Modern investors are eager for education. They’re hungry for the news and insights that will inform their investment journey, and keen to uncover opportunities that will increase their net worth. But finding the time to learn is a challenge, and wading through jargon-stuffed long reads only makes it harder. Investors want bite-sized, digestible content, and they want it served up in the few minutes they have to spare each day.

That’s what makes newsletters such a valuable resource. Newsletters cut through the noise to deliver a package of the most important insights straight into investors' inboxes. They act as a jumping-off point, helping investors find the topics and ideas that are most interesting to them, and directing them towards resources where they can dive deeper. And because newsletters arrive at a regular cadence, it’s easy for investors to bake them into their daily routines.

Newsletters help nurture relationships with modern investors

Because newsletters are so valuable to investors, they're the obvious choice for brands that want to drive awareness and engagement with a large audience. Newsletters sit high up in the marketing funnel, enabling brands to expand their reach, and have the additional benefit of serving a higher-intent audience than social media advertising, for example. On social media, audiences are generally earlier in their education, and may not be ready to receive more advanced messages. By contrast, newsletter audiences have chosen to subscribe, and are looking for ways to advance their investment journey. In fact, email marketing has the best ROI of any marketing platform: on average, businesses see $36 in return for every $1 spent on email marketing, compared to $2.80 for every $1 spent on social media. 

But many brands have an over-simplistic view of newsletter advertising, and that means they’re failing to maximize the opportunity. There’s a common misconception that featuring once in a newsletter will drive immediate sign-ups. It won’t. Newsletter audiences might be engaged and primed to receive brand messaging, but the retail investing journey is complex. We estimate retail investors engage with 10-15 touchpoints before they convert to a customer. It takes time to nurture investors, and educate them on the role of a new platform or the value of an investment opportunity – so expecting to showcase a solution once and see immediate results is unrealistic.

Instead, brands should build newsletters into a multi-touchpoint, multi-channel strategy that grows awareness, trust and lead generation over time. It’s worth doing well: modern retail investors are intelligent people who thoroughly evaluate and assess the opportunities available to them. And because they make considered choices, they’re likely to stay loyal to and become long-term customers of the brands that win their trust.

Two best practices for newsletter campaigns

We launched the Finimize Daily Brief Newsletter back in 2017, and since then, it’s won 850,000 daily readers. Finimize subscribers receive a jargon-free breakdown of the day’s most important financial news, as well as a digest of broader trends and opportunities in the Finimize Weekly Review. Our newsletters boast a 52% open rate and 98% of our readers invest – so it’s fair to say that we have a handle on what investors care about, and how to create compelling content journeys that drive action. Here’s what we’ve learned about how to create successful newsletter campaigns:

Make newsletters part of an omnichannel strategy

We’ve talked before about the importance of taking an omnichannel approach when it comes to engaging investors. Running newsletter advertising alongside other channels not only enables brands to meet investors wherever and wherever they’re looking to learn, but also provides insights that can improve newsletter performance. Engaging community members across other channels helps brands understand how to position their brand proposition, and which questions investors really want answers to. 

Pairing newsletters with events is particularly effective. Events provide the opportunity to build trust by deep-diving into a topic, and give investors the chance to directly participate in the conversation. Brands can look at the questions raised in event Q&As, and use them to define what to talk about to capture attention at the top of the funnel. It helps brands create super-precise newsletter content that is tightly focused around investors’ needs and interests.

Finimize customer Acme Inc. used newsletter placements, social media posts, educational guides and deep-dive events to drive engagement, trust and awareness throughout the Finimize community. By embedding branded content across the educational journey, Acme Inc. became an invaluable resource for the Finimize investor audience.

Use multiple placements and formats to take investors on a journey

Newsletters are a great way to raise awareness and trigger lead generation, but investors need to be nurtured before they can be expected to convert. It’s unlikely that readers will click through from one advert and go directly to account sign-up, so brands need to think about how to keep investor attention once they’ve captured it.

Multiple newsletter placements enable brands to develop a compelling storyline over time and guide readers toward action. Campaigns could start with a company overview, an investment milestone in the next newsletter, then crowdfunding opportunities in the one after that. Using different formats to showcase snippets of longer-form content give investors lots of ways to learn about brands, and continue to build trust with them after they land on owned channels. 

‍We worked with Acme Inc. to identify the topics that their target audience really cared about, and craft a content journey that drip-fed insights and information over multiple newsletter placements. Each installment built on the last to grow our community’s confidence in the brand, and equip them to make informed investment decisions.

Finimize embeds financial brands into investors’ educational experience 

With Finimize Daily Brief and Weekly Review newsletters, brands can showcase their solutions in the places investors are already looking for answers.

Years of working with our community means we know what investors like to read, and can help financial brands build an engaging storyline that seamlessly embeds into the educational experience. Brands come to us with a specific asset or idea; we then run it through a rigorous editorial process to ensure it integrates naturally into our newsletters. The outcome is engaging content – not jarring adverts that add friction to the experience, and that readers are therefore more likely to skim over. We help brands bring their messaging to life, and create journeys that nurture investors towards action.

Financial brands use Finimize newsletters to deliver their message to a high-intent, highly-educated and highly-engaged community of retail investors. Working with Finimize, one global retail investment platform embedded itself into the learning experience of the Finimize community, and built a newsletter campaign that took readers on a journey from awareness, through to trust and finally action.

Representative Case Study

[Anonymized data based on real client]

Who is Acme Inc.?

Acme Inc. is a leading global retail investment platform that wants to enable financial freedom for its customers. It has a track record of innovation and aims to give its customers the best tools and information to inspire the confidence they need to invest successfully. 

Challenge

Acme Inc. had a flagship campaign that aimed to improve investors’ skills and confidence. The firm’s goal was to embed itself into the learning experience of the retail investing community at large.

Solution

Finimize and Acme Inc. took a multi-channel approach to drive awareness, trust, and engagement.

Education can help investors flourish: that was the keystone of our partnership with Acme Inc., driving engagement through the clued-in Finimize Community.

Over three months, we identified – through our proprietary data and user interviews – critical topics that addressed core concerns of the Finimize community and focused on them each in turn.

• Newsletter Features: Through multiple newsletter placements, we took Finimize Daily Newsletter subscribers on a journey of raising awareness of what Acme Inc. has to offer, building trust by highlighting insights from Finimize content produced in partnership with Acme Inc., and then calling to action once the first two steps are well established.
  
• Social Media: Regular posts help meet retail investors in native environments, raising mass brand awareness, and priming investors for further education and action.

• Educational Guides: Our analysts produced high-quality, educational, and actionable co-branded guides hosted on the Finimize website for each month’s topic. The guides serve as a content hub and demand engine for Acme Inc. – both within our Community and beyond.

• Community Events: We co-hosted “deep dive” events that delivered even more information about each topic of the month. Expert guests from Acme Inc. shared timely and thoughtful insights that dig deeper into each month’s selected topic. The live Q&A that followed gave attendees a chance to ask about the trends and themes that matter most to them.

Result

We delivered in line Acme Inc.’s expectations. The firm saw:

• Increased brand awareness
• High-quality lead generation 
• Account creation 

As a result, Acme Inc. has become a recurring partner of Finimize, expanding into a nine-month campaign with a broader set of aims.