Email is a non-negotiable asset to a fund marketer’s toolkit. Treating it as a cheap throwaway platform can have poor consequences beyond compliance.
Multi-tech stacks are necessary to reach a range of institutional and individual investors today, covering the distribution of high-level pitch decks and quarterly reports down to off-the-cuff LinkedIn posts that stoke the fires of industry discussion.
Email sits at an odd juncture. It allows marketers to share ‘everyday’ content, yet also requires a great deal of care and attention.
For one thing, it is essentially free, allowing marketing teams to cue and send batches of updates at any one time to various service providers. However, it is also a truly trust-building channel, as much (if not more) than any other.
Investors give over their details to receive updates, so look forward to tailored communications relevant to their preferences shown across buyer journeys. No jargon, no junk-worthy promotions, and no suspicious-looking spam.
If you couple that expectation with tight compliance disclosure rules and DMARC authorisations as base level requirements, email is clearly not a commonplace low-risk tool. Seeing it that way might drive LPs to develop relationships with other managers that display better-designed email approaches.
In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, “don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” Here’s how to avoid that happening with your target investors.
End Investor Fatigue
Everyone has gotten bored of receiving the same old emails from the same sender. What do we do? We unsubscribe, at the very least.
In other cases we mark an email as spam: a clear signal to the ESP that you do not want future correspondence, which will be duly blocked.
When kicking off a fund launch, there can be a propensity to share performance data quickly, with daily email sequences trying to grab a whole non-personalised pool’s worth of investors’ attention. It is fairly aggressive as a sales tactic and offputting to end users.
There’s a sweet-spot to setting up a correct nurture cadence, which will be different for every investor according to their investment-readiness. Split-testing can help whittle down appropriate sequence timeframes, and also see which CRM-based segments of allocators are actively engaging with certain email campaigns.
Poor Brand Awareness
If a firm loses sight of which investors it is actually marketing to (affluent in some cases, first-time institutional allocators others), they fall into a trap of degrading their whole brand image through generic communications.
Investors look to trust a fund that assists their financial needs. This is helped by the fund manager tracking a contact’s digital history across all channels and feeding them more of that educational material over time. It builds up recognition that the brand is listening (even through a screen!).
If emails appear only as blanket, promotional lists of external URLs that hinder their due diligence process, this avoids the individual interests each LP had in your fund in the first place.
What is most important is targeting investors more singularly with the correct salutations (using automations) and with ‘wanted’ invitations, commentaries, or factsheets according to which content themes or fund pages they have visited, shown via a well-integrated CRM.
Unsubscribes
Not all investors will actually click the (compliance-mandated) unsubscribe button once they tune out of your content.
Instead they may silently mark them as read without even looking at them, or delete them outright. Without being on top of email analytics, there is no way for the fund marketer to know this is happening; lost connection truly happening in the dark.
Checking open rates is not an ultimate marker of email campaign success or failure. But it does identify who is not biting any form of correspondence. This is where subscription list hygiene must be addressed regularly to remove unengaged contacts and preserve email integrity.
IP Reputation
This ‘integrity’ is linked to how an ESP sees a domain’s trustworthiness. If a sender’s email gets placed in spam folders often, their IP will suffer, and the firm will face the potential of a permanent blacklisting.
The common ways that firms tread this line is through prolonged bulk volumes of email, or sending to those that did not opt-in to certain updates. Either method could come across like a phishing attempt or a domain infected with malware.
AI tools on Yahoo and Google email are now checking content as a gatekeeper before investors even see what’s inside. It means using relevant subject lines and contained content that appeases LLMs as well as humans.
Best practice involves sending smaller amounts to recipients that do have good open rates, and checking which types of content will trigger spam filters to get emails to the inboxes that truly matter.
It should go without saying that SPF, DKIM and DMARC requirements are met, and recent changes to ESP rules should be reassessed often.
It is therefore a no-brainer to take extra care with email marketing, which shows no sign of slowing as the communication tool-of-choice for RIAs and institutional allocators.
Every opt-in email address is a potential opportunity to raise or retain assets. Investors are scrupulous in identifying a fund that has responsible email etiquette, where a ‘spring clean’ of distribution lists can increase their belief in a sector that struggles to appear authentic at times, differentiating the most considerate fund managers to invest in.
