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By Amanda Larson Webinars

Webinar Replay: Digital Marketing Ask Me Anything With Samantha Russell

63 minute read
Webinar Replay: Digital Marketing Ask Me Anything With Samantha Russell Featured Image

Our very first ask me anything live webinar in September was a huge hit! We got so many great questions in from advisors and we wanted to be sure to address them all. Twenty Over Ten Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer, Samantha Russell, answered 23 questions, many with the same motif and you can watch the replay here or below at any time.

Should I Be Posting to Personal or Company Pages on Social Media?

This is somewhat of a two-pronged answer:

  1. A lot of the social media scheduling tools in light of the last election and everything that happened with Facebook. Facebook specifically doesn’t allow you to use scheduling tools to post to a personal page so you have to post to a company page if you want to use a tool that schedules your posts for you automatically.
  2. It’s always good to have a branded company page on social no matter what because people expect you to do that if you are legit business. however, that being said people interact and form relationships with other people way more than with brands.

So this is also sort of a double-edged sword – you have to have that branded LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter company page but you really are going to get the most engagement when you post on your own personal page.

If you are able to have personal pages from a compliance standpoint I highly recommend having them. You might not be incredibly active on all of the pages but that’s not what’s at X. So a lot of you might follow me on LinkedIn that’s the platform that I like the most. I recently started getting active on twitter but I don’t post there as often. Find the platform that you like the most post there the most often but still have your branded company page and re-share content from that company page on your personal page every so often. So what you don’t want to do is post a blog to your LinkedIn page and then re-share it to your personal page every single time, right? Why would somebody follow both of those accounts? They’re just sharing the same exact information but maybe 20 or 30 percent of what is shared on your company page you can also re-share on your personal page with a new kind of commentary above why that’s important so that would be one way to do it.

Additionally, if there’s multiple advisors or employees of your firm having that branded company LinkedIn page or Facebook page and then everyone has their own profiles and they can each take turns re-sharing certain things or linking back or tagging the company page that’s the best strategy.

Additionally, the more you can make what you share on the company page a little but more fun and interactive the better. So for instance, at Twenty Over Ten, our team did a really good job this summer any time one of our employees would go on a vacation we’d say send us your pictures from your vacation and we shared those on Friday’s with a picture of that employee where they went and a quote about what they did so that people are interacting with our company and got to know the people behind the company who they’re working with. For back to school, we got some really embarrassing photos of everyone on our team from the first day of school and we shared a collage of a bunch of our team members from kindergarten and first grade on their first day back to school and shared that on our social media channels and then our employees re-shared those. So think about ways that you can make your company page more personal and interactive as well is really key to not just having them be these static boring pages.

At the end of the day though, you do need to just set those company pages up because they are another link to an SEO purpose back to your website.

How Often Should I Be Posting on Social Media?

First, of all with social media I have really increased my own personal cadence and how often I’m posting on social media is kind of a test to see what people will be the most receptive to and what gets the highest engagement. So I now post on LinkedIn two to three time a day, five days a week and those five days are kind of sporadic it’s not like Monday through Friday. Sometimes its a weekend, it just depends. and when I do that the number of leads the number of engagement the number of comments and shares we get goes way higher drastically if I’m only posting once a day or you know even once a day but for three days a week.

So I really haven’t seen the threshold I’m sure if I post it 10 times a day people would get sick of it but I think if you have a lot of really great information to share you can push the envelope and post more often. now that being said, what I’m sharing is not you know Twenty Over Ten’s a great company sign up here, did you see that Twenty Over Ten released this product feature sign up here, did you see that Twenty Over Ten is doing this go create an account here. It’s just great educational material that anyone can use whether they’re a customer of ours or not. and so that’s why you need to be focused on the way that you use social media to convert people into actual clients is just to provide really really valuable information.

If you were going to hire a contractor to come to your house and redo your kitchen you would want to see a portfolio of their work, right? If you are going to hire a lawyer you would want to maybe go online and read reviews for a lot of financial advisors they may never have any reviews about their business and it’s a lot harder for people to gauge whether you’re good at what you do or not but content marketing is a great way to them that expertise. So you can post articles that you’re ready and give some commentary about why they’re important or why it’s a good read. So if you read an article in the Wall Street Journal about some tax strategy don’t just report it but talk about your take on it in your post and start a conversation. If you have tips for people on Social Security calculators and which Social Security calculator they should use depending on their circumstances you know that’s real tangible you know helpful information that anyone could use whether they’re a client of yours or not.

That’s what’s important – sharing content that allows people to get to know you, gets to know your expertise what you believe in what your thought leadership is without feeling like they’re needing to buy something from you or sign up right away or become a client.

How Often Should I Be Updating My Website?

I just posted something today about how often you should you know update your website with new content and this is my general rule of thumb: at least two times per week if you’re in a competitive large metro area like an LA, Houston, anywhere big because they’res going t be a lot of advisors all competing to come up first in the SERPs if someone types in “financial advisor San Diego.”

So two times a week quality content on your website and that can be a blog, a podcast, an article, some sort of original piece of content that you put on there that contains those keywords.

If you are in a smaller market that’s not as large of a metro area you can get away with like bi-weekly and still do pretty well if you are in a really specific nice you can really honestly even go as low as once a month as long as the content is highly specific to that niche and really good quality content.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is just when you go and you search for a company online. The area on the right is that company’s Google My business listing. It’s a free tool that you can set up to allow you to showcase your business. So you can add the photos that appear here so if I click on see photos you can see different photos you can choose whatever photos you want. Most important people can also review your business here right. So you can see Twenty Over Ten has a 5-star Google review which is awesome.

What Is a Really Easy Thing I Can Do to Boost My SEO?

Setup and optimize your Google My Business listing. So this is completely separate from your website from anything else. You set it up with Google you just have to verify that this is your business this is your location and you want to fill it out and create a really robust profile. A lot of people haven’t done this yet and this will help you rank higher locally than your competition. If a lot of other advisors in your area haven’t done this so you want to add at least six photos, you want to get reviews, you want to make sure that you know it’s linked on the map and you can even see here like under this appointments if you click this it will open our calendar so people can find us on Google My Business and immediately just book a session with our team right through that appointment scheduler. They can also call our company, get directions, ask questions.

Can I Have Google Reviews as a Financial Advisor?

Here’s the thing – if you are able to set up a Google My Business profile and your compliance department allows you to do that you cannot prevent someone from reviewing your business on Google. Even if you don’t have a Google My business profile but you have claimed your location on Google Maps someone can still review your business through Google Maps so there’s really no way to prevent anyone from creating a review.

There’s a lot of grey area because people see the review as a testimonial but as long as anyone can leave you a review no one can control this. Google makes it that anyone can leave a review for a business if they are verified on Google maps once they lave you a review what you don’t want to do so that you’re not defying compliance in any way you don’t want to comment on the review positively or negatively ever. Don’t ever say anything about it don’t comment on it, respond to it, anything like that and you never want to re-share or re-post those reviews anywhere because that could be deemed going against compliance because you can’t republish them but anyone can technically leave a review for any business on Google Maps that has been verified.

So again you just want to set this up you want to optimize it. But of course, Google wants to keep people on its platform as much as possible right it doesn’t want you going off of Google it wants to show you more ads, it wants to give you the best user experience so if you’re interested in Twenty Over Ten you can come right here and never go to our website and book an appointment, call us, get directions. Google is going to keep you on their page and people appreciate having that access directly to that information so thats why they do that.

What If I Have More Than One Office or More Than One Financial Advisor?

If you’re all under one office you would just still use one Google My Business listing for all for the name so if its Russell Investments and you have 10 advisors Russell Investments would have the Google My Business page, they’re not individual pages. So it would be for your company but if you have more than one office you would still want to claim all those offices on the map and there is a way to do that. You can go to Google Support and search how to claim more than one listing and they will give you instructions on how to do that.

We have set that up for people through our SEO package so if you’re a twenty Over Ten customer and you’re interested in getting help with lots of things related to SEO we have an SEO package that’s $800 for our customers where we will set up your Google My Business, Google Search Console, we will take care of all these kinds of things for you sot hat’s certainly worth checking out if you are a customer of ours.

Local Seo guide

for multi-location advisor businesses

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How Can I Control the Text That Appears in Google Search?

The main purple sections within the SERPs are your page titles and then they grey section underneath that’s called your meta description. You can control all of that through your website platform. So if you’re a Twenty Over Ten customer again if you go to the page settings the browser page title. We always recommend for most of you advisors whoa re trying to rank high in the local geographic area that you put your location first then your secondary keyword and then the company name after that. That’s the formula you want to follow.

For the meta description if you just keep scrolling down under SEO that’ where you put the meta description. So the grey text that appears right here, that is what you would put under this SEO description. So that’s how you can control what appears and you can do that for every blog post, every page on your website.

HOW TO CREATE TOP-RANKING PAGE TITLES FOR YOUR ADVISOR website

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What’s the Difference Between a Facebook Ad and a Boosted Post?

So for 99 percent of financial advisory firms that I work with what I recommend and what will really work best if post organically so don’t use paid ads out of the gate. Post content organically and then Facebook will tell you which of your posts are performing really well and tell you would you like to boost this post if you boost that post then you’re basically adding money to it as an act making it like a sponsored post so it’s not technically an ad because it originally was organic content that you just posted to the platform without any money behind it but you can boost it by adding some money and making it sponsored.

That’s usually the best way to go because you’re allowing yourself to do a little bit of testing to see what organic content is performing best and then only boosting the content that’s already performing well. That’s the best strategy and the one that I recommend. It’s also a lot easier to track and manage and then you can kind of A/B test different things within Facebook’s platform.

Boosting posts on facebook: a financial advisors guide

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What About Google Ads for Advisors?

Personally, I find that most people when they’re doing a GOogle search and an ad comes up they usually kind of now have trained their eyes to scan over the top three results because they know that they’re ads and they go down into what the organic listings are.

So I don’t actually recommend Google Ads for most financial advisors. Instead what I recommend is doing a great job of creating great content that people can find organically because people also trust organic content much more. So instead of worrying about Google Ads, I would think about putting that same amount of money into maybe hiring someone who could help you write more, produce more content so that you can rank higher for those same search terms.

How Targeted Does My Niche Need to Be?

You know if I’m more of a generalist isn’t that better because lots more people will want to work with me, I don’t want to alienate any one person who might be interested. There’s a lot that we could say about that but what it comes down to is people don’t just go online and search a term like “financial advisor,” right? Think about your own behavior when you go to look for something. If you want to find a plumber you might go online and write “plumbers in Phoenix Arizona” or “the best plumber in Phoenix Arizona” or you might search something like “how do I unclog my toilet?” like a very specific phrase you’re looking for help with something. So what you want your website to be able to do is come up when people are searching for that, right?

So we had a webinar we did last month with Kyle Moore, who’s a CFP® who uses Twenty Over Ten. We created his website for him and helped him with his marketing strategy and his SEO and he had one blog post on his blog: “can capital gains push me into a higher tax bracket?” well, when corporate executives were searching for that phrase they would land on his website and some of them turned into actual clients of his.

So that’s the strategy you really want to employ because those people are finding him and they already see him as the expert in this topic they don’t feel like he was trying to sell to them. He wasn’t you know showing up in their LinkedIn inbox saying “hey I see you’re a corporate executive would you like to hear about this strategy?” They found him and that’s called inbound marketing.

So when someone can find you and already see you as the expert that’s when they’re going to immediately find you to be more credible because it’s you putting free information out there that could be useful to anyone and then they start reading all your other blog posts they’ll think, “Man, I want to work with this person.”

So that’s the strategy I would suggest using and the reason that that’s different than putting a little bit of money behind like a Facebook boosted post is that on Facebook and those kinds of places when you’re already sharing the organic content and it’s boosting your posts so it’s just showing up in more people’s feeds people are scrolling they’re not necessarily looking for an ad on what you’re trying to sell them they’re just going to see it in their feed. Whereas when they go to Google and they’re searching something like you know financial advisors in Phoenix and they see you as this ad at the top if just feels salesy it feels like someone is trying to sell their services to them but if there’s a list that you’ve helped curate of the best the top 10 advisors in Phoenix Arizona and on that list you got together with you other advisor friends in Phoenix and you are the person listed there for people that are five years away from retirement and your friend, John, is the person there are four people in Phoenix who are tech executives looking for help your friend John is there for you know young families looking for advisors and you created this list that somebody will listen to a lot more because it’s not an ad it’s organic it’s showing them here’s a bunch of different options depending on what you’re looking for. So you can use tactics like that as well to have content marketing work for you.

What’s the Best Way to Create Content & What Should I Be Thinking About as I Create New Content?

Obviously for all of you if your job is to run a business as an advisor you are not by nature a content marketer and I completely understand that and it can really overwhelming to try to produce all the content that we tell you that you need to produce. that being said, for all the reasons I just explained content marketing is really the new sales tactic that’s better than anything else and it’s really the one that advisors who adopt that tactic see that results.

So we have a tool in our website platform you can think about getting content in lots of different places the reason I wanted my team to create this was because I worked with many advisors just like all of your who told me I cannot create all this content and then they would go and they would get syndicated content from the New York Times or The Motley fool or whatever and put it on their websites. But it was still obvious it wasn’t written by them so it doesn’t make them look like they’re a thought leader to lend that credibility. So we kept thinking how can we help advisors create great content but do it at scale because we’re trying to help so many people, right?

So we created something called Content Assist that you can deploy. It’s also part of our new platform that we have coming out called Lead Pilot. Where it’s content that you can use that’s ghostwritten but you can make it your own. So if you want to post something about life insurance or about refinancing your mortgage, whatever the case may be instead of just post it as-is you can make it your own.

So if you wanted to take this article about the true cost of refinancing your mortgage you could add in Orlando, Florida to it and then say something like over the last 10 years working with families throughout Orlando we did X Y or Z and then share this. It’s a lot easier to work from a piece of content that’s partially developed than one where you have to start from scratch, you have a blank screen staring at you. If you don’t use twenty Over Ten’s content you can use the same principle in other ways.

You can hire an intern and have them come up with ideas of what you could write about, create the skeleton outline, find the stats and the links put together the first draft and then send it to you and then you edit it and put it up on your website or your blog. However you need to get it done, you need to produce some content at least monthly like I showed you and when we initially started here in order to really be able to compete against everybody else through those kinds of Google searchers.

Marketing Can Be Overwhelming For a One-Person Shop. What Three Tips Would You Share?

  1. Do the five-second test on your website: So this is a quick assessment that I’ve done a whole webinar on as well. What you do is go up to a stranger and you ask them to look at the homepage of your website and within five seconds tell you what it’s all about. So you ask them what did you remember seeing? what’s the company name, who do they serve? and if they say things like I think it’s something to do with finance or it looks like they help people with money you know they might be on the right track. but if they can’t say something like this company helps tech executive plan for retirement like a very straight-to-the-point answer then you’re really missing the mark. Because people are going to make an assessment about your website within just five seconds and the way that people find you is often different now. So rather than just getting referrals from their family and friends a lot of times people go to Facebook and they go into a community group or they just post on their own Facebook page “hey does anyone have a great financial advisor that you recommend I work with? People are going to give links and website to advisors and then they’ll probably look at anywhere from two to 10 of those and then they’ll look up those people’s websites so if you are one of three or four advisors  that someone’s checking out you want your initial homepage to really capture that and just pack a one-two punch. You can’t just say something like “financial freedom coming your way” or some generic statement. It needs to be very specific – “I help employees at Exxon Mobil plan for retirement” or “I help young families stressed for time delegate their financial to-do lists.” Whatever your statement is your need to be specific and that goes back to that point about why having a niche is so important. Because if I am a young family and I am the mother of a young family and I asked my friends for their recommendations for advisors and I get this list I need to be able to self-qualify who’s going to be the best fit. I don’t have time to go in and interview 10 different advisors. So doing the five-second test on your website is incredibly incredibly important to make sure that you’re hitting the right message so definitely check that one out.
  2. Produce content at least bi-weekly
  3. Include a calendar app on your homepage – It is crazy what a difference it makes in the amount of leads you will get if you just include a link to a link to a calendar right on the homepage of your website. you know at Twenty Over Ten we have this little schedule a demo button but it’s basically scheduling a phone call or demo depending on what you ask for and it links to our calendar app. I recommend Calendly. I think it’s the most user-friendly, the most intuitive but you can use Time Trade ScheduleOnce, any of those and the reason being is people don’t want to stop and fill out a form and you know give a bunch of information they want to be able to get your contact information, schedule a meeting on your calendar and then know that they have that booked and ready to go. So if they’re looking at advisors at 11 o’clock at night they don’t have to fill out a whole form tell you why they’re interested email back and forth they just book a time on your calendar and then in the future next week they know that they need to be prepped for that meeting. We actually when we launched Twenty Over Ten we did not have a link to a calendar for people to schedule even right on the homepage and when we added it the number of calendar bookings that we had per week went up by like 150 percent. It was some crazy number.

How Do I Know the Content I’m Producing is Going to be Optimized for SEO?

If you’re looking for just general tips to get started and go to our blog and search SEO we have so many great resources. And again, our company specialized in working with advisors so all the examples we’re going to give you and everything we’re going to reach you in specific to advisors. But you can see all kind of things here like how to make sure you’re optimizing your website, making sure your blogs are ranking for SEO. So if you just come to our blog blog.twentyoverten.com and search SEO you can get all kinds of checklists.

Mostly you just want to think about what are the phrases people are going to be searching for and how do I write content about those phrases, right? So we know you think about can financial advisors have Google Reviews we know that’s a question a lot of you are going to type into Google to look for so when we write a post about that that’s what we want to title the post. If you know a lot of your clients are going to ask you know hey can capital gains push me into a higher tax bracket you can write a post about that and the way the Google algorithm works is more compliance so yes that might be a little bit more of a competitive phrase and there could be other advisors in the U.S. that are also talking about that but if you’re based in Minneapolis and you write a post on that topic and somebody else who’s based in Minneapolis searches for something like that they are going to have a much higher chance of finding you because Google wants to give them not only the best content but Google thinks oh this person may also be looking for help figuring this out so I’d rather give them somebody who’s local to them and has that answers as well.

What’s the Best Way to Schedule Social Media Posts?

We had so many advisors asking us questions about what tools should I use for email marketing? What tools should I use for social media scheduling? What tools should I use for lead generation? And we were always feeling awful because we were giving them you know okay you can use MailChimp for email marketing and you can use Hootsuite for social media scheduling but then you still have to create your own content but you can use the content from our library and it just felt like a lot of different tools to have to use and because again you’re not all marketers it felt overwhelming to use to give that advice. Let alone we couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be on the receiving end of it, right?

So we decided to create a tool specifically to help solve this problem. The official launch date of the tool is February 2020 but we are doing some exclusive early access right now but I just wanted to show you it is called Lead Pilot. It will be coming down the pipeline so if you will be looking for something to help you be able to schedule out content in advance or to send emails and to collect leads this is the tool that you might want to look at.

So we will have a content library it will have editorial content as well as video and interactive content but you can schedule out your social media posts through here. You can explore the content library and then once you choose your piece of content you can create a draft of it or you can share it to your different social networks and create different customized messages for each one. So this tool is incredibly powerful because rather than having to use a bunch of different tools you’re able to use everything in one.

So as your contacts come in they’ll populate into this field if somebody only gives you their email like you can see here you can go in and actually view a whole bunch more information about them. So under this profile insight, you can see a picture, we can source for you where they live, how old they are, male or female, their job history, what they’re interested in. We’re scraping the Internet to get all this different data for you and then most excitingly as they interact with your content and fill out your leads a lead score is given to them and so if their lead score gets really high you know that they’ve interacted with your content either recently or very often and that’s a great lead to pick up the phone or drop a separate email to write. So this tool will have email marketing capability, the content to share as well as the social media scheduling all in one. So hopefully that will help a lot of you who have been interested.

HubSpot or MailChimp – Which is Best?

I only know these tools so much as you know kind of on the periphery as I’ve seen other advisors using them and so in terms of what tool is best for those of you already using those kinds of tools I think you just have to find a tool that you’re the most comfortable using. One of the things we really tried to do with Twenty Over Ten’s website engine as well as Lead Pilot as we’ve been building it is think about a tool is not good if it has all these different capabilities but it’s too many capabilities that you can’t use it. So when you are all thinking about your tech stack and what technology to use don’t get caught up in a million different feature if you’re not going to actually use them. You want it to be simple and easy to use and streamlined to get the job done, right? Done and good is better than not done and perfect. If you’re striving for perfection but you never end up getting anything accomplished that’s terrible. It’s the tools not serving you so you really want a tool that is going to be easy to use. That’s what you want to look for in a tool more than anything something you will actually use to get things done.

How Do I Use Tracking Codes for Retargeting Ads?

It’s really up to you and what goals you’re trying to accomplish. I would say for retargeting we add the code to every single page. Because if we’re going to show ads later we would rather that ad be shown to anyone who landed on any Twenty Over Ten property at any time so that’s the way we do it and it doesn’t hurt to just take a few extra minutes so I would put them on all of the pages and for most of you, your websites are pretty light you’re not going to have millions and millions of pages you’re not like a Crate and Barrel or an e-commerce platform so it shouldn’t be that difficult to set up that tracking code on all fo your pages.

Can I Create My Own Content If I’m a Twenty Over Ten or Lead Pilot User?

On all of our products we want you to be the original voice, the original content creator so yes you can absolutely create your own content as a blog or landing page on any. So under add new in our website platform you just click original content you can add all of your own information in there if you are a Lead Pilot user again you go under content you can click compose and you can add in your own content here. So upload your picture, all of your content there so better than anything is original content you create yourself 100 percent, anyone telling you otherwise is not being truthful that’s going to give you the best bang for your buck. However, like I said, it’s much better for you to start with a ghostwritten piece and edit it to fit your audience and vision than to not have anything at all, right?

Do You Recommend Incorporating Video Into Our Marketing Mix?

Absolutely love video! If you go to my LinkedIn feed you’ll see I share a video every single week pretty much and if you go to our YouTube channel you’ll see we share a YouTube video every single week. We have so many great resources for you if you are interested in getting started with video that we created videos on so video marketing tools what you need to get started, everything you could possibly think of – where you should upload it – at the end of the day simple is better.

So I record all the videos that you see me sharing either on Zoom, which is a platform we’re using right now, which is using the camera on my MacBook Pro or on my iPhone. I’m using an iPhone 10 currently and it’s got a great camera and I’ll just record it horizontally topped up with some good lighting and then upload it to YouTube. I don’t do any special editing or anything like that and that’s pretty much it. I use a tool called Loom sometimes if I want to share my screen and have my face be bigger than what Zoom defaults to and all of those tools offer free versions so if you’re just getting started use what’s already in your back pocket, use a free tool because it’s easy. You don’t need any special technology, you just need good lighting, a room that’s pretty soundproof so that you can cut out the distractions in the background. So that’s what I do for video.

Video marketing 101

Harnessing the Power of Video in Your Digital Marketing Strategy

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What’s the Best Way to Upload My Videos to Social Media?

For social media when you upload the video we use a tool called Headliner to add captions. Most people watch videos on social media with the sound turned off or they scroll through them so you want to add captions so they can get the crux of what you’re talking about without needing to turn the sound on and Headliner is a great tool for that. And then we upload them to YouTube without the captions but in the YouTube studio we’ll write out all of what was actually verbally said so that way it’s good for SEO.

So YouTube is the second most used search engine after people going to Google and so you can really get found through people just searching for things and stumbling across your video. But in order to do that you need to make sure you title it appropriately and that you put in a really great transcript. And that’s a great compliance tip as well so if you record a video and you need to get it approved by compliance before you post it you can get a transcription of the video and take that whole transcript of everything you said submit that to compliance have them approve the content on paper and then go ahead and upload it so that way you have a nice compliance workflow to get all those videos approved.

What Tools Do You Recommend for Remarketing?

We use something called AdRoll. For those of you not aware what remarketing is if you have ever gone somewhere and visited a website like you went to buy a pair of jeans at Nordstrom’s and then everywhere you went online later that day you saw ads from Nordstrom about those jeans. That’s retargeting. Remarketing is also what’s it’s called.

So you add a little tracking code on all the pages of your website and then you can use a company like AdRoll to create those ads so that after people leave your website they’re still being hit by you. For most of you you’re not going to need to do that but that’s what we’re talking about so everybody’s in the loop here.

How Can I Use Email Marketing & My New Whitepaper Together to Increase Leads?

The first thing that I recommend is that segmenting is really key. You don’t want to be sending the same message to all of the people that are in your email marketing provider every single week or every single month and by the way in terms of how often you can really email your list up to once a week. Most research has shown without people unsubscribing any more than that and they may see you may start to get someone subscribes so up to once a week is the rule of thumb. But again, it needs to be content worth sharing so don’t email them once a week just because.

One of my favorite emails that I get only comes once a month but it’s chock full of like the best content and it really is one that I look forward to opening, right? Because it’s only sent once a month so that is definitely a good rule of thumb. In terms of segmenting I always suggest having a list for your current clients and you can segment them into you know life retirees, pre-retirees, however, you want to segment it you can segment it by like topics they’re interested in the most.

The important thing is thinking about the rest of the people on the list that are not currently a client, right? So what about like where they came from. So you can have everybody who signed up for a webinar or an event that you did beyond one list and then everybody who like maybe you got from LinkedIn messages that you connected with be on another list or anyone who downloaded a white paper be another list. So segmenting them is really important.

Once you segment them based upon how you got their information you should know a little bit about what they’re interested in and then you can start sending them those newsletters and then based upon what they read in the newsletter you can send them more content. So if you see that they’re really clicking on all of your retirement content if they’re not clicking on anything that’s related to home buying you know that you don’t need to send them more home.

The biggest mistake I see people making is they’ll get someone who downloads a white paper or an e-book and they immediately start attacking them with sales messages. There’s a reason that person didn’t book a meeting on your calendar and just try to talk with you in person it’s because they’re not ready yet, they want to just kind of gauge your thought leadership and get some of your content. So instead what I recommend that you do after they sign up is give them the white paper or the guide whatever it is they signed up for and then maybe a week later there should be an intro email with something like “thanks for signing up for my newsletter or my white paper. I have a newsletter that I send out to everyone who downloaded that guide that goes out once a month it’s full of great tips all about retirement planning. I’m going to go ahead and add you to that and hopefully, you’ll find the content useful.” And then maybe after you see what they click on you can follow back up with additional information like a month later saying “hey I saw that you have been really reading all of my articles on X. I hope people just like you do Y. Would you like to setup up a time to talk? If so, here’s my calendar link. if not, continue enjoying all of my free content on this topic.” So that’s the way that you want to approach that.

Email marketing for financial advisors

5 list segmentation best practices

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In terms of subject lines and sender names one of the other big mistakes I see people doing – I get email newsletters form so many advisors that we worked with which I love and almost always they’ll have you know Russell Investments or a planned financial network the name of the company will be the sender name and the email you don’t want to do that. You want to put a personal person in there. So it should be something like “Samantha, Twenty Over Ten” or “Amanda at Lead Pilot” that’s the way you want to address the email in the sender name because that’s going to get you way more open rates.

And then in terms of the subject line, we have a whole blog post all about the different do’s and don’ts when it comes to what subjects get the highest open rates. You want to avoid exclamations points, avoid using words like “free.” So even if you have like a free guide “free” can put you in somebody’s spam. You really just want to make it seem almost like it’s coming person-to-person email. So if you’re sending an email to somebody that was a potential prospect just one-off email from your Outlook you might say something like “some information for you about retirement” that could be an email subject line that you use. In fact, the ones that have come across as the most informal often get the highest open rates.

For Or Against Single-Page Scrolling Websites?

If you have a website that’s not very chock-full of content it’s pretty short and to the point having everyone on one page that people can just keep scrolling is a great way to capture people’s attention and keep them going. If you’re looking for examples of all different kinds of websites and come to our blog it’s under this showcase page. We have so many different roundups and options for you so this one’s all faith-based advisor websites, this one’s investment advisors, we have before and after transformations, specific networks all different kinds that you can take a look at. But I think that you know overall we really want to think about how much content do you have before we decide the website. If your website’s really content-heavy you’re going to need a lot more pages than just one page but if you don’t have a lot of content you can probably get away with just one.

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