The Five Best Converting Email Templates For Fund Marketing
There has been an enduring fascination for email in the fund world. It’s the marketing outreach tool that keeps on giving. The good news is that it will likely continue to remain popular even as personalisation (or, in fact, hyper-personalisation) becomes the norm for investors increasingly demanding tailored communications.
Email has a lot going for it: it presents a lot of multimedia into a small package, points investors to other channels (fund performance documents, landing pages or embedded videos) and keeps an ongoing conversation weekly or monthly with the fund. It’s also a format that the recipients sign-up for and actively want. Whether they’re keen to be enlightened by a portfolio manager about market movements or always keeping an additional eye on a different fund, they’ll outline their preferences and grant a thumbs up for the fund marketer to continue feeding them their favoured content.
That’s a golden apple for fund marketers. With prospects segmented by preferences, email lists can be maintained and kept current––ensuring the right emails meet the right people. This is especially useful if they’re someone a marketer wants to warm towards an eventual sale. Luckily, the Art of the Conversion is best achieved with reusable, striking templates any Creative Director would be proud of.
Core Components of the Conversion Template
There’s a very simple design mantra when it comes to performant email templates: “have form and function”. The form of course looks into brandable colours for every element, how white space is used, font considerations, and tone of voice. Function underlines why a template should be created.
The following examples we’ll look at are all about converting engaged investors, so how can the template’s composition help achieve that goal? To increase subscriptions, build up lead scores and prompt recipients to download lead magnets or sign up for a new event, we see three crucial slices of the pie:
Maintain a professional edge: clean design, an authoritative and expert voice, and fonts that suit an established fund brand help nurture trust from the get-go.
Consider brand awareness: repeated uses of logos, the brand’s colour scheme and employee pictures through every graphic, title or subtitle is integral, as is continually showcasing the fund’s philosophy through the messaging.
Always personalise: first name salutations are just the beginning, as dynamic content attributed to each investor’s interests (shown by their touchpoint data) goes the extra mile in making them feel considered.
Even after understanding who the template is destined for, it can take as little as two or three seconds for an investor to leave an email forgotten in the inbox maze. Here’s where emails serving different functions place conversions at their heart through design, via our mocked-up firm Intelligent Asset Management.
Fund Commentaries
Any asset or wealth manager will see fund commentary emails as their bread and butter. But there’s far more psychology involved to get investors hooked on the information, then taking the plunge to place money there (or in additional products).
As this is one of the more ‘financial’ forms of outreach, it needs hard numerical data and factual information without coming across as dry. This template outlines its intent clearly in its first paragraph:
The fund type is embossed in bold and linked to an external page, making it extremely clear what the subject of the whole email’s content is.
It comes courtesy of a portfolio manager: the expert in the field that investors would value hearing from.
It identifies the fund’s commitment to sustainability, being both topical and favourable to those that want to hear more on ESG investing.
A personal touch is valuable for conversions in that investors know who to talk to to learn more. The picture emphasises real contact, not an anonymous ‘behind the screen’ voice.
Performance is not the be-all-end-all for a lot of fund content, but it certainly plays a leading role here. These templates can swap in graphs according to historical performance which, in positive cases, are certainly enticing. These can be interactive too, so long as they do not take away from the additional commentary that grants condensed insight into how the fund fits into the overall investment approach––a captivating ‘storytelling’ style that can keep investors following along with future emails.
All these elements are subtly branded in recognisable colours, being eye-catching and breaking up white space to prompt clicks.
Exclusive Webinar Invitations
Online events are all about sign-ups: getting investors through the door, to help them learn and be inspired to speak to an advisor about where to invest according to their goals.
An event invitation template should try to get them to click ‘attend’ fairly quickly. There’s not much waffle needed; ideally, a very short introduction that outlines what the investor will get from watching the webinar, which in this case is how to align the money they want to put away with a sustainable fund.
Whenever we’re interested in an event, we want to know all the crucial details straight away. Here, all that information is ‘framed’ into a branded graphic: the webinar’s title, data and time. Most importantly is a large unavoidable call to action (CTA) which, if they’re free to attend, is directly there to tempt them to sign-up immediately.
For those that want extra information, a ‘Why Attend?’ section offers more about the value they’ll gain (answering their potential “what’s in it for me?” question), made more bite-sized using animated icons as visual cues.
The continuous scroll template design acts as a funnel to direct viewers throughout the whole email and catch them when they feel engaged––particularly with that final button to encourage participation. A final roll of the dice is to be time sensitive. ‘Spaces limited’ can help gain faster responses, thus more potential users that could be converted post-webinar.
If the webinar invitation (or indeed multiple reminder remails) is to get investors involved, the ‘thank you’ is the next breadcrumb to nurture their piqued interest.
The purpose here is to re-catch them straight after attending, when the desire to explore more about the discussed fund or strategy will be strongest. Or, delivering a download to those that could not make it on the day. You keep them in the ‘possible conversion’ category rather than cooling their engagement, while capturing the details for everyone that requests a replay via a landing page. With slides or videos ‘On Demand’, this places the ball in the investors’ court to do as they wish in their own time, too. The specific key takeaways should double down on the benefits of watching (as the original invite had) and the graphics similarly branded and laid out to boost that recognition factor.
The final piece of a puzzle to guide conversions is offering further follow ups with the Investor Relations team. Phone numbers, emails and social links grant investors options but all aim to keep a conversation going (hopefully to a sale!).
In-Person Events
Real-life conferences or roundtables demand more participation time from an investor, but could lead to face-to-face meetings with money managers they may have spoken to on the phone or seen online.
It’s best to stress exclusivity in this template, with numerous design considerations to do so. One is language: proving that it’s a unique opportunity (particularly with in-person events not so commonplace these days). Likewise, images of the hosting venue displays professionalism without trying anything fancy, besides housing it in your branded colours, of course!
Giving the details upfront means that end users do not have to scroll endlessly to identify the agenda points that can convince them to join. Having a ‘Process’ outlined also streamlines correspondence; making clear they’ll only need to click the RSVP button once, and not have a back-and-forth to get further information. Laying out the template in step-by-step blocks works well to lead the recipient to that all-important CTA.
Any good news being made transparent to investors ups that friendly, personal feeling. But how can it help conversions? Getting certifications through good work speaks volumes about the quality of service that performance, outlook videos, and reports cannot do in such a short space of time. As you can see in this example, investors are acknowledged for their contribution – there’d be no fund without them after all! – which identifies the wider picture of all those contributing to success.
Of course, design elements are paramount to cementing recognition. The Morningstar Ratings and award logos speak for themselves, sitting amongst the recognisable colours an email chain should always keep consistent. A lot of text could be off-putting, and so the graphical balance is necessary.
A template primed for conversions goes beyond the initial announcement. Offering the fund report through a link acts as a subtle click-through to the website, pointing investors to peruse extra materials alongside contact details they can use for queries. When you offer multiple ways to take an email open to a dialogue with the sales team, the likelihood of a conversion is far more likely.
Trialling Conversion Success
The language, graphical elements, and CTAs can all be assessed within A/B tests. Collected data outlines which emails get more ‘opens’, and can indicate which components (such as forms or download buttons) receive the most clicks. It helps numerically back up where improvements need to be made, either to subject lines, persuasive CTA language or if external pages are too hidden.
With templates firing on all cylinders from the initial engagement point, fund marketers can look into the data to retarget the investors paying the most attention to certain topics and move them along the sales funnel. With conversions the ideal end goal, spending time getting email templates right is well worth the creative brainstorming, patience and trial and error.
If you’d like to know more about Mastering Templates, check out our comprehensive guide in our list of White Papers.
July Investment Commentary: Navigating the Sustainable Investment Landscape – IAM ESG Fund’s Stellar Performance in H1 2023
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Join us at Claridge’s for an Exclusive Investment Gathering ‘Unlocking Sustainable Investment Success’ by Intellingent Asset Management
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