Email marketing for fund managers is a process with lots of moving parts – it is not as simple as sending a random sequence of emails whenever a manager feels the urge. Without a solid strategy in place, it will become impossible to keep track of it all, as well as planning individual campaigns and measuring your progress and success. Creating an email marketing strategy for your fund marketing is incredibly useful as you can use it over and over again to simplify the process.
Identify your target audience.
Your target audience is the set of people who would make ideal investors. They are the people who want to invest in your fund. Your email marketing should set out to attract them, interest them, and, ultimately, convert them into prospects or investors.
Who are your current investors?
Who are your competition’s investors?
Who will benefit from your funds?
Once you hone in on all of these different groups, figure out where they overlap. Determine common demographic information like:
Location
Seniority
Fund Size
After you figure out your target audience’s demographics, record them.
Build your list of subscribers
To build your email list of subscribers, you need to gather their email addresses. How do you do that? You need to attract them, build trust with them, and win them over so they want to hear more from you.
A few tactics for list-building include:
Create relevant content. With content, you build trust by providing value to your audience. Educate, entertain, or inspire them. Then, somewhere in your content, include a call-to-action that asks them to sign up for your email list.
Make a one-time offer – cheesy but is surprisingly under-used in fund marketing, A free offer in exchange for an email address is a great way to build your list. Try offering a research piece, webinar invitation or ebook and ask for their email before they can download it.
Keep an opt-in form on your website – This is a tactic that plenty of fund managers use. Often, the opt-in form is located in the sidebar or footer and is a static element. This gives your audience the chance to sign up at a moment’s notice while browsing your website.
Email list segmentation
So far, you have one group of email subscribers who probably fall into your main target audience. Sending relevant emails to all these different people can get complicated, especially as your list grows. What’s the answer?
This process involves splitting your list into smaller groups based on similarities. Ideally, each of your list segments should have a different buyer persona attached. This is a profile of the ideal customer that represents the major traits of the entire group. Coming up with email campaigns for each of your segments is a proven way to get better results. According to research by Aberdeen, email messages that are personalized this way get a 14% improvement in click-through rates and a 10% jump in conversions. This is not easy and does require thought into how to segment. A simple way is to segment based on company size, seniority and if they are known investors in other funds.
Create emails aligned with brand and audience.
First up, what kind of emails will you send? A weekly newsletter? A monthly factsheet? Updates on your newest thought-leadership post? Emails triggered based on user interactions with your website?
To help you figure out which types of emails to send, think about a few factors:
Are there important days during the year where a campaign would help spread the word (think big result announcements, events, conferences, holiday, etc.)?
Do you publish content regularly, and would a newsletter help more subscribers see it?
Do you have content ideas that would work well in email messages?
Include all of your email ideas in your email marketing strategy and keep them growing.
Work out your goals and measure your campaign’s success
Here are some sample goals. They are not exhaustive but form a good starting point to use your email marketing campaign to target and raise AuM.
