Creating savings accounts, depositing checks, and getting business loans aren’t the kind of exciting activities that most people look forward to, but these emails demonstrate some ingenious ways to get people’s attention and prompt them to interact with a financial services business.
Tie Into Something Your Customers Like to Do
Acorns is an investment service that rounds up your purchases to the nearest dollar and puts the leftover change into investment funds. It’s like a digital spare change jar that produces a return on investment, rather than sitting there waiting for someone to undertake the tedious task of counting all those coins.
Investing spare change may not be the most exciting thing to do, but Acorns puts some fun into the concept with this marketing message that ties into the upcoming summer travel season. Acorns will invest a little money into its users’ accounts when they make travel plans through the companies mentioned in this email, which encourages them to keep using the service while taking vacations.
Show Them How Easy it is
The engineers who created the ability to deposit a check with your smartphone likely had to jump through a bunch of regulatory hurdles before it could be introduced to consumers. Now that it’s reality, though, the people who are doing it probably can’t imagine any other way to get funds from pieces of paper into their accounts.
This email from Wells Fargo is aimed at those who haven’t made the leap yet by showing them how easy it is. The lifestyle photo captures the mood the bank wants to convey and the bullet points reinforce the idea that depositing a check with your phone is easy, convenient, and secure.
The Sign On CTA button takes the recipient straight into their account, which makes sense given how many people read email on their phones.
Connect With Events like Giving Tuesday
Toyota Financial Services (TFS) used these two emails to let users know that they could help them celebrate Giving Tuesday, which happens every year on the Tuesday following Black Friday. They earmarked $150,000 to give to four charities – Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Girl Scouts, Special Olympics, and the American Red Cross – and divided the money based on the number of clicks each organization received.
This was a great way for TFS to get involved in charitable giving while encouraging the participation of its users. The follow-up email was smart because it illustrated the impact of the giving initiative and encouraged customers to continue giving to those causes if they wished.
Give People the Big Picture View
ScholarShare 529 helps parents save for their kids’ college educations, or private elementary and high school educations, by setting up 529 plans, which are college savings accounts that are exempt from federal taxes. There are different kinds of 529 plans; their state tax benefits vary by state.
This email was sent out during the first week of January when many people make personal improvement resolutions and generally feel optimistic about getting a fresh start. It plays off that idea while also giving recipients a handy chart that demonstrates how quickly savings can add up, depending on the age of the child.
Sure, everyone knows that a few dollars tucked away each month can turn into a tidy windfall a couple decades from now, but it’s always helpful to see it displayed like this.
Have Some Fun
Fundbox offers short-term lines of credit to small and medium businesses (SMBs), but they base their decisions on a company’s health, not the personal credit scores of the people who own it. They only collect fees on payments made, not for loan origination or maintenance of accounts.
They sent out this holiday email to offer a credit toward fees during a two-week period in December, and they used a fun holiday-themed GIF to get people’s attention. It’s simple and invites people to click on the CTA button just below the skier’s destination.
While there is certainly no one right answer on how to create an effective financial services email campaign, these five great examples should get your wheels turning for your next marketing email!