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Advisor Marketing Made Simple
How to Write A High-Converting Email Sequence As An Advisor (Francesca McLin)
00:50:28
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- [00:00]
Taylor Shulte
Hey everyone, really quick before we start today's show, if you're listening to this right now, you've likely listened to one of our advice line episodes where Kendra and I help real life advisors solve their biggest marketing challenges right here live on the show. It's like a free marketing consultation, but recorded so fellow advisors with similar challenges can learn alongside you. It doesn't matter if you have decades of experience or you're just getting started as an advisor. If you have a marketing challenge that's slowing you down, we would love to invite you to join us on a future advice line episode. To be considered, just head over to TaylorShulte.com apply and fill out the short form. That's TaylorShulte.com apply. We've also included a direct link to the form right there in the episode description in your podcast app. Do not miss this opportunity to get two experienced industry marketers in one place with one goal to provide honest feedback and actionable solutions so you can reach and help more of your ideal clients.
- [01:07]
Kendra
Hey, it's Kendra and Taylor and we're here to make advisor marketing simple. Today's guest is Francesca McLin, an award winning copywriter and marketing expert with over 16 years of experience in financial services. As the founding chief Content officer of Snappy Kraken, a leading marketing automation platform, she built and scaled a content machine that created over 3,000 unique marketing campaigns and has reached more than 7 million US investors. And before becoming a marketing leader, she was actually a financial advisor at Edward Jones and a compliance principal. So today she's going to share what she's learned from millions of data points and and thousands of campaigns on what it takes to create emails that actually get read and drive results in your firm. Now make sure you listen until the end because I asked Francesca for those busy advisors listening, if they only have one hour this week to improve their email marketing, what should they do? And she doesn't hold back. Welcome to Advisor Marketing Made Simple. Today I'm excited to welcome Francesca McGlynn to the show. Francesca, I'm so excited to have you on because behind the scenes you're someone that I often turn to for strategic advice and insight and especially on this one topic, which is email marketing. So thanks for joining us today.
- [02:32]
Francesca McLin
Thanks for having me on. Kendra, I love talking to you. I'm a fan of the podcast and I'm stoked to be here.
- [02:38]
Kendra
Awesome. Well, let's dive right into it. You know what, in your opinion is a marketing challenge that you're known for solving very well? For advisors.
- [02:47]
Francesca McLin
So typically when advisors come to me, it's because they don't know what to say. They don't know who they're saying it to. They're taking a look at their marketing metrics and they're realizing they're not getting the appointments they want, they're not getting the email conversion that they want, and that something is not working right in their marketing. And I think the thing that I do best is I go right down to the foundations. Who are you talking to? Who is your audience? What are their problems? What are their challenges? What are their fears? What are their dreams? And extracting all that information through interviews and surveys and then applying it to the foundational bits of their marketing and making it convert really well, because we're reflecting these deep desires and we're joining the conversation that their audience is having in their heads.
- [03:39]
Kendra
I love that you started with who, because for those listening to the show, I'm sure they hear Taylor and I kind of go over and over again, like, wait a second. Before we dive into building something, you know, from a marketing perspective, we really have to understand who are we speaking to so that we can build it in a way that really speaks to them in an authentic, you know, effective way. So when advisors are starting to think about how to build and write effective emails, what are some of those actionable principles that you dive right into with advisors to help them write more effective emails?
- [04:13]
Francesca McLin
Oh, absolutely. So I think before we ever get to talk about individual emails or an email strategy, we have to look at two other things first. And I think the absolute most important thing is who are you talking to? Who is on your email list? If you don't have a really clear of your avatar or your Persona or that that person that you really, really want to become your client, and that person isn't represented in your email list, Maybe you have a list with like 5,000 people, which. But it's a cold list, or it's a borrowed list, or it's a bought list. That list isn't going to perform well for you. So if that's your list, you might either have to call a bunch of people off of it or, frankly, throw it out and start over. That's number one. Number two is, what are you offering these folks? You know, what are you putting in front of them and saying, hey, this is what I do. This is how I make the world better. This is what I can do for you. And if it's undifferentiated, which is a word we see a lot, if it's boring. If it's expected, if it sounds like everybody else out there, that's not going to perform well for you. So you really have to deal with those two issues first, your list and your offer before you get to your email.
- [05:30]
Kendra
When we think a little bit about the quality of that list for some advisors, you know, you mentioned calling your list and essentially what that means is cleaning that list up, removing those dead contacts or contacts that are not your ideal client. You know, how would you recommend an advisor take a look at their list to understand if the list that they're even working with is high quality to start with?
- [05:52]
Francesca McLin
Absolutely. So typically I'll see a couple of situations. One is a situation where the advisor is an ethical marketer. They've got permission, you know, they've done the work of getting permission to email these folks, but they just haven't been doing it consistently or their emails haven't been great. And so then we'll just take a look at, okay, what are your open rates look like? Let's take a look at these contacts. You know, depending on the marketing system they're using, when's the last time this person opened your email? When's the last time they engaged with you in any way? And then I'll typically say, look, if they haven't done anything with you in the last six months, give them one more opportunity to engage and then just get them off your list.
- [06:31]
Kendra
And when you're thinking about that engagement element, often from my side, I see sending them, you know, one to three email campaigns just to see, hey, here's some of our best stuff. Here's what you've missed. Just to see, see, are they opening, are they engaged, Are they interested? So when we think about engagement, I just want to make sure the advisors know, like that's what we're looking for when we're taking a look at your list to see if it's still high quality. That makes a lot of sense to me. So what do you think are some of the biggest mistakes when advisors are starting to look at? Maybe they've, they've got a clear idea of who they serve, they've got a list, they know that that list is decent quality. When they start to write those emails. Are we there yet? Do we have anything else we need to know before we start to think about the strategy behind the emails? How do you look at that?
- [07:16]
Francesca McLin
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that most advisors struggle with two things. The first thing is perfectionism, and we all struggle with that. I struggle with that. Like I'M a professional writer. So to me every email has to be as close to perfect. But in reality, you know, there's something I think Carl Richards said, he said version zero, just get it out the door. It doesn't have to be perfect, just get it done. And especially if it's an email that's eventually going to go in a sequence, you'll have opportunities to tweak it it as you go. So try to get out of your own head, Just write the email, get it done. Lots of experiments. The second thing is you don't want to be overwhelming. A lot of advisors know so much and they care so much. You know, the advisors that I work with, they're such smart people, they're so caring and they care deeply about their clients and their outcomes that they want all of that to come across. So they tend often to write emails that are extremely overwhelming and they break what I call not me, but everyone calls the rule of one, which is this email that you're writing has one job and it's being written to one person and it has one message. So what is the one big point you want this email that you want this reader to take away? Once you know who the reader is, what is the one point you want to take away? And maybe it's a value building email. It doesn't always have to be a sales email. It's an email that you're dropping this nugget of wisdom or brilliance. And then if this email does have a job and it should have a job, what is that job? Is it to get them to hit reply and say what their biggest question was or their biggest takeaway was? Is it to get them to book an appointment and make that really easy for them? That email shouldn't have like three different jobs.
- [09:01]
Kendra
I love that you mentioned this because I get a lot of pushback from the advisors I work with when they want multiple calls to action. And effectively what they're trying to do here is have one email do multiple jobs. And you know, email marketing is an area that, that I am pretty nerdtastic about as well. And I am constantly reminding them that hey, this email has one job, right? And, and it doesn't always mean to book a call. You know, I think a lot of advisors also want to jump to that. And I understand because the closer you get them to your calendar, the closer they become to a client and driving, you know, firm revenue and you get the opportunity to help them. But there's a lot of, you know, jobs that emails can play along the way. And you know, from what you're saying here, it sounds like one simple way to make your emails more effective is to ask who is this for? And what's the role of this one email before we even get super far into the weeds. And I think if advisors were to go back and audit their current campaigns or emails they send out, they'd find so many touch points in there that are a bit overwhelming. Yeah, I agree.
- [10:05]
Francesca McLin
I've actually perfect example of this. One of my favorite stories to tell about the rule of one. I was working with his advisor and we were auditing his appointment sequence. You know, the emails that go out before an appointment, after an appointment. And what we were finding out is that this advisor used your pre standard 2 to 3 appointment process where the first one was a qualification call. The second one was the big appointment where a lot of, a lot of question asking. And before that second appointment, the prospects had homework to complete. And the problem was they were having, you know, 50% of their prospects were missing some aspect of the homework. They weren't uploading their statements, they weren't uploading their tax return, they weren't answering the questionnaire. And so he was really stuck. Cause it was getting his team bogged down and prospects were getting stuck. And then I took a look at his emails and I realized he was sending this one email with like four different homework tasks assigned to this one email. And of course people were missing it. You're asking them to do too many things. And so we took a look at the process, we cleaned it up a little bit so that it was a lot easier for the prospects to complete. And then every job got its own email, plus reminders. And all of a sudden the completion rate skyrocketed because you were respecting the rule of one and making it really easy to take that next step.
- [11:23]
Kendra
And I often think many of us forget that a lot of people too read these emails on their phone. So think about how you read email and if you have too many things going on in there, it's just really challenging for someone to process. It becomes exactly what you said, this big homework assignment. And I don't know about y'all, but my to do list is totally nutty. So, you know, fitting that in, it can just feel very overwhelming. So I love this concept of one person, one problem, one email. What do you think of the other strategic pieces that advisors get wrong when it comes to writing effective emails?
- [11:59]
Francesca McLin
One principle I really like people to focus on is this concept of the intersection. And you can't See me, but I'm crossing my arms in front of me right now. And it's the intersection between what you, the advisor, wants to say and then what the reader needs to read and hear from you. And it goes back to that deep knowledge and understanding of who your audience is and what they want from you. And a lot of advisors, I think, tend to get bogged down in the details of the education piece and the numbers and the statistics, probably because that's where they feel safe and comfortable. But in a lot of cases, folks need to know that, you know, they don't necessarily need to see it all spelled out in an email. And to your point about folks reading on their phones, yeah, we're constantly bombarded. You know, email is such a crowded channel. It's been around for 50 years and yet it's still the channel where a lot of people do business. So you're competing with all these other emails. You need to make these emails easy to digest. Lots of line breaks, short sentences, variety, lots of bolding. You know, you're writing for people to scan the email. They may not read every single line. And you want to make it really easy for them to understand what the email's about. Make them excited to open it and then excited to do whatever it is you're asking them to do.
- [13:23]
Kendra
This concept of the intersection is really interesting to me. This concept between what do you want to say and what does your reader need or want to hear? Could you give me an example of maybe what an average advisor would say and then what an awesome advisor would say if they, you know, from a high level, if you were writing an email campaign like this, how might that look different?
- [13:45]
Francesca McLin
Oh, this is a great question. So I think one of the perfect examples of that is your bog standard market update. Pretty much any marketing automation software, any of your broker dealers, any of your big contractors, they're going to provide you with a market update. And typically it's going to be written by somebody on the investing team, someone with a very high level of knowledge, but they're not going to be a copywriter. And so your average advisor is probably just going to take that market update and they're just maybe going to put a little bit of spin on and they're going to send it right to their prospects and clients. I think an advisor that's more tuned in with strong copywriting and strong marketing skills is probably going to focus on a really timely and important event. Let's take, I don't know, the Fed started lowering interest rates.
- [14:34]
Kendra
They're going to take that.
- [14:35]
Francesca McLin
They're going to digest it really, really simply so that it's really easy to understand what happened. And then they're really going to apply it to this audience and say, okay, you know, you my audience member because I'm an advisor in Baltimore, Maryland. This is what it's going to mean for investors in Baltimore, Maryland, or this is what it's going to mean for this particular niche of workers in this area and really bring it home for them and then give them some sort of a call to action. Maybe, you know, it is going to have to be different for if it's a client, if it's a prospect. One thing that I love is to ask for the passive referral and say, listen, if you've got someone who's concerned about what this major economic event is going to mean for their portfolio or their retirement, forward them this email.
- [15:22]
Kendra
I love that because you just added one more job to the list, right? We talked about the job could be getting them to reply, the job could be getting them to book an appointment. The job could be forwarding this to a friend or family member, someone they care about who might need that info or the kind of help that you provide. And you said something around, you know, the way that we communicate to them being really easy to understand. And I often have to remind advisors that we're writing for their audience and not themselves. And so there's a really cool tool called Hemingway. And the reason this, this tool, you can basically take your copy and paste it in there. And what a lot of people don't understand is the average adult reads at a best, at a sixth grade or below level. So it often astounds advisors when I rework their copy. And it sounds so simple because I'm writing it for the person that they want to serve, not themself. And so if you're an advisor listening and you just want to see what level your copy is at, I would definitely check out the Hemingway app. You can paste your copy in there and it'll tell you what reading level grade you're at. And that's one just simple tool that you can use to understand how dense is this copy to read. And the other thing that, that you kind of jog my memory on, Francesca, something that I love to do. You mentioned using different calls to action and in your email software, if you can tag your clients versus your prospects, it's really easy to change out those calls to action. So for a lot of our clients, I'll go in, I'll write one version of the email for prospects and then I duplicate it and I change the calls to action based off knowing who the audience is. And that's another way too that you can see if you're sending it to just your clients, what's the open rate and the engagement rate and what is your prospect? So all the other contacts on your list. And something that's interesting to me is that I've found for some of my clients, they could have a pretty large segment of the list that's not clients and the quality open rate is very low. But then when I segment it out by their clients, I can see their clients open, they click and they engage. So that's just one more way to kind of break up your calls to action and see, you know, you can send the same email to clients, the same email to prospects with a different call to action and see, you know, how they respond.
- [17:39]
Francesca McLin
I think that's super smart. You know, at a basic, you absolutely need to be segmenting and sending it out to prospects and clients separately so that you can see the difference in engagement. And another thing that I love to encourage advisors to do is make a quick video, most especially if it's going to prospects. But even for your clients too, because you can take a fairly complex topic, you can break it up into a nice little three minute video. It gives you some FaceTime. It lets the email do a little bit more heavy lifting for you. You get a different sense of what the engagement is.
- [18:15]
Kendra
There's a tool called Loom. I love that for just quick and dirty fast videos. Highly recommend that. I'm sure there's tons of other tools out there in the market, but I love that as well. And just showing them your face and you know, sometimes you can speak out loud easier, more effectively than you can writing. I've heard some advisors say, oh, when I'm in client meetings, it feels much more natural to speak this out loud. But then when I record myself, you know, if I don't think about being in a meeting, I'm sorry, when I write I, I get all stuffy, but if I'm on a video, I feel a little bit more relaxed. So understanding kind of which medium works well for you is really helpful. Now, Francesca, I know that you are one of, in my opinion, the best financial writers in the industry. And I know, I know that that feels like a huge compliment, but I really, truly mean it because you have this ability to take these complex topics and make them so accessible. I'm so impressed by that, that ability that you have And I know for a lot of advisors, compliance is a really big concern. And you found a remarkable way to find a balance between writing emails that are compliant and effective. So when advisors are looking at how do they write these emails that are compliant and effective? Do you have any thoughts or tips or approaches that you take when you're writing emails?
- [19:38]
Francesca McLin
Absolutely. So let's talk about two categories of emails. You know, broadly speaking. One are what we call I know emails. And that is where you as an advisor, you're demonstrating your competence, you're demonstrating your value as a financial professional. We'll take that one first. The second one is I care emails, where it's a much more personal perspective. You know, there might be a little bit of educational information in there, but really it is about you as a person, as a human, as a parent, as a child, as a sibling, you know, really sharing and empathizing with that audience. So when we're writing I know style emails, you need to talk about the numbers, you need to talk about the facts and the education, but you don't want to get lost in them. You don't really ever want to talk about things that are going to perhaps feel promissory to your compliance. And then even when you are getting into things like benchmarks and performance, you're sort of anchoring people to a lot of the wrong things. And then you're immediately giving them something to nitpick. So you really want to step above and really think about what does this person need to know about this? I'm the advisor. I know what I'm talking about. What does this client or prospect need to know about this, this thing, this event, this data, this quarter that's going to apply to their life. And you can do that pretty well by talking about the emotions about it, maybe even talking about stories, something that gets across the facts and the education without getting you bogged down into details that your compliance is going to hate.
- [21:18]
Kendra
Can you think about an I know campaign that you've written and maybe kind of give me a high level like, hey, for this I know campaign, maybe the topic looks like this. And here's how I would talk about it differently, specifically. So maybe an advisor listening can understand what an I know kind of looks like practically when you write that?
- [21:36]
Francesca McLin
Absolutely. So perfect example is going to be some sort of a timely email or a timely set of emails that, let's say that you might send out to prospect. I specifically like sending these out to opportunities, meaning folks who've met with you, they're sitting in there Somewhere they're not engaging, this is a great way to reel them back in. So perfect example could be in February you might send a tax related email because people have just gotten their 1099s. Taxes are front of mind. That's an area where a sharp advisor can add some value and helping them understand how all that fits into, you know, if their retirement income. So I might take something about taxes and say, look, here are three things you need to know about your taxes right now. Bonus points if there's something unique to your state or your area that you can add value to. Here's what you need to know. Come talk to me if you want the rest. Come talk to me if you want to apply this to your particular situation. And so in that situation with profit, probably using a formula called problem agitation solution where we're agitating the problem of taxes in their mind. We're agitating a little bit about pointing out here are some things that could go wrong if you don't get these things right this year. Solution is come talk to me, come talk to my team. Here's how you take the next step.
- [22:54]
Kendra
That's awesome. And when you think about those three things to know, do you break that down and is that the three things to know? Or like, how do you structure an I know email to drive action in a way that feels compliant?
- [23:08]
Francesca McLin
Sure. So I would typically structure this around three things and that might even appear in the subject line. I would probably test a few different subject line options and I would absolutely break it down as thing one, thing two, thing three. I would probably throw a video in there that maybe goes into a little bit more depth and I might even link it to a larger article. If you've got something on your blog or maybe you've done a podcast episode or you have some other piece of content that goes into greater depth and then the way you keep it compliant is you, especially when talking about something about taxes, you probably didn't have a disclaimer at the bottom that says, hey, I'm not an accountant, I'm not a cpa. All advice needs to go through a tax professional, unless you are a cpa. And then I would keep the tips pretty general, specifically applicable to this audience. And then the CTA would be come talk to me so we can see if this applies to your situation.
- [24:05]
Kendra
Gotcha. And then when we think about that other type of I care email. How does an I care email differ from an I know email, which is more of the the numbers and the facts?
- [24:16]
Francesca McLin
Absolutely. Let's Take the same topic. Let's talk about taxes. A great ICARE email would be a story, for example, it could be a story about you and your personal history or your family's history, something that someone didn't know about. Taxes could be a story of a client. You know, we've heard those called desire stories, where you're basically presenting almost like a mini case study, and you're presenting it as like, look, this was the thing that this person was struggling with. This person really struggled with taxes. They didn't understand how their IRA worked. They didn't understand that they were going to get taxed when they were in retirement. All these things happened to them. And then we worked together and this was the outcome. And so it's the same basic topic, but you're approaching it from two directions. One is highly educational. The other one is telling stories and building empathy.
- [25:07]
Kendra
The thing I love about stories is that you can look at your current clients and what are the questions that they should have asked you or. Or maybe the big things that you solved for them. And what's interesting about financial advising is if you can show them that, hey, here is something you had no idea of. There's an advisor we had on the show, Elliot Apple, and he has this blog post that I read once about like a. I can't remember exactly what the term is, but like a swinging power of attorney or something like that. And it was so interesting to me because I had no idea that that even existed. And he told this story about how he discovered that with his dad. And I think about that because I'm like, wow, what else does Elliot know about, you know, his area, you know, financial planning? And so I love when advisors tell client stories about these examples of things that people overlooked or big wins that they had, and they weave in stories about that person and their desires. Like, for example, you know, you can't give super specific details because it is a client, but something about, you know, they were, you know, maybe the stage of life they're in or the concerns they had, some of those specifics, because people can relate to that in their own mind when they see it. So I love using those client stories for eye care and using that to show your expertise as an advisor.
- [26:30]
Francesca McLin
Absolutely. And the thing I love about these client stories and is, you know, one of the things we get a lot out of when I do these interviews is we get to go deep with these specific clients and be like, okay, what brought you to the table? What made this advisor so special? And advisors, like, so many of us, we all suffer from the curse of knowledge, meaning we know so much about a given topic, about, you know, an advisor's case, how financial planning works, that you forget all the simple questions, all the, all the questions that a prospect might have before they meet with you. And so, you know, if you're an advisor listening to this, next time you have a prospect meeting, write all those questions down, start taking notes of them, because you're going to see patterns. Folks have the same questions. And then when you think about your clients, think about the most common scenarios that people come to you with the problems, the big thorny, scary issue, and then tease it out into a great story. You get to highlight some of what you did and, you know, the specific details of that person's situation don't necessarily matter as much as the emotions and the story behind it. And that's typically if your compliance is a little sticky about quote, unquote, success stories.
- [27:38]
Kendra
That's the way you get around that, definitely. And I've seen some advisors use tools like Fathom AI or Jump AI to record their prospect and client calls. And after the call, you can essentially run a, you know, a question which is, hey, can you tell me all the major questions this client asked or the big problems we solved on this call? That can be a really easy way to, to summarize those calls and get that data after the call to use in your email campaigns. And keeping a list of those ideas in something like a document or spreadsheet as well.
- [28:13]
Francesca McLin
A hundred percent. You know, one of the, I think your strongest tools as an email marketer is your idea list. Constantly, whether you're using Evernote or Notion or Google or really any of your tools, have this little list of ideas that every time a story shows up or every time you have an idea in the car. I use Otter AI as a memo, a voice memo app, because, yeah, I'm a writer, but I get a little bit stuck and so I just record a memo of me talking and then that's what essentially writes half the email for me. And I'm constantly keeping these ideas going so that when it's time to write an email, I'm like, oh, yeah, this, this is the perfect time to talk about this.
- [28:52]
Kendra
Agreed. Having, like an idea garden is such a important part of the process. So I know, Francesca, that not only you're a great email writer, but you think a lot about automation and scalability. That's kind of like a, a unique element to your expertise. So when you're working with a lot of Advisors, what do you feel are those must have email sequences that really kind of the foundational elements that every advisor should have.
- [29:18]
Francesca McLin
Oh, I'm so glad you asked this question. So I like to start with the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. And for those of you who maybe not know what I'm talking about, the top of the funnel is where folks are first becoming aware of you, they're first opting in to hear from you. And the bottom of the funnel is your sales process. You know, that's where they're starting to really fully engage with you and start deciding, are you the advisor for me? So at the top of the funnel you absolutely need some sort of high value lead magnet, a free guide, some kind of offer that you're using on your website. You're using maybe when you speak, if you're speaking somewhere where people can immediately get value from you. And then on the backside of that, that new prospect welcome sequence, that is going to be one of your heavy hitters because you want prospects to immediately get value the minute they decide to sign up with you and opt in to hear from you. And what happens a lot of the time I find is that advisors are good about maybe writing that instant delivery email, but they haven't thought a lot about what they're doing with that delivery email. And then they tend to drop the ball after and then immediately put someone into just sort of a generic newsletter sequence. And the problem with that is you're not treating them, you're not rolling out the red carpet. And so that new prospect welcome sequence, it's going to tell your story, your why story. It's going to offer them value. It's going to then go deeper with some videos. If you're podcasting or doing videos or writing a blog, it might introduce them to your greatest hits of content. And you want someone to go through that before they ever get to your newsletter. Because you're building, you're building that relationship, you're building that one to one rapport. And some of them will be ready to take the next step and book an appointment. A lot of them won't be. So that's the first one. Yeah.
- [31:04]
Kendra
And we think about those welcome sequences that, you know, add value in your opinion. What does adding value look like? You know, you mentioned, for example, if you have something like a podcast, you could share your greatest hits. How do you think about what value looks like on a practical level for an advisor in an email sequence?
- [31:24]
Francesca McLin
So I think of value in a couple of ways. One, you Want to introduce them to you as a person. You want them to understand why you do what you do, which is why I think a why story, a really compelling why story, and a video around that is such a, such a powerful marketing asset. I also think you want to perhaps introduce them a little bit to your philosophy, but really you want to focus on them and their problems. And this kind of goes right back to the beginning where we talked about knowing who is your audience being really clear on their challenges, their pain points, their journey. Because you want this welcome sequence to go right into that. And I think a strong way to do that is with a story. Hey, look, this is a personal story to me that's gonna be relevant to you or this is a story of one of my clients who had this. Does this resonate with you? Okay, here's the next step. I think problem related content is highly undervalued, especially at the top of the funnel. It needs to be less about you and your firm, more about their problems, their reality, their dreams, their potential transformation.
- [32:30]
Kendra
I love that you said that because you know when someone is coming in at the top of the funnel, which is where they're just first finding out about you. And if, if any advisor's listening and they want to really learn more about that marketing funnel process. Taylor and I did an episode called Marketing Funnel Basics. It's totally gangster. We'll link to it in the show description so you can check them out. But those different stages have different roles. And I like the approach where you said really top of funnel, we're leading with problems. And I think that's like the foundation of so much of marketing for advisors that's done well is we're really focusing on their problems and then how you create the solution. And that's when you start to move through the funnel a bit more and you earn that opportunity to start to talk a little bit more about yourself. So you mentioned kind of the top of funnel, a great, you know, kind of must have sequence is a lead magnet with a, with a welcome sequence. And then what about the bottom of funnel? What bottom of funnel sequences do you think advisors should have?
- [33:31]
Francesca McLin
So I think the most powerful bottom of funnel sequence you can have is an absolute killer pre and post appointment sequence. So often what happens is advisors that are using something like calendly or time trade, they just have an easy way to book the appointment, but then they don't really spend a lot of time thinking about what happens after that. And especially if you're an advisor that's using some Sort of paid lead gen. Maybe you're doing seminars or you're doing smart asset or one of those things. Those people don't know you very well. So you want to immediately give them a great experience. The minute they book an appointment with you, you want to be sending them a video thanking them for it, sharing your story, especially if they haven't heard it yet. Then you want to be sharing with them what to expect at the appointment. Like what are they getting out of this appointment? And this is something that Taylor does really strongly with his free retirement assessment. Like that is a concrete thing that they're getting. That is a reason to show up for the appointments. You need to be giving people a real reason to show up for your appointment, especially if they're not as warm as a referral or another lead that's already as engaged with you. And then a great post appointment especially, you know, if they're coming through and they're qualified, you want to give them an incredible post appointment experience with a custom video and a custom summary to give them the reason to show up for the next appointment and fill out the homework that you're probably giving them. So spending some time really thinking through that sequence and building it out and it doesn't even need to be fancy, you can totally build it out in calendly. And that's what most of my clients do when we first started working together just to keep it easy.
- [35:09]
Kendra
And I loved when you, in that pre appointment example that you gave, you did exactly what you've been talking about here. One email or one problem, you know, a video with your story and a thank you for booking and then also the next, which is what to expect on the call, the way that you're going to talk through some of their biggest issues, things like that. And then the post appointment, which is a, you know, custom video follow up summary is that when you do that custom video follow up summary, is that a manual process? Is that automated? Like how do you typically work on that with clients?
- [35:40]
Francesca McLin
That's a great question. So in that case it kind of depends on the team. Some advisors are super on the spot. Them are their assistants at immediately getting a post appointment email out the door. You know, they'll build the work, they'll build the workflow in Red Tail or something like that. In that case it's totally custom and the advisor would do a loom video and they would have it scripted to a certain extent, but then they would be reflecting back the major challenges. That's where a tool like Fathom can Really help. You know, where you're extracting the major pain points, the major challenges, the major goals from that transcript. And then you're using them to feed your video, your custom video. And then the rest of the email would be templated. That's if you're super on the spot. If you're someone who maybe struggles a little bit with that follow up, having an automated follow up that goes out with maybe a pre programmed video in it that thanks them, that says, hey, I'm, I'm thinking through our notes, I'm really thinking about what we talked about. Stay tuned. From an email from me within 24 hours. So then that buys you a little bit of time. I would only do that if the prospect is qualified. If the prospect is not qualified, I would probably send them a templated follow up that sends them to whatever resources you're going to send them. You know, I know a lot of advisors struggle with unqualified prospects because they want to help everybody. So have some prepared resources that you can send someone who's just not a fit for your services.
- [37:04]
Kendra
So I know that you've built a lot of these different kinds of sequence, you know, pre sequences, post sequences for calls, lead magnets, welcome sequences. Can you share an example how one of these sequences worked for your clients? Like what were they doing before, what kind of haphazard mess did they have going on, or nothing at all. And then when you built, you know, one of these workflows, what kind of results did they get from that? Do you have any specific success stories that you could share with us?
- [37:32]
Francesca McLin
Yeah, absolutely. So there's a client that I was working with last year. He was an established advisor, he was doing well. He broke, you know, the million dollars in revenue, that sort of magic number that a lot of folks were aiming for. And he was bringing on junior advisors because he wanted to scale that way. And the trouble he was having was that he knew the way he wanted to do things, but he was having trouble keeping his advisors consistent in their sales process, in their bottom of funnel process. And so he was really good at closing people. He was really good at giving people a great experience. But then when his junior advisors were getting involved, things were getting a little messy. And so as a result, the overall firm close rate was only something like 30 or 40%, which is way below what I would expect to see, you know, at a firm at their level. But it was entirely because of the other advisors that were dragging it down. So what we implemented was a really clear sales process. You know, I got in with the advisor, we clarified what it was going to be that everyone was going to be doing and he took the job of training the other advisors to do it. And then we built the pre and post appointment process that got built out in calendly. It got built out and I think they were using Red Tail and then he really worked with the advisors to implement. And all of a sudden, just by getting everybody following the same scripts, using the same tools, all of a sudden we saw their close rate go above 60% across the board which was great for him because suddenly he no longer feels like he has to be the rainmaker that he's got advisors that he can offload sales onto so that he can start focusing more on the more business critical things. And it gave the other advisors more confidence because they're like, okay, look, there's a system, there's a process, I'm not hanging out here on my own.
- [39:12]
Kendra
And when you look at, you know, kind of mapping out some of those clear sales processes steps, what were the things that they were missing specifically that you kind of got clear on and then were able to support with email marketing?
- [39:25]
Francesca McLin
Sure. So I think the biggest point of difference was that some advisors were pre qualifying with a short call. Other advisors were going right into an hour long meeting. So having everyone start with a quick pre qualification call and the goal being getting the firm founder out of doing those before they went into the hour long meeting. They saw their meeting show up rate increase. We put in a bunch of pre appointment emails ahead of that to introduce the advisor, introduce them to the process and teach them. It was going to be a multi step process. We gave the whole process a name that was like this is this process that you're going to go through. You're going to come out of it with a very concrete thing that you can either choose to implement on your own or you can work with us to implement. And then the other thing we had everybody do was start sending those custom follow ups which really had not been happening consistently.
- [40:20]
Kendra
When you talk about those custom follow ups, you're talking about essentially those kind of videos where you talk about, hey, here's the conversation we just had, here's what we're excited to help you solve, here's what those next steps look like. Is that what you're talking about with those custom follow up videos?
- [40:34]
Francesca McLin
Yeah, that's a, that's a pretty good way of looking at it. Basically the introduction is, hey, it's me, we spoke today, it was an amazing conversation. Here are the things you told me that I walked away with. By the way, there was this one thing that you said that really got me thinking. And the reason you do that is because you're reflecting back to this person that they're being listened to. And that is one of the number one things that so many high net worth investors struggle with. That I hear over and over and over again in my interviews. They don't feel listened to. That's why they're looking for someone new. So by reflecting back that you've heard them, that you're listening to them, that you're now taking what they told you and you're thinking about it and you're going to go deeper in the next meeting. You're pre selling that next meeting. You're getting them to feel warm and fuzzy about you and you're prepping them to expect more stuff to come.
- [41:20]
Kendra
I love that. You know, a lot of advisors do struggle with email. Do you have any advice that maybe sounds a little bit counterintuitive but actually really drives a lot of success with email marketing?
- [41:33]
Francesca McLin
What a great question there. So I'm a writer and you're a writer and we probably tend to have a lot of disdain for pre programmed content mill content. Here's the thing. If you're already struggling to get emails out the door, if you're struggling to get your newsletter out the door, if you're struggling to get enough content in front of your prospects and your clients, it is okay to send some of that packaged content out. Like in the absence of anything else, send that. But don't expect it to do your marketing for you. It's keeping people warm, it's keeping your list warm, it's getting folks to see something from you. And the closer those emails and that marketing is to your audience and their problems and their desires, the better it's going to be. But also, don't get lazy. Use that as a foundation. Send better content that's more in line with your audience and your firm. On top of that. Definitely.
- [42:33]
Kendra
And I think, you know, when I think about kind of counterintuitive advice, one thing that surprises a lot of advisors is I don't think an unsubscribe is a bad thing. I think there is some nuance to it that if you're getting a lot of unsubscribes, that's a red flag. But generally if your unsubscribe rate is below 1%, it's just people saying, hey, at one point I was looking for this advice and now I'm not How often do we unsubscribe from emails that at one point we're very in align with what we need. So, you know, a lot of advisors, they want these large lists and I've seen some really tiny but mighty lists. I care so much more about quality than quantity. And so while it can seem very exciting to build these giant lists, I want to really encourage advisors to build it the right way. Sometimes that's a slow way, but not, you know, buying these lists and running them through all these automations. And I'm personally another fan of that. It just feels kind of icky to me. That might be, that might be what some people like to do, but quality over quantity and not seeing it unsubscribe is a bad thing because it will also help your delivery rates. So that's kind of some counterintuitive advice that I think most advisors probably wouldn't expect to hear from me.
- [43:40]
Francesca McLin
Absolutely. I love the unsubscribe. If you're not getting unsubscribes, you're not emailing often enough. You should be emailing often enough that you. Every email maybe comes with a couple of unsubscribes. But yeah, you definitely want to keep an eye on that 1% because otherwise you get into deliverability issues. But yeah, absolutely. Email more than you think you need to. I think a lot of advisors, frankly, business owners in general, I think they get nervous about emailing too much. Oh, I don't want to bother people. Email them more.
- [44:06]
Kendra
And I don't think people want more email. But they're very much open to truly valuable email. That's the difference. And so you kind of pointed out here too, when we think about what do they want to hear, you know, what kind of problems do I solve with them? What did I see in my client work, you know, this week or this month that was really interesting? Or we just saw a client light up when we talked about something that seems so ordinary and so obvious to us. But it was a huge value add for the clients. And I like that approach too with client stories because what I find is you can also use them to remind your current clients of the value that you can bring and the problems that you can solve. So for example, I have one client, they had a, an advisor client of mine had one of their clients email them about how do I decide which car to buy. And she wrote this post on LinkedIn about her process and it was fascinating. And I was like, this is so interesting. Even though I'm not looking to buy A car. But we sent that to their email list. And to me, you know, the call to action that I write for a client would be like, hey, by the way, just so you know, these the kind of things that we can help you with. So don't forget when you go into any major buying decision, we can give you additional perspectives. So when we think about those different kind of calls to action, how to weave in those client stories, those are some of the ways that, you know, I like to approach it.
- [45:27]
Francesca McLin
I think that's super smart. And actually that, that reminds me of a, of a client that I had where when I interviewed their, their recent clients. And I always like to interview folks that have signed up with them within the, ideally the last 12 to 18 months because that buying decision is fresh in their minds and they had such a unique perspective because they had come to this advisor after a death in the family and the adv had been, you know, their, their, the person who died's advisor. And they found it so great working with them and that whole experience that they decided, hey, maybe I should, I should start working with this person. And it gave rise to a really great email that we sent out both to clients and to prospects about his personal experience dealing with the death of someone in his family. And that ended up leading to a really natural conversation around estate planning. And so finding these little nuggets of stories, finding these little nuggets of wisdom where there's a parallel between client experiences or there's something that you, the advisor have personal experience with, like they don't want you to be this, this sage on a stage, this, this wisdom from on high. They want to know that you're a person who cares, that also deals with stuff in your life that is a great way to build connection.
- [46:44]
Kendra
I love that. So some of the advisors listening, they may not have time to build, you know, some of these sequences we've talked about, but maybe they are actively emailing. In your opinion, if an advisor has just one hour to improve their emails this week or their next email that goes out, what do you think they should focus on?
- [47:04]
Francesca McLin
So I would take a look at your foundational sequences. I would take a look first and foremost at that bottom of the funnel. I would look at your pre and post appointment sequence if you think is as tight as it can be. If you're getting close rates in the 60 or 80% range and you're happy with that, cool. Move on then to your top of funnel sequence. Take a look at that new prospect. Welcome. Do you have any More, you know, podcast episodes that you could put in front of them. Do you have any client stories that you can tell? If all of those are locked down and you feel really great about where they are, then I think the next gold is in your opportunities list. How many folks are hanging out, you know, they've gone through your appointments or some level of them, they're not really taking the next step. Take a look at what kind of a timely email you could send them. What's happening in the headlines, what's happening in the, in the economy that you could send that? I know email with a little bit of a video, maybe an article attached that says, hey, I can show you how you can deal with this issue. Come meet with me to reengage.
- [48:05]
Kendra
I love that. I know advisors listening are going to want to see what does this look like in action. What does Francesca's brain and strategy look like when it's applied to advisor marketing. And I know you've prepared some email templates for our audience to show them what high converting emails look like, what can they expect and where can they get them?
- [48:26]
Francesca McLin
Absolutely. So I'm putting together a whole set of templates of emails. It's at www.freegrowthplaybook.com should be in your show notes and inside I've got templates for the pre and post appointment sequence and your new prospect welcome sequence. And it's a playbook that I add to about on a monthly basis when I've got ideas that I've proven, things that worked surprisingly well, interesting and unusual tactics that lead to better open rates and conversion rates. So bookmark it, steal the templates inside, use them to build your own high.
- [49:01]
Kendra
Performing sequences and where can others connect with you? And just learn a little bit more too about how you help advisors.
- [49:08]
Francesca McLin
So you can usually find me on LinkedIn. I am fairly responsive on LinkedIn. Otherwise you can find me at Francesca McClinn.com I love talking to advisors. I'm always happy to talk to folks. I usually give folks a free 30 minute strategy session where we can throw ideas back and forth.
- [49:27]
Kendra
Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Francesca. I know we covered a lot of details here on the different kinds of sequences, how to improve sequences. You also mentioned something really helpful in this call about version 0. So for any of our listeners who want to understand more about that version zero concept, maybe you feel a little bit intimidated by email marketing or even some of your other email or your other marketing projects, we have a conversation we had with Carl Richard called why Overthinking will ruin your marketing. So you can jump over to that episode next. Check that out and learn about version See thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. To get the resources shared or sign up to join us as a guest on one of our advice line episodes, check out the links in the show notes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.