There’s immense power in a decent-sized, qualified email list for your financial newsletter. Yet two main questions plague many business owners – even those with a large number of subscribers:
“How do I increase the number of people on my list, and how do I improve the engagement rates I’m currently getting from that list?”
Answering these two questions could unlock some impressive results from your newsletter. After all, the more clients and qualified prospects who receive and consume it, the more likely you are to attain new clients or achieve cross/up-sells from your newsletter.
In this article, our marketing team here at CreativeAdviser offers this guide on improving your newsletter readership as a financial firm. The first part focuses on ideas to grow your list whilst the second examines ways to generate more out of your existing list (e.g. enquiries).
We hope you find this content helpful and invite you to get in touch if you’d like to discuss your own financial newsletter project with us.
How to Increase Newsletter Subscribers
Use strategic calls to action (CTAs) across your online profiles
It might sound obvious, but it’s remarkable how few financial firms put this into practice. Few people will sign up to your newsletter if they are not invited to do so. That means finding wise places across your digital platforms to put a call to action (CTA) to subscribe.
For instance, at the end of each of your blog posts you could place a CTA saying something along the lines of: “Did you enjoy that? Receive more great content like this by subscribing here!” In addition, you could pin a featured post on your Facebook profile inviting your followers to do the same.
Give people a reason to sign up
Of course, people are not simply going to join your newsletter just by looking at your CTA. All of us are inundated with emails every day which clutter up our inboxes. So people need a compelling reason to add you to that list of messages, and look forward to receiving them.
To achieve this, however, is not easy and requires a lot of careful thought and work. First of all, your brand needs to be compelling (i.e. the “look” and “feel” of your website and visual identity matter).
Secondly, you need to offer the exceptional value that is difficult for people to find elsewhere.
Think about why people subscribe to the Money Saving Expert newsletter, for instance. Why do people do that? An important reason is that the subscriber is promised a regular supply of innovative ideas to help them save money. The fact that it’s offered by Martin Lewis (a powerful brand icon) helps to push them over the line to press the “subscribe” button.
How to Increase Subscriber Engagement
Tailor subject lines
One of the first steps to getting more open rates from your existing subscribers is to make sure that your subject line is very strong. Here, it simply isn’t good enough to title it: “September Newsletter”. Based just on that title, why would someone want to open the message?
Here, you need to be creative. One idea is to create intrigue. You do not need to convey an impression of scandal or gossip, yet you could try to tease your readers a bit. For instance, perhaps you could lead with something like: “Are you making this £1,000 mistake on your pension?” This causes people to wonder what the mistake is and whether they’re making it, so they want to open it!
Of course, this can be a bit tricky to navigate with compliance in the background. Yet if you can find an angle that engages people and ticks the regulatory boxes, you should get so much more out of your financial newsletter.
Improve your send times
The subject line of your newsletter is important, but it’s also crucial to test different sending times to ascertain the ideal day and hour in the week. For instance, are people more likely to read it on a Monday (e.g. when they’ve just started work) or on a Sunday evening?
Might a lunch hour work better for a newsletter sending compared to early morning (as people are commuting), or vice versa? The answers to these questions are not universal and will vary depending on the distinct nature and needs of your subscribers. This might also change as your list grows.
Use personalisation
Do you address your subscribers by name when they receive your newsletter (e.g. “Hi John”)? If not, then this is an easy area where you can make an improvement using the field placeholder functions of an email service provider by MailChimp.
Personalisation has repeatedly been proven to improve engagement rates on financial newsletters. As kind and polite as you may think “Dear Valued Client” is, it is not as effective as calling people by name. It creates a feeling that the message is especially for them.
Interactive content
One other great way to engage a subscriber base is to vary the content you offer them – and to try and make it interactive. Surveys a good example of this. Here, you can invite clients to leave their feedback on a particular aspect of your service. Or you could run an opinion poll asking which topic they’d like to hear from you about.
Video-based content can also be a fantastic idea. This offers clients a much more visual content experience and is much easier to digest than text-based content.
