Email Marketing for Financial Advisors: 4 Service Providers to Consider

What’s the Best Email Service Provider for Your Financial Planning Business? We’ve got four platforms to boost your email marketing strategy. Email marketing is integral to your inbound marketing efforts as it reaches thousands of people in just one click. People are using email more than ever, and email marketing has a great ROI. According to the DMA, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $32.

Today, there are many email service providers, and the endless options can be nervewracking. Below we will be exploring the best email service providers to help facilitate your firm’s email marketing campaigns. Using strong email service providers will help you to avoid mistakes and create a strong campaign for your firm. Before checking out the below, the Webinar Replay: 6 Biggest Email Marketing Mistakes Advisor Make & How to Avoid Them can provide some useful tips and tricks.

Email Marketing Tools for Advisors to Enhance Your Online Presence

Before you can begin to implement any email marketing campaigns, you need to select an Email Service Provider (ESP). There are a ton of service providers available to choose from to facilitate your company’s email campaigns and it can be daunting to select which one is right for you. To make it easy for you, we’ve profiled four options to consider when planning out your digital marketing strategy. These four main services we will discuss are Lead Pilot,  AWeber, Constant Contact, and MailChimp. Here, we’ll break down key features and what you should know about each, including pricing.

All four of these ESPs have a marketing focus in both B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer) emailing for large scale campaigns. They also all have the capability to accommodate multiple subscriber lists and segments. Each one is a little different, so read below to learn which one is the right one for you.

1. Lead Pilot

Lead Pilot tops the list for content distribution among many other services. This tool enables advisors to distribute their content via email or social media within the same dashboard. Posts can be scheduled for a future date and time or posted immediately. Within the Lead Pilot dashboard, you can also gain insight on the performance of your content distribution across email and social media including open and send rates, clicks, impressions and engagement.

Best Features:

• You can manage all your content on this one platform
• Automated social posting and email marketing
• Ability to easily schedule and send content
• Analytics to help users gain insight on how your content is performing
• Content that you can send out is completely editable, so it can be tailored to fit your niche
• AI-Powered LEAD score qualifies leads, providing you with contact information, work history, geographic location and much more

What to Know:

• You get a 7-day trial period
• Pricing: $249/per month when you pay annually, $299/month when you pay monthly

2. AWeber

AWeber email service is great for small businesses and provides simple but very powerful marketing tools. If you are looking for some lead generation and to send some immediate follow-up messages, this provider would do the job.

Best Features:

• Automation- when subscribers “opt-in” through your website they will send follow-up messages automatically
• Tag a bunch of subscribers at once
• Email marketing experts are available 24/7 for support
• Has a number of free email templates available
• Integration capabilities with Drupal, Magento, SalesForce and WordPress
• 30-day free trial
• Automatically creates emails from your blog posts
• Ability to test subject lines, send times, email content and much more.

What to Know:

• Does not provide social networking signup form options or social network delivery options
• You can’t include or exclude multiple segments at once when sending an e-newsletter
• Pricing: $19/per month for up to 500 subscribers & unlimited emails, $29/per month for 501-2,500 subscribers, $49/per month for 2,501-5,000, $69/per month for 5,001-10,00, and $149/per month for 10,001-25,000

3. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a service great for sending “batch and blast” emails. These are email campaigns that are relevant to the audiences that receive them. At one time, you are able to email all of your contacts an email campaign that you have created. With slightly more options and sophistication than Aweber, Constant Contact is likely to be a good fit if you are looking to send newsletters or “batch and blast” emails. In addition, whereas AWeber is optimal for small businesses, Constant Contact is great for any sized business.

Best Features:

• Batch and blast emails
• Drop and drag editing
• Upload contact lists from Excel, Outlook, Salesforce, or wherever you store your contacts
• Provides real-time tracking tools
• Has a number of free email templates available (more than double the options as Aweber)
• Integration capability with Drupal, Google Analytics, Joomla, and SalesForce
• 60-day free trial

What to Know:

• No RSS feed capability, meaning you’re not able to receive automatic updates from your site to trigger email sends (Example: if a new blog post goes live on your site, you are not able to automatically have an email sent out to your mailing list notifying your contacts about it)
• Storage limitations
• Limited auto-responder
• Pricing: Email – Starting at $20/per month based on the number of contacts. Email Plus – Starting at $45/per month based on the number of contacts.
• Need help creating a strong email marketing campaign? Check out Elements for Successful Email Marketing Campaigns: A Guide for Financial Advisors

4. MailChimp

MailChimp is increasing its automation capabilities and is likely to be the most sophisticated of the trio. Their wide variety and large number of free email templates available (the most out of these three service providers) makes it incredibly easy to match your email marketing to your existing brand. It is an all-in-one marketing platform that is sure to take your business through the roof.

Best Features:

• Send Time Optimization
• Wide variety and a large number of free email templates available
• Provides marketing CRM tool
• Help you find new contacts with their lookalike audience finder
• Most integration capability with content management systems with 300+ integrations
• Able to integrate with Drupal, Google Analytics, Joomla, Magento, Salesforce, WordPress and Zencart
• Free basic email option

What to Know:

• Pricing: MailChimp offers a variety of plans to pick from: Free- the most basic plan to help you get started, Essentials- starting at $9.99/per month, Standard- starting at $14.99/per month, and Premium- starting at $299/per month

Twenty Over Ten offers a one-click integration for advisors using MailChimp. so that all of their contact forms submitted via their website go into their specified MailChimp list. You can get information and screenshots for that here. So, how do you do this? Check out the simple steps below.

Log into your Twenty Over Ten account.

Step 1

Go into “Site Settings”

• Step 2

  Click on the “Integrations” tab.

Step 3

Hover over the MailChimp section and click on the “Setup” button.

Step 4

Connect your MailChimp account. Once connected, you can select which Mailchimp list you want contacts to populate

The best news of all – Twenty Over Ten offers automatic integrations with third-parties like AWeber, Constant Contact and MailChimp so now visitors can sign up directly on your site and automatically be added to mailing lists. Learn more about this feature.

• Unsure of what email marketing metrics you should be tracking? Check out 9 Email Marketing Metrics to Start Tracking Today