The global email users amount to a whopping 3.9 billion. This number is expected to grow to a huge 4.3 billion users by the year 2023. These statistics make it clear that email marketing is an opportunity that no marketer should ever miss.
Moreover, the open rate of marketing emails across all the industries is 24.79% followed up with a click-through rate of 4.19%. Just the business and finance industry sector has an open rate of 20.79% and a click-through rate of 2.73%.
So, if you consider these statistics, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) should incorporate email marketing campaigns in their digital marketing strategy. Email marketing, when leveraged the right way can come up with a lot of opportunities for BFSI.
However, before you begin with your email marketing strategy for BFSI, it is critical to understand how it works for this sector. It will help you create an impeccable campaign that drives results without spamming or alienating prospective customers.
What is email marketing for BFSI?
Email marketing for financial services is the use of email along with marketing automation to develop and foster a relationship with potential customers and clients. Simply put, email marketing for BFSI is the process of targeting prospective customers and clients by sending them unique and relevant content. It is a great way of reaching interested customers while nurturing them with valuable content. All in all, the primary objective of email marketing for BFSI is to encourage your subscribers to sign up for your commercial facilities, thereby speeding up the sales cycle.
How the BFSI industry can create an impeccable email marketing strategy?
If you wish to make your financial services compelling and exciting for your customers, it is high time you create an impeccable email strategy for them. Let’s take a look at a few of the ways that can help you do the needful.
Make a great first impression through onboarding emails
You can make a great first impression with your onboarding emails. It is important to grab your customer’s attention from the first email itself. You can create an excellent onboarding email by sharing the important features of your products or services while coming up with a strong value proposition. See how Paypal delivers important information and features like a pro in their onboarding email template. From a step-by-step information about various fields to a clear and strong CTA, this onboarding email has it all. PayPal even goes a step ahead and includes a video about how it works.
Introduce your services with a welcome email
Once a customer interacts with your business, you can send them a welcome email to introduce your financial services to them while encouraging them to engage with your business. Further, a welcome email is also a great way of thanking the customers for joining your business. Take a look at this banking email example from Regions Bank. From thanking their customers for opening an account with them to informing them about the facilities they can avail through their account, Regions Bank does a great job with its welcome email.
Inform and educate your clients
Banking, financial, and insurance services industry is a difficult concept to understand. Therefore, it becomes imperative for such companies to educate the customers about the services they provide. It will help you place yourself as a trusted advisor in the eyes of your customer base. You can take some cues from this amazing email template design from ATB. They aren’t only informing customers on ways to use their prepaid MasterCard but are also encouraging them to download their app and fulfil their simple banking needs instantly.
Send important and critical notifications
It is imperative to update your customers about the action they performed. It will help you in keeping them informed while garnering their trust. Take a look at this simple yet effective email example from Revolut where they are notifying their user to download the documents they asked for.
Make your services easily accessible
You can make your services easily accessible to your customers through email marketing. For instance, you can enable your customers to see their bank statements or other documents without the need of going to the bank and waiting in long queues. Do it the way Paypal does where they are sending account statements to their customers through email.
Work on customer retention
You can use retention emails to reduce your churn rates and increase engagement. It is also a great way to make the customer understand the value of a product. Here’s how Wealthsimple shares value about their services and positions itself as a financial advisor in their retention email. They have also given an offer of free management up to $5000 to their customers. Now, that’s a good retention technique.
Send personalized emails
With 40% of banking customers opting for financial providers that offer them customized service, it becomes imperative for BFSI to incorporate personalization in their email marketing strategy. You can make the use of available data to personalize communication with your subscriber base. Do it the way Coinbase does it with their personalized service email.
Make announcements for new products and features
It is important to keep up with the new trending technologies to stay ahead in the race of competition. The same is the case with BFSI too. So, if you want to be successful in the long run of business, keep your customers engaged and excited by updating your services and providing them with new features once in a while. We love how Aspiration sent a product update announcement email to their user base. Take a look at how they made use of vibrant hues, simple images, and compelling email copy to show their customers what they are going to offer.
Here’s another email example from Bank of Tennessee where they are updating their customer base about a new feature of mobile deposit.
Work on customer transaction security
It is critical to sharpen the security of customer transactions in financial services. You can do so by incorporating two-factor authentication in your operations. It gives web services a secondary option to access a client’s account and verify a login attempt to confirm an action. You can carry out the confirmation process by sending an email for the same.
Wrap up
Creating an email marketing strategy for BFSI is simple. All you need to do is define the kind of relationship you wish to have with your customer base. Do you want to have a serious and monotonous customer relationship or are you looking for a more personalized and understanding relationship? Remember, your email marketing strategy can transform how your customers perceive their relationship with your company. It can help you change your dull and complicated finance thing into a personalized, vibrant, and healthy customer relationship.
So, go ahead, make the most out of your email marketing strategy and take your financial services to the next level. You can take some cues from the above-mentioned strategies and create a world-class email campaign that would resonate with your customer base and their banking needs.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing email marketing agency that specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
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