Everyone has a reason for signing up for email updates. Knowing why can assist funds to tailor their individual nurture campaigns.
TL;DR: record how and why LPs opted-in to your marketing.
Knowing who a contact is and which action they took to start receiving updates is important to email marketing. But as CRM agency Astral notes, effective email always starts with knowing what a contact needs at the moment you write to them.
Therefore, two things should become a priority to record in the CRM: the type of opt-in, and where the person lies in the digital relationship. For instance, a deliberate newsletter subscriber is different from someone who handed over an email address to download one report.
The guide similarly suggests studying the motivations and language behind key triggers – the true ‘intent’ of their email behaviour – reviewing their email history for irrelevant or repeated sends, and judging success by engagement according to opt-in type, as well as how few emails it takes to convert someone.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
A typical asset manager’s database tends to converge different entities under a single ‘marketing consent’ flag, be they consultants, platform gatekeepers, family officers, IFAs, existing LPs and new webinar sign-ups.
As a result, everyone gets the same monthly commentary. That will harm future engagement with those that simply have no care for an update they did not sign up for.
Equally, separating recipient groups is a compliance matter. Under the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), firms need to have a basis for contacting each person, and where the firm is regulated.
The FCA’s financial promotion regime means you must know whether a contact is categorised as a professional investor before sending them product-specific material, and in the US, Marketing Rule obligations differ depending on whether they are an existing or prospective investor.
Determining every contact relationship stage matters due to the length of fund sales cycles. You need different messages sent at different intervals dependent on their journey; i.e. an investor who redeemed last year requires a separate cadence from a prospect that downloaded a report eighteen months ago.
Here are some tips to stay on top of every contacts’ opt-in ‘intent’:
- Add an opt-in source field: record how and why investors joined, be it through events, gated content, direct subscriptions, an introductions, or being an existing client, before reporting their engagement.
- Track relationship stages along your pipeline: align email workflows to cases of prospecting, due diligence, onboarding, and redemptions, meaning they are not clustered into one list.
- Link investor categories to segmentation lists: product-specific content should only reach investors that are recorded as having professional or eligible status.
- Review send histories individually: look out for, and consolidate, contacts that may be receiving multiple near-identical updates a week.
- Measure your efficiency: track the number of emails sent per meeting booked or per allocation to identify how outreach affects asset-raising.
Source
Astral, “Audience analysis for CRM and email” (via TLDR Marketing)
