Monday Morning Jumpstart with Dan Richards

10 minutes to drive your week

Topic for August 23, 2010: Six words to get emails opened

Listen to the interview

1. Today, the volume of email means that fewer and fewer emails are being opened – that's true of clients, who presumably should be motivated to open emails and it's even more true of prospective clients who don't have the same level of motivation to open emails.

   Often clients plan to get back to our emails at the end of the day, then run out of time and it never happens.

2. To avoid having clients set aside your emails, we have to be careful about not overwhelming clients with emails. I was talking to one advisor who sends clients a market recap at the end of each day. That may be fine if clients have asked for this or are retired so have the time to look at these, but for many clients that will simply be way too much email.

   And the risk is that clients will stop opening everything we send them a result.

   Given how busy everyone is, we have to be selective about what we send people. We have to ensure that it truly is valuable information that meets their needs.

3. Another key issue in getting emails opened is the subject line. The subject line is the most important part of any email – it's there that people will decide whether to open that email or not.

   And there are six words that if you put them in a subject line dramatically increase the chances that an email will be opened – that's true of existing clients and it's also true of prospective clients.

   Those six words:

   Here's the information you asked for

4. These words get past the sense that an existing or prospective client is getting broad generic information that everyone else is getting and conveys the sense that this information is customized for them and them alone.

5. There are a couple of ways an advisor could do this.

   For your biggest client, you could absolutely personalize this.

   Let's suppose you're talking to your client and he or she says they're traveling on holiday to Florence.

   You could say "I recently read a great article in the New York Times about Florence. Why don't I send it to you."

   So you go to the New York Times website, find that article – and now you can send your client an email that says Here's the information about Florence I mentioned.

6. You can only do something like this for your best clients.

   For your broad group of existing and prospective clients, you have to set up a process to send information that's customized to their specific needs but that also allows you to operate efficiently.

   A few weeks back we talked about using an online survey with twelve topic areas and asking clients to indicate the topics in which they are interested in receiving information.

   Once you've collected that information for clients, you could create email groups for each of those topic areas – so let's suppose you've got an article on retirement income strategies such as minimizing the clawback of benefits.

   Now you could send that article to only those clients who have expressed interest in this kind of information.

   Two things happen as a result.

   First, you're only sending clients information that they're interested in. And second, you can legitimately say "Here's the information you asked for."

7. This also works for prospects. When talking to a prospective client, you could say "I'd like to stay in touch if I could but I want to ensure that any information I send you is relevant to your needs."

   "I wonder if I could run through half a dozen topics on which I send my clients information, to see if any of these would be of interest to you."