How To Use Marketing Automation to Increase Efficiencies And Investor Engagement
One big problem in fund marketing is that tools and processes that can make a big difference – AI, big data, CRM etc – invariably don’t.
But that’s because they are not used correctly, which results in stats, metrics and charts that have no context or role beyond marketing. In effect, you end up producing pretty charts that have no relevance to sales, thus can’t help in terms of raising assets under management.
And the underlying reason for this is that marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned and so are not working to the same targets.
Madness – as the only reason both departments exist is to bring in and retain AuM.
And to do that effectively, you must have systems in place across both departments that revolve around identifying and following up with potential and existing investors who are engaging with your content – and thus are most likely to increase, or start, an investment with you.
Knowing this information – and having it all correctly filed in a CRM – gives you a great opportunity to reach prospects and clients with automated campaigns that can have a significant and positive effect on AuM.
A simple example is a drip campaign, which targets prospects within your CRM who have never engaged with you. It’s an automated flow of messages that stop whenever that person actually engages with your content – by clicking on a link, for example. This helps you engage with dormant prospects and lets you capitalise on the investment you made in getting them on board in the first place.
But a more in-depth and profitable way to use automations is by sending business factsheets – and tracking the resultant engagement.
Say, for example, you want to identify those on your database who have just started engaging with your content. This is important information, as someone who has suddenly started engaging could be considering an investment.
To establish this, you can set up an automation that trawls through all your channels – social, investor portal, email etc – to look for new engagement. You can then set a minimum limit – say three instances of engagement – that automatically means that the prospect is passed over to sales as a lead.
This type of automation can be used in other ways, such as identifying those who have stopped engaging, thus could present a redemption risk, or clients who are invested in one fund but are engaging with content related to things they are not invested in, thus presenting a cross-selling opportunity.
And automations can identify where best to send leads. Long-term existing clients, for example, could be sent automatically to your Relationship Manager, whereas new contacts may go to New Business Development.
Another way automation can help you is by boosting event attendance. The easiest way to do this is by automatically resending an initial invite to those who didn’t open the email. But you can go one step further through an automation that follows up on those who opened an invite but did not click on the relevant link, as well as those who clicked on the link but didn’t actually register for the event. Both of these sets of people are absolutely prime for an automatically generated reminder – as they are obviously very interested but may need more persuasion to actually attend.
To sum up, automations are a vital part of fund marketing, as the investor journey is now almost totally digital. Both sales and marketing must realise this and come together, so that marketing is working to provide the type of information that can be used in an automation, which in turn feeds relevant information to sales at the correct time.
