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If you’re not devoting time to email marketing, you may be allowing opportunities for growth to pass you by. Email drip campaigns enable you to nurture relationships with current and prospective clients, build trust and foster engagement, without requiring you to be tied to your device. Read on to learn how to build financial advisor drip marketing campaigns that convert.
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Financial Advisor Drip Marketing Strategies
A drip campaign is a series or sequence of emails you send to clients and prospects over a set period of time following an automated schedule. Each email in the sequence should build on the previous message and steer the reader toward a specific call to action (CTA).
These messages are typically designed to target a specific segment of your book of business, such as current clients you’re sharing a new service offering with or prospects who have had an initial consult but have yet to commit. According to HubSpot, segmented emails drive 50% more clicks and 30% more open rates than unsegmented ones, evidence of drip campaigns’ value as a marketing and conversion tool. 1
If you’ve never tried drip marketing, here’s how to create your first campaign.
1. Define Your Audience
First, ask yourself who will be on the receiving end of your drip campaign.
How you market to prospective clients may be different from how you market to your current clients. Your drip campaign messaging should reflect the audience you’re speaking to and their unique needs or pain points.
This is where an ideal client avatar or buyer persona comes in handy. Developing these hypothetical profiles can help you determine how to shape your message so that readers are receptive to what you have to say. Once you determine who you’re marketing to, you can move on to the next step.
2. Clarify Your Goal
What’s the purpose of your drip marketing campaign?
It’s a simple question, but one that requires an answer before you begin crafting your messaging. There are several types of drip marketing campaigns you might use to grow your business.
| Advisor introduction | An introductory email sequence is designed to help a prospective client get to know you. This type of drip campaign is most often used when someone joins your email list. For example, a prospect may download your lead magnet in exchange for giving you their email address. Through your email marketing service provider, you can have an automatic trigger set up that will then launch your introductory sequence. |
| Seminar/workshop | Seminars can be a highly effective marketing tool for advisors, too. If you plan to launch one, a drip campaign is a terrific way to tell prospects and clients about it. You can design your campaign to pique interest, encourage registration and follow up once the seminar is complete. |
| Follow-up/cold outreach | If a lead goes cold, you could use a drip campaign to warm it up. You might send out a sequence of emails asking the prospect if they’re still interested in hearing from you, sharing helpful resources or offering a free consultation to get their attention. |
Whatever your goal may be, consider which metrics you’ll use to track it. Email marketing software allows you to monitor things like open rates and click rates if you’re including links in your messages. You can also go a step further to track:
- Visits to your website
- Consultations scheduled
- New clients acquired
These types of key performance indicators (KPIs) can shed light on the overall effectiveness of your drip marketing tactics. It’s also helpful to track unsubscribe rates from your email campaigns.
If you’re getting a sizable number of unsubscribes or failing to get a meaningful number of clicks through to your website, those are clues that your messaging or the timing of your emails needs some adjustment.
3. Craft Compelling Content
Drip campaigns can get a prospect or client used to seeing you in their inbox, but if you don’t give them a reason to open your messages, they may get sent straight to the trash folder.
A successful email drip campaign is compelling from start to finish, and includes an eye-catching or engaging subject line, a personalized greeting, helpful or valuable content that speaks to the needs, goals and interests of the reader and a clear CTA that directs the reader to the next step. An effective way to approach drafting your content is to think about the end action. In other words, what do you want the reader to do?
For example, you may want them to visit your financial advisor website, schedule a free consultation, sign up for an online seminar you’re offering or something entirely different. Whatever it is, the content of your email should make that action seem natural and logical, so the reader doesn’t think twice about doing it.
It makes sense to craft all of the emails in your sequence at once so they can build upon one another. If you have an email service provider you’re using, you’ll create your drip sequence within that platform. You may also use your customer relationship management (CRM) platform or lead generation service to draft and send emails if your system has that capability.
SmartAsset AMP, for example, features built-in tools to help you develop and manage drip campaigns. When you create a nurture campaign using the platform, new referrals are automatically enrolled. In addition to email drip campaigns, you can also communicate with prospects automatically through text and call reminders. Schedule a free demo to learn how you can leverage this tool for lead generation.
4. Set Your Schedule
Once you’ve created each email in your sequence, all that’s left is to set your schedule. How frequently you send each message in the campaign will depend on its purpose.
For example, introductory email campaigns typically span consecutive days. If someone signs up for your email list, they may get a short welcome message right away. Between one and three days later, they’ll receive the next message in the campaign, and so on until all the messages are sent.
A follow-up campaign may require a little cooling-off period between messages. So you might space them out over two to four weeks instead. Your email marketing software should allow you to set the schedule for delivery of each message and adjust it as needed.
In terms of how many emails to include, it depends on your audience and the overall intent of the campaign. A typical drip campaign may be anywhere from four to 10 emails. Any less than four and you may not be giving your audience enough time to connect with your messaging. More than 10 and you run the risk of your audience tuning you out or worse, unsubscribing from your email list altogether.
5. Test Before Launch
Before your drip campaign goes live, test it to ensure that messages are delivered in the right order and at the correct pace. Review each message you’ve drafted to check for spelling errors, grammatical errors and typos, and click any links that are included to make sure they’re functioning properly.
Once the campaign launches, you may continue testing by experimenting with different email headlines, subject lines and delivery rates. These efforts, along with tracking your performance metrics, can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your drip campaigns and where you may need to make adjustments.
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- Ideal for RIAs looking to scale.
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CFP®, CEO
Joe Anderson
Pure Financial Advisors
We have seen a remarkable return on investment and comparatively low client acquisition costs even as we’ve multiplied our spend over the years.
Pure Financial Advisors reports $1B in new AUM from SmartAsset investor referrals.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is financial advisor drip marketing?
Drip marketing is a marketing approach that involves sending multiple email messages to prospects and clients over a set period of time. Advisors can use drip marketing campaigns to build a rapport with clients, keep them up to date on the latest market trends, and gently steer them toward products and services that are designed to meet their needs.
Can advisors use AI for email marketing?
Writing drip emails can be time-consuming, and artificial intelligence may offer advisors a shortcut. The key to using AI to craft your marketing messages is to add a human touch. Before you hit send on AI-generated emails, review the content to make sure that it’s friendly, conversational and reflective of your brand. And remember that any email campaigns you create should be compliant with federal and state regulations.
How can advisors build drip email campaigns?
The simplest way to set up a drip campaign is to use an email marketing service or software. Email marketing services make it easier to craft your messages, schedule them and assign tags so you can easily segment your email list. When comparing email marketing services, consider how much you’ll pay monthly or annually, the features you’ll have access to, and the level of support provided.
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Bottom Line
Drip campaigns can help advisors build their businesses on autopilot if they’re sending out the right messages to the right clients or prospects. There may be a learning curve in setting up your first drip sequence, but once you get the hang of it, you may find that it’s an invaluable part of your marketing plan.
Tips for Growing Your Advisory Business
- Digital marketing goes beyond just email. It also includes social media, digital ads and content creation. If you’re ready to boost your brand’s visibility, partnering with an online marketing platform could make sense. SmartAsset AMP uses a holistic approach to help growth-focused advisors reach their goals. Schedule a demo to learn how you can use it for your business.
- The SEC’s marketing rule governs what registered investment advisors can and can’t say in their email messaging. Other rules apply to recordkeeping and which client communications you’re expected to maintain. Reviewing the guidelines for marketing and recordkeeping can ensure that you’re maintaining compliance when conducting email outreach.
Photo credit: ©iStock.com/Marco VDM, ©iStock.com/ipuwadol, ©iStock.com/ijeab
Article Sources
All articles are reviewed and updated by SmartAsset’s fact-checkers for accuracy. Visit our Editorial Policy for more details on our overall journalistic standards.
- Buckley, Ryan. How to Create Successful Email Drip Campaigns [Examples + Best Practices]. 16 Jan. 2026, https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/drip-emails-opens.