This is a transcript from the Marketing for Advisors Podcast. To listen, please visit mfapodcast.com and every episode is easily available and free to listen.
Don Anders: Hello, my name is Don Anders and I'm here with Donovan Stull. And this is Marketing for Financial Advisors. Today we're going to be talking about targeting your existing list. I think one of the biggest problems that we have in our industry is we focus on always getting new people in. We keep searching for new names, trying to find those new diamonds in the rough who are good fits to be clients and really need our help. Two problems with that: A, it's really expensive and then B, it's kind of stupid. Maybe not stupid, but we’re into marketing, and it's not a smart to fully focus on getting new people into our sales funnels.
So if you think about a sales funnel, like any funnel, it starts at the top with everyone and then it goes down. Then you get cold leads, which are people who have identified themselves., and then you have hot leads, which are people that have said they want to appointment but haven't come in. And then you have prospects, are people who've come in but have not become clients. Then you have clients. Well, most companies have similar sales cycles. So if you take, let's say Amazon, you have everyone, and then cold leads are people who have gone to your website, and you know, but that's it. They know who you are. Then you have hot leads, are people who have a login but haven't really purchased anything. Prospects would be people that have added that to their cart and then clients are people who have actually bought the cart. And so what Amazon will do, if you notice, they'll still market to everyone, but they will focus on those prospects, right.
They will focus on the people who've gone to the cart but haven't bought. Why? Because they're so close to becoming clients that it makes sense to keep retargeting and remarketing to them. They know that you're interested in. Well, a lot of us will have people say, yeah, I want an appointment. And they just don't come in. And we'll say, yeah, well they never wanted an appointment or they didn't want to come in or they weren't serious or whatever we want to conjure up and make up in our brain, but it's not real. What really happens is most of the time they did want an appointment, but they got scared or they got intimidated or they changed their mind or they got busy or whatever else it is. Those people came in for an appointment didn't become clients. Now some of them just didn't like what you had to say.
But then other people, they are still thinking about becoming clients. They just haven't yet. So what we highly recommend doing is run events, run seminars, run webinars, whatever it is to your existing list, also clients, right. What do clients provide? Referrals. So you want to make sure that you re-engage those clients and you can do that through either email. The other thing for us, we invite a lot of our people through email because it's free. So if you're doing an event and you already have people that are interested in becoming clients, why not invite them back to another event.
Donovan Stull: Something that we started doing recently was we looked at every single event that we've done over the last 18 months and we have two main areas of focus in Florida and we separated it by location A and location B. So we said out of all the names that we have that attended any event, look at all of the no-shows. So we took all of those no-shows or those who never confirmed, whatever the case may be. And we just put them into an email list. And that's not a revolving, but an updated list after each and every event. So the next event, before I decide to do any digital marketing into it, I send them an email first. You know, hey you're, you're invited to this upcoming event here at a particular location.
And they go to the landing page to fill out their information and if they say they want to come in again, sure. Fantastic. You know, just from 2019 alone, I think our two lists are collectively about 150 and 200 names on that as a grand total. And while that's not a lot, I would much rather send out an email and hope that ten of them decide that they want to come in for the event this time around and if they don't, okay, they're going to get an email again the next time.
Don Anders: And it doesn’t cost anything. Same thing with clients, same thing with prospects and people who have... How about people that did come to seminars, said that they wanted an event and said that they wanted an appointment but they didn't actually show up for the appointment?
Donovan Stull: Yes.
Don Anders: So, my recommendation is spend some time nurturing that list. The other thing is, I think your list that you've built, a lot of financial advisors have spent tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars building that database. And it's often either completely neglected where it's not... Literally nothing happens or you don't mail out to it, you don't email out to it. You just say, okay, well we're just moving on to new names. Or you'll just hire a company that sends a generic, terrible, newsletter and pretty much devalues that... It doesn't give you any actual value.
It can actually hurt your image to that list. Instead, I would really highly recommend focusing on creating some content, whether it's on Facebook, you can upload your list to Facebook, whether it's through email, whether it's through mail or whatever it is. We highly recommend taking some money and actually creating content and creating some campaigns specifically for your list. It's the easiest way. It's almost like shaking a tree, right. They're already there, a couple will fall out and want appointments or want to meet with you. And the other-
Donovan Stull: Just go back and sort your CRN list.
Don Anders: Yeah, go through and make sure that all of your leads... I mean if you just have clients and leads, well that's not really accurate. They aren’t just leads. You have cold leads, you have hot leads, your prospects. Part of our boot camp that we do, we focus on how you need to properly sort your leads. A lot of times people will have clients, referrals or whatever else, but do you have the people who are interested or said that they're interested ranked? My recommendation is that you should.