Whenever we talk to new brokerage owners and mention email marketing, we practically expect the puzzled look on their faces – almost as if we suggested using a telegraph or a fax machine. The fact is that most of them think about themselves as clients and automatically associate email marketing with spam email. This happens primarily because these brokerage owners automatically imagine themselves receiving such an email and promptly deleting it and reporting the sender as a spammer. While understandable, this notion is false and causes them to lose potential leads, and here’s why.
The first mistake that the aforementioned brokers are making is that they are projecting their personal experience onto their clients, where in reality, the two share very little similarity. Business owners and people who work in marketing and sales in general are used to receiving a considerably larger volume of emails, and thus usually develop methods of automatically filtering received emails, often based on the identity of the sender and the title of the email. In reality, many traders are not as accustomed to quickly sifting through mass amounts of emails and are thus more likely to read correspondences that professionals tend to automatically ignore.
The second mistake that these brokerage owners make is to forget that most good email campaigns target people who have actively left their information with the expressed desire to be contacted. Unlike the brokerage owners, which have a different agenda and different goals, potential traders that leave their contact information have an interest in the product and are, in fact, waiting for brokerages to contact them. This, of course, is only true if the people you are contacting left their information after visiting one of your landing pages or clicking on one of your ads. If you procured your leads from a third party, the assumption that they are not interested is more likely to hold true.
The third mistake is to assume that every email you send is a Call to Action. A smart email campaign needs to provide the potential client with an added value – something that they can get without committing, without paying, and with no strings attached. If you email a person with an interest in Forex trading and give them useful advice, they are more likely to be responsive to following emails. And by the time you do send them a call to action, or by the time one of your sales reps calls them, you have already built a certain trust.
How to Use Email Marketing Effectively
So after refuting the myth that email marketing is useless at best, and sometimes even detrimental, let’s see how you can improve your email marketing for optimal results.
First and foremost, as we have just mentioned, make sure that your emails are not strictly advertisements. People like and want freebies, so give them what they want!
The second thing is to keep your email lists fresh and filter out unnecessary email addresses on a regular basis. If someone did not open the last five emails you sent him, it is unlikely that they will open the sixth and they are the type of person who probably sees your emails as irrelevant to them. And that’s okay – some people leave their information by accident. Don’t take it personally and focus on the people who responded to your previous emails favorably.
Thirdly, remember that emails are also a way of keeping in touch with existing clients, not only a way of recruiting new ones. This means that email campaigns are also a great way of improving client retention, a fact that is often neglected or forgotten.
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The take home message is that although many business owners intuitively dismiss the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign, this is a mistake because it is a wonderfully useful tool when properly applied, and we highly recommend that you incorporate it into your brokerage’s marketing efforts in the future, if you haven’t done so already.
