Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
The chances that a prospect will open an email from someone they don’t know are slim. Advisors who rely on mass emails are increasingly challenged to find creative ways to get their message through. But a few advisors who are succeeding in attracting clients via email invitations told me of five ways they get past inbox filters.
The problem came to light after advisors submitted their most pressing questions to me. Three different responses touched on the same issue – how to improve the returns from broad based marketing, whether cold calls, email campaigns, direct mail or advertising.
Got a question for Dan?
Dan Richards welcomes your questions. He answers every question and uses some questions as the basis for his articles. To get your question answered, email
Here’s how one advisor put it:
I am trying to grow my business and use email and E-Invites for events and other forms of communication such as newsletters and short information pieces. From these, I get very little if any response. Is email not effective anymore? Any suggestions?
My answer:
What this advisor describes in terms of low response when reaching out to prospects with emails and e-invites is consistent with what I hear from other advisors. And the drop in response doesn’t just apply to emails, but to all forms of mass prospecting.
That doesn’t mean you have to give up on these tactics. I have recently had conversations with advisors who experimented with the subject line and the message in their email campaigns and have seen a boost in response rate as a result. That said, while there are things you can do to improve returns from mass marketing, you will never see the kinds of results that advisors obtained in the 1990s.
A 90% drop in response rates
Here’s one example of the drop in results – from a Southern California-based advisor who’s carefully tracked response rates for 20 years. Starting in the early 1990s, he built a $250 million practice, mostly through quarterly dinner seminars supplemented with referrals from clients who came from those seminars. Over that time, he has consistently targeted affluent neighborhoods by mailing “wedding-style” invitations to dinners in private rooms at high-end locales such as Mortons, Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse or a local country club.
His goal is to get 12 to 15 couples out to each dinner. Even though some of his guests are there solely for the dinner, over the years he’s averaged about 1.2 clients from each dinner, with these new clients typically bringing over $1 million or more. When he began in the early 1990s, it took 500 invitations to get those 15 couples out. In 2002, it took about 2,000 invitations to achieve the same outcome. And since the global financial crisis, it now takes 5,000 invitations to get 15 couples out for a free dinner at a high-end restaurant. In effect this mass-marketing approach gets 10% of the results it did 20 years ago, with the response rate falling by a factor of 10, from 3% to 0.3%.
