Email, Banner Ads, Webinars And A New Kind Of Hangout For Independent Advisors

Advisor Perspectives, the Website that no asset management marketer can ignore if he or she is interested in better understanding independent financial advisors/RIAs, is making news this week with two items of interest.

Online Marketing Campaigns

First are a few results from Advisor Perspectives’ recent survey of advisors on their response to fund company email, banner ads and Webinars. This follows a comparable survey last year, the results of which were reported on in a whitepaper and blog post, and I offered my take on them, too. This year, Director of Marketing Jeff Briskin says the plan is to distribute the insights in an ongoing campaign throughout the year.        

Independent advisors are no pushovers, as most mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers already know. But, the first of the survey results, made available in a two-page whitepaper emailed this week, confirm that.

Less than one-third of advisors will respond to a Webinar invitation, according to the survey. And, those who do say that a marquee name (speaker or sponsor) is the top way to entice them. Product-focused content? It's the least interesting Webinar "hook" you can offer. 

Banner advertising has limited appeal. The fund company name or reputation matters most to one-quarter of survey respondents (the largest percentage of those responding to banner ad questions!).

But even if you work for a little known firm and don’t have the wherewithal to book a big-time Webinar speaker, there’s hope for you in the survey results about what it takes to get an email opened. Investment whitepapers/research and other thought leadership deliverables sit at the top of the chart and offer the greatest potential as a gateway to show advisors a little bit more about your firm and what you know.

In fact, most investment firm marketers make the assumption that “marketing” to independent advisors/RIAs requires just fresh, solid ideas versus bright, shiny other stuff.

A Forum Of Insights: APViewpoint

To facilitate the exchange of ideas between advisors—something that doesn’t take place on AdvisorPerspectives.com—the mothership tomorrow is launching a new site: APViewpoint. Update: Advisor Perspectives tells me that they've delayed the launch, it should be sometime in May.

There are LinkedIn groups and other advisor communities online, but this site is different in a few ways, according to Briskin. There's nothing unique about the structure or its capabilities, the design isn't flashy. Instead, Advisor Perspectives is hoping that the depth of participation and debate will distinguish the forum.

Thirty thought leaders, including Bob Veres, Harold Evensky and Michael Kitces, have committed to take part. Registration is being monitored to assure that only advisors sign up. To date, 500 advisors have been admitted during the beta process. An email invitation goes out to Advisor Perspectives’ list of 400,000 names starting next week.

“The biggest selling point is that this will be a community of elite advisors,” Briskin says. "These are advisors who are the cream of the crop, people who interested in learning." Advisor Perspectives readers tend to be "more sophisticated" and have higher AUMs, he says.

This video provides additional detail on the forum. 

Briskin gave me guest access and, sure enough, there is a lot of substantive debate and exchange going on in APViewpoint. Responses to the conversations I scanned were longish, reasoned, almost academic.

As of yesterday afternoon, the most commented on post was about using bond ladders for retirement income. A post seeking feedback on some retirement research published by GMO was the most viewed. In the course of one conversation, an advisor commented on the “packaging and marketing attributes” of the "JP Morgan Dynamic Retirement Income Withdrawal Strategy/Breaking the 4% Rule" executive summary. He'd liked it and uploaded the Adobe Acrobat file.

You can see how this could develop into a fascinating way to follow hot buttons and track what’s resonating with advisors.

Fund Companies Will Have To Wait

...Except that for now participation by fund company employees won’t be allowed. Here’s where the conversation with Briskin turned awkward.

“We want the site to live and breathe and blossom,” Briskin says. Advisor Perspectives intends to provide a "haven" for advisors who want to be free to criticize fund companies (and I did spot at least one post drilling into a firm’s performance) and not need to navigate their way through product pitches.

If you’ve spent any time in standard-issue LinkedIn groups, you know what Briskin means. In its early state, the forum is refreshingly free of self-promotional posts masquerading as engagement.

Hope you don’t mind me using space in this blog to describe a community that would not have you as a member. The restriction will lift soon enough.

As advertisers and Webinar sponsors, asset managers are a significant source of Advisor Perspectives revenue. Briskin says the firm's early plans to monetize APViewpoint envision giving firms some kind of access. At some point, he says, Advisor Perspectives may bundle up comments and sell them as market intelligence. Or, firms may have the opportunity to pay to feature a portfolio manager's presence on the site for a week.  

Whatever, the offer will have to work for both sides.

The business of reaching financial advisors online was fragmented when I wrote about it four years ago and it’s even more so now. APViewpoint has a long road ahead not just to build up its registrations but to drive good word-of-mouth among members and repeat visits. Social media will go only so far in raising visibility—promotional posts will link to a registration page. And, search can’t help a site whose content is behind a wall.

The more active users (defined by vibrant, helpful conversations, subsequent log-ins, posting, following, etc.) the more appealing this will be as a forum to get in front of, on a paid basis, or even—assuming fund companies and their Sales staff can promise to behave—in read-only mode. 

I wish Advisor Perspectives team success with this. By the way, the Advisor Perspectives newsletter will start to include excerpts of what’s being discussed in APViewpoint. For the time being, that will be one way to keep an eye on what’s going on in there. It has a brand new Twitter account to follow, too: @APViewpoint.

The Best Email, Websites, Social Media, Content, Presentations In 2013: Others’ Reviews

For those of us susceptible to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), year-end reviews are a tonic. They can catch us up, help us see an underlying order to what we’ve just lived through and provide some perspective on how to tackle the next year.

Rock The Boat Marketing is taking a two-post approach to putting a bow on 2013. On Monday, you’ll see RTB’s annual Content Highlights of the year. What follows is a compilation of what others have called out as noteworthy.

Email

Email is the mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer’s workhorse—it’s what digital marketers do the most, email is interacted with the most and it produces the most results.

Every year at about this time, I regret that I haven’t paid more blog attention to email. As a Chicago Cubs fan, I take comfort in knowing that there’s always next year to atone (and note that I’ve started by listing email first in this post).

In the meantime, please check out this iMedia Connection post highlighting the innovative approaches your peers in other industries took with email in 2013. This industry could use some of that.

Websites

Everybody has been at it so long that lists of "best" Websites tend to have little turnover year after year. If you’re looking for fresh inspiration, check out this DailyTekk list of “the 100 Best, Most Interesting Blogs And Websites Of 2014.” Best enjoyed after hours and on a tablet.

Social Media

Such a big topic it would have been easy to go off the tracks—or run longer than two minutes—but Socialbakers does neither in this succinct summary of social media networks in 2013. 

Content

Those of us marketing thought leadership pieces have been slogging at it for years, but content marketing took on a life of its own this year.

So, it’s no surprise that year-end content marketing reviews got pretty meta. Example: 18 of the Best Content Marketing Strategy Guides of 2013 by Tom Pick of Business 2 Community. These will tide you over until the Rock The Boat Marketing Content Highlights post next week. 

Presentations

With an August publication date, this HubSpot post doesn’t have a year-end hook. No matter, 20 Inspiring SlideShare Presentations Every Marketer Should See is a valuable curation.

It’s also a way for me to call your attention to the Upworthy approach—hmm, what could you achieve if your team was required to write/test 25 headlines for every piece of content? For more background than what the presentation provides, also see this PDF.

Upworthy: 10 Ways To Win The Internets from Upworthy

See you Monday!

Reaching Advisors Via Gmail? Read This

The end may/may not be near.

Retailers and other heavy email users are reporting reduced engagement afterGoogle’s recent change to how it categorizes Gmail. Some are quite upset, going so far as to suggest that Gmail is "killing" email marketing.

In this industry, email is by far the most effective marketing communication, a point reinforced as recently as this table from the July 2013 Cogent Research*: Advisor Touchpoints™. Even so, my sense is that this industry is closer to the "The End Is Not Near" part of the spectrum. But, it is possible that your firm's email effectiveness will be diminished to some extent, thanks to the Gmail changes.

Are you using media lists to distribute marketing messages? This has bearing for them, too.

For Collecting 'Marketing' Emails

For background: Gmail is #8 among email clients. As part of the Google Apps suite, it has particular appeal to RIAs who have warmed to the idea of keeping their data in the cloud.

But, advisors of all stripes long ago decided that there are benefits to maintaining an email address for the purposes of collecting “marketing” (translation, sorry to say: non-essential) messages. Over the years, many gravitated from Yahoo! and Hotmail to Gmail as their preferred free email service. More often than not, it's a Gmail address that's used as a second address when advisors sign up today for asset management communications, among other online offers.

In other words, advisors have already siloed asset management communications from their primary email account's Inbox.

I was worried three years ago when Google introduced a Priority Inbox feature based on the Gmail user’s reading patterns. But now (starting in late May and continuing on a rolling basis that is believed to be complete now), Google is automatically categorizing email as it arrives.

Here’s the upbeat video that Google created when the tabs were announced.

This is a broadbrush treatment, and Google has yet to reveal the basis (algorithm) on which the emails are categorized. We're not likely to ever know.

It's A Tossup Where Mutual Fund/ETF Emails Go

Most asset management communications are sent on an opt-in basis. More to the point, few are promotional in nature. Global investment perspectives and half-price mani pedi offers don't have much in common. Unfortunately, Google is ruling otherwise.

Over the last few days, I’ve used a Gmail address to subscribe to many mutual fund, ETF and investment media newsletters and the early results are not encouraging. The screenshots below illustrate the problem with representative emails received yesterday. 

Most of your work is showing up in the Promotions tab versus the Primary stream. Google's algorithms notwithstanding, to the naked eye there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the categorization.

The most promotional email in the set is the first RIABiz email in the Primary tab, carrying a sponsored message from T. Rowe Price. The content and tone of the emails flagged as Promotions are different in no perceptible way from the emails that made it into the Primary stream. You can't tell from the return address ("economics"), but the last email in the Primary stream, by the way, is from First Trust. Personalized emails show up under both tabs.

By comparison, all of the emails shown above arrived directly in my Outlook account, none was stopped by its industrial strength SPAM filter.

Remain Vigilant

By definition, emails relegated to the Promotions tab will get less attention than email included in the Primary stream. What's an asset manager email team to do? Here are a few suggestions:

• Size the problem.Look into how many Gmail addresses you mail to. Maybe this is not your firm's problem. Another relevant consideration is where the Gmail is being read. The tabbed Inbox is available only in the Gmail webmail client and in official Gmail apps for iOS and Android. One recent study found that only 19% of Gmail opens actually occur in official Gmail.

• Monitor the effect. Create a report that segments only the Gmail recipients on your email list, and track the open and clickthrough rates over time. If you use MailChimp, by the way, you’ll want to read "Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates." Also, ReturnPath offers a Gmail Tabs analysis for brands. Unfortunately, the benchmarking data provided is of limited value given that Banking is the closest it comes to investment companies.

• Be proactive. Prepare and send an email that shows Gmail-using advisors how to move your emails out of the Promotions tab and into the Primary tab. This MailChimp post includes the explanation you’ll need. There's nothing to it. But, be realistic about how many advisors will respond to such a plea. You might think about enlisting your internals in the crusade.

Let's keep an eye on this. 

2 Customer Acquisition Graphs For Your Digital Dashboard

Survey data released in the last week points to a recent rise in the importance of email as a customer acquisition channel for the retail industry.

It’s a provocative finding given that email tends to be the Rodney Dangerfield of digital marketing work, with marketers over the last few years giving much more attention to flashy social media tactics. And yet, see how organic search (whose value is off the chart created by the Custora E-commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot) and email lead as acquisition sources for retailers.

Email's Impact Doubled

At a time when few of us were giving any respect to email, its impact more than doubled, providing almost 7% of customers in 2013 compared to less than 3% in 2011. By contrast, banner ads, Facebook and Twitter crawl along the bottom of the chart. 

The breakdown of lead sources may be different from how asset managers have acquired customers over the last few years—you may want to include Online Event Marketing and would probably drop Affiliates, for example—although I suspect they’re directionally consistent. I also agree with the commenters to the post who point out that social activities may not be getting credit for creating awareness that eventually leads prospects to subscribe to emails.

Whether in the retail or the asset management industry, once a subscriber is on board, email can be a powerful brand-builder and prospect nurturer.

2 Questions

But the purpose of this post is less about the data and more about the exercise. I’ll use the survey as the occasion to pose two questions to you:

1. Are you tracking and comparing the sources of names that you acquire that eventually turn into customers? Your dashboard should include a graph of customer acquisition by channel over time, too.                 

2. Are you also tracking the value of the names acquired by channel and comparing them to a computed average customer lifetime value a la this Custora graph?

Of course, attribution (i.e., in most cases, the source of the last click is the channel credited for sourcing the prospect) is a consideration to work through. But for starters, make sure that you’re collecting and organizing channel and customer value data in a way that lends itself to further analysis.

Speaking of flash, here’s to a fireworks-filled but safe Independence Day! See you back here or on Twitter next week.