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, we're going to chat about how financial advisors can get clients with direct mail. I'm not sure if I've ever discussed direct mail on this podcast before. I think I have. I'm pretty sure I have, but I have a list in front of me, going back to episode 200 and I don't see any episodes about direct mail. Maybe I've missed something. I have this sneaking suspicion, this feeling that, yes, I have talked about direct mail, but I cannot find it. I might have had an episode before Episode 200, but I haven't done anything about mail, direct mail, sending letters, anything like that, since at least November 2022 that I can see, so we're going to talk about it now. [01:08.0]
Real quick plug. I promise I won't spend forever on this. This episode is scheduled to air November 25. The deadline to lock in your spot for the December Inner Circle Newsletter issue, which ships on December 1, so the deadline is November 30 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Also, the price of the newsletter is increasing to $199 per month on January 1, 2025, but all subscribers prior to that date will be locked in at the $99 per month price. You can subscribe at TheAdvisorCoach.Com/coaching. That's all I'm going to say about it for now.
See, it wasn't that bad, was it? Because even that's direct mail. I mail a physical newsletter to financial advisors in all 50 states and multiple countries around the world. I spend tens of thousands of dollars per year on printing and shipping costs alone. But in this episode, I want to talk about the sort of direct mail that gets you clients, not the kind that goes to existing clients, like in my case, the mail goes to Inner Circle members. [02:07.7]
When I talk about direct mail for financial advisors, I'm almost always talking about a simple letter that goes to people in your target market and gets them to do something. That something is usually calling your office, because I've noticed a higher response rate with phone calls, but it could also be going to your website to schedule an appointment. It could be sending you an email, but I like to do phone calls as the primary call to action, and then going to the website or scheduling an appointment or emailing you as the secondary call to action, because that way you give people a choice, and in psychology, that's super important—you're shifting the decision from “Do I reach out to this financial advisor?” to “How do I want to reach out to this financial advisor?” Huge shift. Makes a ton of difference. [02:53.4]
Plus, offering two options makes more sense, because a lot of people read their mail after typical business hours. If someone opens your letter at 7:00 p.m., then chances are that person is not going to call your office, so if you only have one call to action to call your office, then you risk it not happening, because people will likely put your letter down and move on to something else and if they do that, then they're probably going to forget about it entirely. They're never going to do it. It's just the kiss of death if they put your letter down.
I want you to picture this. This is what you want them to do. You want someone standing in the kitchen with your letter in one hand, pulling their phone out of their pocket with the other hand, and with the letter still in the other hand, reading it and typing in your address, your web address, your email, your phone number, whatever it is. You want them to do the thing at the exact same time that they open that letter. [03:47.6]
Just so I'm clear, when I say letter, I mean a real letter, a letter written on standard copy paper, 8.5x11 inches I think it is, printed and folded into a white No. 10 envelope. It doesn't have to be white. I like white because it's the most economical, but I have seen boosts in response from using different colors, not always, but white is usually really cheap and just makes economic sense from a business perspective, because if I increase my per-mail cost and that drops my profit by 3%—let's go back to elementary school here, at least business-wise—if you increase your expenses while holding your income constant, your revenue constant, what does that mean for your profit? It means your profit goes down.
If my profit drops by 3%, as an example, then I need at least a 3% bump in response for it to even kind of make sense and from a break even. That's just the math of marketing that a lot of these gurus don't even consider. They just want to maximize, maximize, and there's a time and a place for that. But one of the things that makes me different is I focus on the business economics, what actually makes your business more profitable, what actually makes you, the business owner, wealthier. [04:57.4]
Now, what makes a good direct-mail letter? For starters, it must be written by you, not your company. It should be a letter from one person to another. It should have information about you and the problem you solve for your market. I guess I don't mean that you have to be the one physically writing it, but it has to feel as if it's coming from you. It should not feel as if it's coming from this faceless entity, this company. It should feel like it's coming from one person to another, and it must solve a problem. I really want you to get this, it must, absolutely must, solve a problem that your market actually once solved.
I've seen so many financial advisors and their marketing campaigns, and all of this effort that they put into it, and the campaigns just don't work because the offer isn't good. The offer doesn't solve a burning problem that the market has. I like having proof of concept. It makes life so much easier, meaning, if you have an online ad or a social media post that took off and got you a bunch of appointments, then you should expand on it and mail it directly to your target market. Why? Because you have a proof of concept. You already know it works. [06:04.0]
Your online ad might be able to fit in one page, but with a direct-mailer, you can mail three pages printed front and back with a single stamp. And how much is that stamp? Right now, it's 73 cents. Goodness gracious, stamps have gotten so expensive over the past decade or so. It's just ridiculous. Anyone who tells you that inflation is not that bad, just lying through their teeth. Look at the humble stamp. The stamp is 73 cents. The paper and ink might be another 15 cents or so, and let's throw in some more miscellaneous costs and round up to $1 per mailing. That means, for $1, you can get a total of six pages of your message delivered to anyone in the country. That is so powerful.
Whenever I see financial advisors spending a bunch of money on online ads or content marketing, or virtual assistants or lead gen, or anything like that, I think to myself, Do you have a direct-mail campaign running, especially if you have a proof of concept? Because from a marketing perspective, I'm just telling you right now, if you have a winning marketing campaign, aka proof of concept that works with short copy, then long copy will likely work leaps and bounds better. That's simply because you will have more time to explain and expand on your message and just state your case. [07:15.7]
Let's say you have six pages. I'm just spitballing here. Please don't take anything I say as gospel. This is merely to give you an idea. Page 1 could be all about grabbing attention and talking about the problem your prospective client, the recipient, has. Page 2 could be nothing but agitating the problem, really make that recipient feel it. Just dig into that problem. Make it bigger, make it scarier. It's the agitation part of the problem, agitate–solve formula.
Page 3 could introduce you as the solution. Page 4 could talk about why you're credible, why you can help, what you do, and so on, just about your process, your magic formula, your secret sauce, the thing you do. Then Page 5 could segue into a strong call to action, where the recipient could contact you to solve that problem. [08:04.4]
After that, page six. You've got another page left. That could be your PS, and the PS could be where you insert a bunch of frequently asked questions that—gasp, here's a big secret—they secretly handle objections. Ooh, that's so powerful. One question could be “What if I've never worked with a financial advisor before?” or “Do you have account minimums?” or “How long will this take?” Questions like that. It's a very, very effective technique. You're answering questions about what you're secretly doing, this is top, top secret now, is handling objections, because when they get to the end of that letter and they think to themselves, What about this or this or this or this? boom, right there you’ve answered those questions.
My point is, you can accomplish way more with six pages in a simple direct-mail letter that, again, only cost roughly $1, than you could by trying to push and push and push in other mediums. [09:00.4]
Now, I want to go back to the little bit I mentioned about credibility. On the second Tuesday of every month, I host office hours exclusively for my Inner Circle Newsletter subscribers. We get together. We hang out on Zoom. We talk about whatever is on their minds, and I mean that. I have nothing planned. It is extremely casual. There are no presentations, no lectures, nothing. I just sit there ready to serve, ready to help, ready to be of service.
Back in the October office-hour session, an Inner Circle member shared a rough draft of a direct-mail piece he wrote. It was super impressive and it was one of the best direct-mail pieces I've seen in a long time from a financial advisor, because a lot of financial advisors, they do an OK job. It's just that they're not. They've never tried it. They've never honed their skills. They get a pass. They're not supposed to be excellent at it. I never expect them to even be above average, especially not on the first try. That's what the office hours are for.
But this guy, he was almost all the way there. He just needed to touch it up a little bit. It was very, very impressive. We ended up. Going through his letter line by line and improving it along the way. I'm not going to give away all of the secrets for free, not in this free podcast episode, but I will give you a few things that might help you. [10:11.5]
For example, one of the reasons I like the Inner Circle member’s direct-mail piece so much is because he has a lot of credibility. He's a published author. He has been featured in multiple media outlets, and I think he's the president or chairman of some group related to his niche. I don't remember exactly, but it was something like that. In other words, this guy can approach a cold audience and instantly be seen as an authoritative expert. That is amazing. You could send the exact same mailer out with the only change being the credibility, and the more credible mailer will likely get better results.
I'll use myself as an example. I've been helping financial advisors since 2015, and every year, my conversions, not just from direct mail, but across the board in ads and social media and email everything, every year my conversions go up just a little bit. Just like a ratchet, they go up and then up again, and then up again. [11:03.4]
Is it because I'm becoming a better marketer? Maybe, but I think the biggest reason, if I'm being honest here, is because I have more credibility. I really think that's the case. I wish I could take credit and say, “Oh no, my skills are so much better and I'm such a good marketer. That's why my conversions are going up,” and I'm sure that that's part of it, but the biggest part is more likely than not just the credibility. I've been here for a long time. My results speak for themselves.
I'm actually running my own direct-mail campaigns right now. I dropped off some letters this morning. If I sent that same campaign back in 2015, financial advisors would receive the letters and think, Who the heck is this guy? James Pollard? I don't know him. But now, when I send direct-mail letters, at least some of those financial advisors will think, Wait a minute, James Pollard, that name sounds familiar, and it rings a bell, and that is what enables me to get results for myself that, truthfully, other marketers and coaches and consultants simply cannot get. [12:06.3]
When financial advisors get something from me in the mail and they are my prospective clients at this point, my name rings a bell with them. They think about me and they're like, Wait, I think I saw this guy on social media, or, wait, I think I saw his ad, or, wait, doesn't he have the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast? And that is power.
I'll stick to the United States, since that's my home country. If you are a financial advisor in the United States and you're on social media, then you have probably seen my ads. There is a much greater than a 99% chance, probably 99.9% at this point, that you have seen my ads on Facebook, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn.
If you are a financial advisor in the United States and you have ever googled anything about financial advisor marketing or prospecting or business building, then you have likely visited my website. Then throw in the products I have, the email list I have, the podcast here that you're listening to right now, and just all the other marketing assets, as I call them. [13:07.1]
My direct-mail pieces will do better now than they did in 2015 and 2016, and so on and so forth, because I have more familiarity. I have more name recognition in the market, as marketers will call it. If I got back $2 for every $1 spent on direct mail before, I might get $2.50 or $3, or $4 or $5. Now, that is huge and it's a direct result of multiple marketing strategies. Hmm, wait a minute, maybe there's something to that multiple marketing strategies idea.
Moving on, assuming you have credibility, what are some things you can do to make direct-mail work? If I had to get clients with direct mail, if my life was on the line and I absolutely had to get results, this is what I would do. I would personalize the ever loving crap out of it. [13:58.3]
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
Honestly, I would write one letter to one person. I would make it obvious, drop-dead, can'-mistake-it obvious that I wrote the letter specifically for the recipient. [15:09.0]
For example, an advisor asked me about mailing small business owners. Let's say that one of the small business owners has a coffee shop. The advisor could write, “I love your coffee shop,” directly on the direct-mail piece and attach an actual receipt as proof, meaning, there is no mistaking that this mailer is supposed to go to someone affiliated with this coffee shop. It's not mass-mailed.
It's not going out to everyone, because it's a literal receipt with a financial advisor handwriting on top of the letter, “I love your coffee shop, Joe Smith,” or John Smith or Sarah, whatever, and that is the proof. I would get a pen. I would write on top of the letter, “John Smith, this is for you.” I would circle things. I would draw arrows. I would make it clear that the letter is specifically for John Smith. [15:57.0]
In the early days of the Advisor Coach, this is what I did: when I wrote a letter to financial advisors, if I mentioned something like, “Hi, I run TheAdvisorCoach.com, and I can help you improve your website,” as an example here, I would circle your website and then draw an arrow, and off to the side, I would say, for example, “I saw you have a banner on your website. I think we could switch it with something, something, something,” or “I saw you're offering a weekly newsletter on your website. I think I can improve that by something, something, something.” That is the personalization. It makes the recipient sure that the letter is specifically for him or her, and this takes time.
Yeah, it's not as easy as sending a mailer to a fulfillment house and having them do all the work for you. The fulfillment houses, the mailing houses, they could just print and stuff thousands of envelopes and you can hang out on the beach somewhere. That's awesome, but this personalization is what gives you the edge.
Look, if you're a financial advisor and you're making a few million bucks per year and your client lifetime value is in the tens of thousands of dollars, then you can afford to be a little bit more relaxed with this thing, this whole direct-mail thing, because you have a lot of wiggle room in your business, and your margins can more than make up for it. You are winning based on economics alone. [17:10.3]
However, for financial advisors who are maximizers, maybe they're in the earlier stages of their careers—maybe they're not making millions of dollars per year and they want to make sure that they get the most out of every marketing dollar that goes out into the marketplace—I'm telling you that you should make the letters feel more personalized.
Let's say you're mailing gym owners. Take a selfie of you standing in front of the person's gym and include a screenshot of the recipient’s social media account. Talk about how much you love following that person. This stuff doesn't have to cost money, but it does take time. That's one of the life lessons I wish everyone knew. You always pay for things. You either pay with money or you pay with time. When you don't have a bunch of money, you can pay with your time. You can put in more effort. That's the name of the game. [17:55.4]
When I say you pay with time or money, that applies to investing in yourself too. One of the reasons financial advisors give me money is because I save them time. What do I mean by that? I mean I shorten their learning curves. I save them years of headache and heartache from trying to figure things out for themselves, or from hiring people to, quote-unquote, “do marketing,” which is one of the worst things you can do, by the way, and then having to start over from square one when things inevitably don't work out, that is how I save them time.
If it takes a financial advisor five years to learn how to do something amazingly well and just pour rocket fuel all over his or her business, then if I can get that same result in a year by helping the advisor, how much would that be worth? How much are those four additional years worth to the financial advisors? That’s kind of where I'm playing from here.
Back to direct mail. Here are some other things I do to boost response. We're going to go kind of rapid-fire here. I mentioned the white No. 10 envelope. That's my go-to. Are there envelopes that can get a higher response? Yes. But, again, I'm a business owner. I'm not just a marketer. I think in terms of business economics. Other marketers might focus on getting the biggest response no matter the cost. I like to consider the cost, because cost is a variable in determining profit. [19:10.8]
For example, you can almost certainly get a higher open rate and therefore a higher response if you use FedEx envelopes and maybe you overnight them, and overnight is super expensive, but they would almost certainly get opened. But that would be way more expensive.
I like to handwrite the recipient’s address and I like to handwrite the return address. I'm a bit of a hypocrite here, because I personally don't do this. This goes back to the economics things. It is simply more economical for me to print my addresses, but I'm saying if I absolutely had to make direct-mail work, I would hand write the envelope. I have a lot of other tricks up my sleeve. I can kind of get away with this.
I also like to use a live stamp. This is something that I personally do. I'm not a hypocrite here. None of that bulk rate nonsense. Just use a live stamp. If you are currently not using a live stamp, what I mean by that is you peel and stick the stamp, it is a real stamp. None of the electronic or digital ones that you press on. I'm talking about a peel-and-stick stamp. Use that. [20:11.4]
There's another really cool thing I like to do with stamps, by the way, but that is, for sure, way too valuable to give away in a free podcast episode. That is reserved for newsletter subscribers only. Trust me on that one.
What else? Let's see. Like I said before, I would use multiple pages, for sure. With the type of mailing I'm talking about, the cost of the stamp is the same whether you mail one page or you mail six pages. If you mail one page and I mail six, I'm probably going to kick your butt, simply because I have more room to agitate the problem, build credibility and do all of the things I told you about earlier.
Finally, your direct-mail piece needs to sell. It needs to make a compelling case for why your recipient should reach out to you or do the thing that you want him or her to do. It is not a glossy brochure. It is not something to feed your ego. It is a sales piece. It should sell. [21:04.1]
There's an old adage that advertising is salesmanship and prin. That has certainly been my experience. One of the reasons direct mail is so awesome is because you can take your sales message and for the small cost of paper, ink, postage, and depending on your situation, a little bit of time, get it in front of anyone you want. Now, of course, you need to know how to sell in order to make it work. It is salesmanship in print, or I guess to be politically correct, salesperson-ship and print?
Some of you might be thinking, James, what about postcards? What about handwritten notes? I love both of those. There is a place for them, usually in follow-up, meaning, your follow-up to someone who received your original letter can be a postcard or a handwritten card, or something like that. Then, as a third follow-up attempt, you just switch, so if you send a postcard, then you do the handwritten card. If you did the handwritten card, then you do the postcard. I like handwritten cards because they just feel more real and you could be like, “Hey, I sent you a letter and a postcard or just a letter, but I haven't heard from you. What's going on? I sent this specifically to you. I am eagerly awaiting your reply.” [22:11.3]
One of the highest converting teasers, it's called teaser copy in the marketing world, where they put it on the outside of the envelope, it said, “A favor of a reply is requested,” and that worked really well. I have not seen any test in the financial advice industry. I personally have never tested it because I like the personal feel. Going personal has always worked better for me and the favor of a reply requested, it just puts people in a business mindset. I don't necessarily want to do that. I want to build a real relationship. That is kind of my answer to the card and postcard question that I know I'm going to get as a result of talking about letters.
I actually remember years ago, I was helping this financial advisor build a direct-mail campaign, and he really wanted to send handwritten notes as the first touch with his prospective clients, meaning, he would get a list somehow and the very first thing he wanted to send these people was a handwritten card. [23:10.6]
I told him that would be a bad move for two main reasons. First, handwritten notes are far more expensive to create in time and money than just letters, like the letter we've been talking about. Second, handwritten notes simply have, this is just a hardcore reality, less real estate upon which to convince someone to set an appointment with you. If you have one card and I have six pages, I will likely do a lot better than you.
I know I keep going back to this, you're selling. It's just that you have more room in a letter to make your case, more room than a LinkedIn post, more room than most messages you can send more room than an email because now Gmail is cutting off messages after a certain length. More room than an online ad. You just have more space to state your case and it's so gosh darn cheap. [23:53.0]
I don't remember all the specifics, but I think the cost of what I recommended versus what he was going to do was something like $3,000 cheaper for every 1,000 mailings, and my way would actually get more responses. That's a win-win right there. That means, if he mailed, let's say, 10,000 pieces, simply consulting with me before doing anything saved him $30,000, and don't forget, got him more clients as a result. That’s pretty cool. Direct mail is fantastic.
I'm going to wrap this up here. I think it's highly underrated. I wish more financial advisors would pay attention to it, especially because I think in terms of alternatives, I like to think about what you would do with the money otherwise. If I have $10,000, or let's make it $100,000, if I have $100,000 sitting in the bank right now, I might be able to earn $4,000 per year and have $104,000 at the end of this year. Oh, and I have to pay taxes on that. Let's hold that constant. Let's say there are no taxes, whatever, but you hold a constant, OK? $104,000. [24:58.5]
If I invest, let's say, in the stock market and the stock market absolutely rips 20% this year, I'll have $120,000 at the end of the year. But if I have a strong market-to-message match, I could mail and offer to people in my target market. $400,000, the sky is pretty much the limit in direct mail. I could create an entire campaign.
Let's say I budget $5 for each person to mail an entire three-piece follow up sequence. That means at $5 per person that I budgeted with $100,000, I can mail 20,000 people in my target market with an offer that ideally is already proven to work. Remember, I talked about having proof of concept. Let's say that a mere one half of 1% of those people set an appointment. That's 100 appointments. [25:49.1]
Now you need to figure out what your typical closing rate is. Let's say it's a third, so that's 33 new clients. Next, how much is each client worth to you? Let's say five grand to make the math easy. That's $165,000. Even after factoring in your time, you're probably better off there than you would have been anywhere else, especially because a lot of that revenue is probably and should be recurring, which means what investors call the cash-on-cash return is extremely high. Where are you getting that return? You would get so much money from that initial investment, it would blow the stock market's compounding out of the water. It would blow real estate compounding out of the water.
That's another thing I really wish financial advisors understood. They are way too close to the finance world that they need to take a step back and think about actual money math. What is actually going to make them wealthier? I love IRAs. I love 401(k) and all that. But there are so many financial advisors out there worried about maxing out their IRAs when they should be worried about total return. They should be worried about wealth. What is actually going to make them wealthy? [26:56.6]
If you have an alternative available to you where your return on capital is so much greater, then you can always take that money and invest it wherever you choose. That is the fungibility part of money, because money is fungible. I know I said I'm wrapping this up. I don't want to go off on a tangent or anything, but that's one of the reasons, how I can tell if someone is a horrible investor.
If I see a young guy who has his business rocking and rolling, and he goes out and buys a Lamborghini or something, and he's talking about hustling and building businesses, I pretty much know He's a moron, because the return on capital, especially in the early days of your business, is so ridiculous, or at least it should be if you're running a good business that you shouldn't even think about putting it elsewhere.
For financial advisors, the same money that they stuff away into retirement accounts somewhere, and again, I love retirement accounts, could have grown so much more elsewhere, because you need to think in terms of return on investment, return on capital, what will actually build wealth for you, because is the goal to have a bunch of money in a 401(k) or is the goal to build the biggest business ever, or is the goal to actually be wealthy? [28:05.7]
Really think about that, because maybe the answer isn't in your business, OK? It's not always going to be. Just think in terms of alternatives. I know I've been talking about that a lot in recent episodes of this podcast, the whole “think in alternatives” thing, but it's what helps people.
To be clear, let me be a hundred percent clear—I know this is a Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I have a ton of financial advisors listening—I am not saying you should not invest in your 401(k). I'm saying you should be cognizant of your alternatives and choose accordingly. Choose based on what gets you the most money over your lifetime, and chances are, if you're a business owner, that means funneling the money through your business and then investing it.
Alright, that is it. Seriously, this time I am wrapping it up. If you haven't subscribed to the Inner Circle Newsletter yet, make sure you do that. The link is TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next week. [29:01.0]
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