Define your goal.

Before you create your email campaign, ask yourself these questions:

• What do you want to achieve with this email campaign?
• What are key messages you need to get across?
• How can you present these points in an eye-catching manner?

Answering these questions will help you chart the direction of your email campaign, whether it’s nurturing new leads, re-engaging existing clients, or promoting a specific service.

Do your research.

Once you’ve defined your goal, the next thing you have to do is your research. In this stage, you need to dig deep into customer insights and identify what will resonate with your target market.

To find out what you need to say and how to say it, you need to comb through your voice of customer (VOC) data.

For those of you who might not know, VOC is a methodology businesses use to collect and analyze customer feedback about their brand, products, services, and customer experience.

VOC data contains the desires and pain points of consumers, telling those who use it what their audience thinks and feels about a specific product or service.

Simply said, this provides you with the words and expressions customers use, enabling you to create a deeper connection with them since you’re equipped with the words and expressions they use and understand.

So, how exactly can you collect VOC data?

You can gather this through client surveys, one-on-one conversations, social media engagement, testimonials, and the questions clients ask you most often during meetings.

Make sure to pay attention to unsolicited feedback as well, since these comments are often the most genuine.

Leveraging VOC data will help you create emails your clients and prospects can actually relate to.

Identify your reader’s level of awareness.

It’s important to know your audience’s awareness level before writing your email since this will determine how you’ll write and structure your emails.

Awareness refers to how much a client or prospect understands about their financial pain points, potential solutions, your services, and your ability to help them.

There are five stages of awareness:

• Unaware – Prospect doesn’t know his or her problem.
• Problem Aware – Aware of their problem but are unaware of the solution.
• Solution Aware – Knows solutions exist, like working with a financial advisor, but haven’t chosen one and haven’t heard of your practice.
• Product Aware – Knows about your practice but aren’t sure it’s the right fit for their needs.
• Most Aware – Knows about your practice and is on the cusp of being a client.

Personalize your emails.

Without personalization, your emails will feel generic and impersonal to recipients, and in some cases, could even get flagged as spam.

By personalizing the emails you send, you build stronger connections with your clients and prospects and keep them engaged with your practice.

The key to personalization is segmenting your recipients based on your VOC data and their level of awareness. For an example, a retiree gets a different message than a young professional just starting to invest.

Have a clear call-to-action (CTA).

You won’t get the results you want from your email campaign if you don’t include a clear CTA at the end of each email.

Create a compelling CTA by asking yourself what you want the reader to do once they finish reading, whether that’s scheduling a consultation, downloading a guide, or replying with a question.

Keep your VOC data and your recipients’ awareness levels in mind, since these will help you write a CTA that feels relevant rather than pushy.

Plan the frequency of your emails.

One of the biggest reasons email campaigns fail is sending too many emails in too short a period.

When planning your campaign, make sure the volume of emails you send won’t overwhelm your subscribers. Overloading their inbox is a sure way to get flagged as spam, both by email service providers and by your own clients.

By thoughtfully planning your email frequency, you’ll send messages your subscribers actually look forward to opening.