6 Proven Email Marketing Tips for Finance Companies

1. Only create content for your target audience

One of the most important parts of any marketing campaign is understanding your target audience. These are the people who you want as customers, clients or users.

In order to attract them, you need to create content that resonates with them. This means you need to understand things like:

• financial expertise: beginner, intermediate or expert

• what questions are they asking about money or investing?

• what are they worried about when it comes to finances?

If you know these things, you can create very specific content that answers their questions and provides solutions for their worries in a way they understand.

This creates trust because your target audience will feel like you truly understand them. And as a result the first company that comes to mind when they’re looking for a new investing platform, banking app or financial advisor is you.

Now let’s look at an example that does an overall great job at this.

Example: Brex

Brex is a spend platform that provides corporate cards and financial management tools designed specifically for startups and scaling businesses.

All of their content is targeted towards business owners who are trying to solve cash flow and expense tracking issues.

They’re also offering tons of free ebooks and webinars for founders or CFOs to help them with things like spending and capital flow.

2. Send a regular newsletter with valuable content

When it comes to email marketing, the first thing you’re probably thinking about is a newsletter.

And you’re totally right.

If you want to grow your fintech business, you absolutely need to send one. Maybe you’ve even set that up already.

Unfortunately, most businesses in the finance space are doing this wrong. So, before you skip this section, hear me out.

To use a newsletter for client conversion, you need to send valuable content on a regular basis. So, I’m talking about things like daily investing insights or weekly saving tips.

What you definitely want to avoid is just sending company news that don’t provide any value for your target audience.

Because honestly, nobody cares…

Example: Robinhood Snacks

Robinhood is a popular trading platform that also delivers a daily financial newsletter and podcast. It features:

• Market recaps in a witty, informal tone: Makes finance news approachable

• Focus on current events: Explaining how news impact investments

• Highly shareable format: Encourages audience engagement

As you can see, they send out a newsletter every day that gives their target audience the most important financial news that they can read in 3 minutes.

This is valuable, quick, and easy to consume and prepares the reader to invest on Robinhood.

This means they can just easily include their own product as the “next logical step” to make use of that news.

They don’t focus on their product but instead offer value first.

3. Create a standalone landing page for people to sign up

Do you know what’s the number one reason why less than 1% of your website visitors sign up for your newsletter?

Distraction.

Your home page is full with text, buttons and links. And your newsletter sign up button likely isn’t the first thing they see.

On the contrary, it’s likely somewhere at the bottom of the page or even in the footer.

So, if you want to drastically increase your sign-up rate, you need a separate landing page. That page should give the visitor only one thing to do and that is signing up.

Example: Robinhood Snacks

Robinhood does such a great job with their newsletter, so we’ll take them as an example again.

As you can see, Robinhood created a separate landing page for their newsletter called “Snacks”. And the only thing you can do on this page is type in your email and sign up.

There are no other buttons, links or options.

As a result, landing pages like this convert at an average of 30 to 50%.

4. Use an Educational Email Course as a lead magnet

Now, if you either don’t have the resources to send out a daily or weekly value-packed newsletter or you want to increase your sign-up rates even more, then you need an educational email course.

This is a free course that you can use as a lead magnet, meaning, people get access to it by typing in their email address.

The great thing about this type of lead magnet is that people get used to opening and enjoying your emails from the start.

Plus, you’re giving away something for free that some people might even pay for. That builds a lot of trust which makes it so much easier to convert them later down the road.

Examples: Forbes

While Forbes isn’t a fintech company, they offer a great example of a financial Educational Email Course.

For instance: The "How to Invest Like a Pro In 10 Days" email course provides:

• Step-by-step breakdown of investing basics: Explains different investment vehicles

• Actionable steps: Encourages users to invest

• Drip-feed format: Delivers content in digestible chunks over several days.

While I’m not a huge fan of their landing page (it’s essentially an article), they do a great job at providing value through their email course.

5. Offer a free trial if possible

Another great way to capture emails is offering a free trial. This strategy obviously only works if you have a product that doesn’t cost you any extra time or money to offer for free.

If you offer a service, like as a financial advisor, this strategy isn’t the best way to use for email marketing because it would take you a lot of extra time that you probably don’t have.

Example: Xero

Xero, an accounting software platform, prominently features a free 30-day trial offer across their website.

If you sign up for the free trial, you obviously have to use your email address. Then, Xero can send you lots of helpful and informative emails, helping you use and understand their product better.

Why this Strategy Works

• Reduces risk for the customer: They can try before committing financially, increasing willingness to sign up

• Demonstrates value: Actually using your product is the most convincing way to show its benefits

• Opportunity for nurturing: You can use in-app messages or emails during the trial to provide tips and help users get the most out of the experience.

Important Considerations

• Not all fintech products fit: This works best for SaaS platforms or those with easily definable features. Highly customized solutions might not suit a simple free trial

• Trial length matters: Long enough for users to experience value, but not so long they forget to make a decision. 30 days is common, but some may opt for shorter or longer windows

• Onboarding is key: Ensure people have a smooth experience actually setting up and using your product during the trial.

6. Offer regular webinars for your email list

The last email marketing tip that works great to warm up your audience and build trust is webinars.

Some companies use them as lead magnets. But that’s often a bit too much of a commitment for most website visitors to get started.

How it can be used very effectively is by sending it to your email list, though.

You’ve already built a layer of trust with them. And they know that you provide valuable content for them. So, signing up for a long webinar to learn even more from you, sounds like a much better idea at this point.

You can host them live, but pre-recorded works well most of the time, too. This allows you to set everything up automatically to make it as efficient as possible.

Example: The Pomp Letter

The Pomp Letter is a 3-time-per-week newsletter by finance influencer Anthony Pompliano. He’s currently got 235,000 subscribers and all of his emails are value-packed.

Every now and then, he also promotes a webinar in his emails.

He includes a simple section at the bottom of his newsletter where you can sign up.

Compared to your newsletter, a webinar is a good place to include a little sales pitch in the end.

But only after you shared lots of valuable knowledge for free.