of money out of an IRA for a big-ticket purchase can raise his or her level of taxable income, and that can affect happiness. I'm not very happy when I pay more taxes. Are you?
Wes also found that happy retirees have their mortgage payoff date within sight, close to five years sometimes. The unhappiest retirees have somewhere between 11 and 12 years left on their mortgages. That's something you can share. It's a data point that's backed by research, backed by Wes. [19:09.5]
You can say, “Hey, look, in the process, I have found that the happiest retirees have their mortgage paid off right around this time. I'm going to help you plan around so you can be happy or we can increase your chances of happiness. He also found that happy retirees are typically better budgeters than unhappy ones. They spend more time with their financial planners, too.
You can share this information with your prospective clients and let them know that you're not saying it. Some other guy named Wes Moss is saying it. He wrote a book about it. He did a survey and he found that 79% of people in the happy group, they're comfortable with the amount of time they've spent planning for their future.
On the other hand, 87% of people in the unhappy group feel as if they haven't done enough to plan. 87% of people in the unhappy group, they're like, Oh, I haven't planned enough. I haven't done enough to plan. That's a huge difference and it's something you can bring up with your prospective clients. [20:08.4]
Share that knowledge. Share that information. Share that evidence. You're not just talking about money here. You're talking about happiness. You're showing them the way because you are the guide illuminating their path. Assuming they want to be happy, which is a fair assumption, then it is your moral and ethical duty to let them know that a solid financial plan is correlated with happiness, because it is.
Those are my five or my favorite ways, not “the” five. I've got a whole bunch more that I can share in future episodes, but those are five of my favorite ways to attract retiree and pre-retiree clients. This marks my third episode in a row with the number five in the title. Will I continue the trend next week? Who knows? You'll have to tune in to find out.
If you enjoy this type of content, share it with a friend. Post about it on LinkedIn, tag me in your post so I see it. It costs you nothing but a little time and it helps the show a lot. I greatly appreciate it. I really, really do. If you haven't subscribed to my email list, go over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/57, the number 57, so 57, the number 57, so 57 and opt in. You'll get an 80-plus page PDF with 57 of my favorite marketing tips you can start using right away to get more clients. It'll keep you busy until the next episode, next Monday morning, because I will catch you next week. [21:26.0]
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