The Great Wall of China is an architectural feat that still amazes people to this day. Each brick was molded by hand and then transported in wheelbarrows, on workers’ backs, on camels and horses, and so on. It took them 300,000 soldiers, countless townspeople, and over 20 years to build the first iteration of The Wall.
But think about all the time, money, and resources the Qin Dynasty could have saved with trucks, forklifts, and an assembly line. An infrastructure engineer hypothesized it could take as little as 15 months to build The Great Wall with modern technology.
Ancient Chinese engineers didn’t have that choice, though—because they didn’t have modern technology. But you do. Doing your marketing without automation is like voluntarily building The Great Wall without factory-made bricks. Hand molded bricks work fine, but using an assembly line leaves you time to focus on the engineering (i.e., your marketing strategy) rather than the manufacturing (i.e., posting daily, sending emails every week, etc.).
Luckily, we know a thing or two about marketing automation—we built an entire automated growth program specifically for financial advisers, after all. When you automate the eight functions listed below, you can get more out of your marketing spend.
Taking note of your leads’, prospects’, and clients’ demographics and psychographics—also known as segmentation—will help you craft messages that better resonate with your target audience. And it works. MetLife, an insurance firm, started its segmentation project in 2015 with five customer personas that they had developed over two years—young achievers, concerned moms, financially mature, ho-hum, and solo content. These personas were designed to save MetLife $800M annually by 2020.
With automated tools like Snappy Kraken, segmenting your email list is easy. Simply upload a spreadsheet with your list of contacts to the Snappy Kraken database. Then, tag your clients based on their interests, retirement stage, or other factors. Snappy Kraken member Nolan Baker, the founder of America’s Retirement Headquarters, told us how he does it: “We tag our clients based upon interest. So, people [who] are golfers or people who like to go to wine events or people who like a vacation.”
Through segmentation, America’s Retirement Headquarters was able to consistently send their contacts relevant messages, leading to a 76% growth despite their struggles with COVID-19.
Older millennials expect personalization—personalized movie suggestions from streaming sites, personalized shopping experiences from online shops—and yes, that extends to personalized financial advice and services. In fact, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that offering personalized experiences can boost growth rates by 6% to 10%.
The good news is that personalization and segmentation go hand in hand. An automated system like Snappy Kraken can send your contacts email sequences based on tags and groups. Your contacts receive messages with information that is relevant to them, meaning clients interested in stocks aren’t getting emails about real estate investing, and 30-year-olds aren’t getting info about saving for college.
Have you ever received an email with your name, birthday, or other personal information on it? If so, you’ve seen this email automation tech in action. Most companies use merge tags to personalize bulk emails. The technology uses the information you’ve collected from your prospects and clients, like their names, birthdays, and interests, by pulling the person’s information from your contact list.
When someone gives you their contact information and hits the “download now” button, they want to receive their offer right away. Because of artificial intelligence and other technological advancements, 59% of consumers expect cutting-edge digital experiences. If the email containing your offer is delayed because someone in your office needs to send them out manually, they could take it as an indicator of outdated technology and take their business elsewhere.
The easy way to make sure that your downloadable offer lands in your new leads’ inbox right away is by attaching triggers to your calls to action (CTAs). That way, when someone hits the “download now” button, your automation software sends the offer instantly.
Nurturing your prospects can be really time-consuming because of multiple emails, videos, and social media posts. Sending marketing materials off one by one, week after week (or day after day, depending on your preferred cadence) is an unnecessary black hole for time and energy. But consistency and frequency are also necessary.
Snappy Kraken member Matt told us, “I just scheduled a meeting with a $1.2M prospect because of [Snappy Kraken’s nurturing campaigns]. He said my name kept coming up (because I’ve been emailing him since the end of 2018) and he’s finally ready to sit down and talk.”
Snappy Kraken’s library has thousands of email campaigns that you can quickly personalize. After you hit “launch,” our automated system schedules each email or text message to send at optimal times to the contacts in your list that you’ve tagged for that category.
You can add your contacts to more than one campaign, so they receive relevant emails based on multiple interests. Again, all you have to do is hit a few buttons, and the system takes care of the rest. America’s Retirement Headquarters told us that they saved 40 hours a week on marketing content creation, segmentation, and delivery through Snappy Kraken’s automated system.
Do you have folks who haven’t opened your emails in a while? Or ones who used to like your social posts, but have since stopped.
It happens. Leads – when not engaged regularly – go cold.
The good news is, each of our automated campaigns is not only designed to be eye-catching, but to spark meaningful conversations that can turn even the chilliest lead into an attentive prospect.
Check out what Hannah Buschbom of AmeriFlex Financial told us about her experience with Snappy Kraken:
“I had two prospective clients who went completely cold on me. As soon as I sent my first Snappy Kraken campaign, they turned into actual clients. The best part? They more than covered the costs of using Snappy Kraken for the year.”
Like manually sending emails, manually posting all of your content to your social media accounts is unnecessarily time-consuming—not to mention the effects of context switching. Psychologist Gerald Weinberg found that you lose at least 40% of your productive hours to context switching when you try to do three tasks at once.
When you manually create social media posts, schedule each post individually across multiple channels, and create graphics for each of them, you’re trying to do more than three tasks at once. Which means you’re losing at least 3.2 hours of an eight-hour workday every time.
Social media scheduling tools help you by reducing the number of tasks you have to complete. You create one image and write one caption that can be used across all platforms and then use the tool to schedule everything all at once. Automation makes sure that your posts are published at the right times to the right channels. Snappy Kraken takes it one step further and creates the posts for you—so all you really need to do is select which posts you’d like and hit the “launch” button.
Webinars are a great lead magnet—78% of marketers say webinars helped lower their cost per lead. But generating signups, hosting the webinars, and sending pre- and post-event emails is a lot of work.
The good news is that you can do all the work in one sitting with automation software. Platforms like eWebinar allow you to host pre-recorded webinars that simulate a live environment—complete with chatboxes and aggregated Q&A sessions.
Generating signups and sending pre- and post-event emails also becomes easier with pre-made campaigns and an automated email client like Snappy Kraken. The Financial Guys’ digital marketing strategist, Joe Tilton, told us that with the help of a Snappy Kraken campaign, they were able to generate 34 event signups in four days. “We had to move people to the May event,” Tilton told us, “there just wasn’t room for all the new people who signed up!”
Marketing data is your pulse on what’s working and what’s not—and manually collecting data through surveys and interviews isn’t the most efficient way to get an overview of how you’re doing. Making marketing decisions without knowing how your audience reacted to your marketing campaigns is like flying blind.
You can automate data tracking with Facebook Pixels or by adding an urchin tracking module (UTM) to your links to track click-through rates (CTR). You can also set up automated emails that send surveys to your clients at certain points in their journey—after they’ve been a client for one month, six months, and a year.
Automation software can add all your data to a spreadsheet so that it becomes easier to understand.
Snappy Kraken goes one step further than most automation platforms by building the campaigns and collecting the data for you—and it’s built for financial advisers. All you need to do is personalize your campaign and “send.” Most of our members have told us that they only spend an hour per month on their marketing with our pre-built, automated campaigns.
Get in touch with us if you want to know how to add to your marketing team without adding an extra person.
Tags: Automation