How Important is Email Marketing in B2B Fintech?

Phil Ireland, Head of CRM at Growth Gorilla, joined Helen Owen, VP of Marketing at Tribe Payments and Jonathan Nyst, Chief Marketing Officer at Monizze, for a Panel Event packed with email marketing tips and tricks for fintechs.

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They talked about:

• How to define your email marketing strategy
• What works and what doesn't in B2B email marketing
• Newsletters vs marketing automation
• How to cut through the noise with email marketing
• How to bring value to your audience using email marketing
• How to gather and analyse data

Check out the key takeaways:

1.  From 1 to 10, how important is email marketing to the success of your fintech? 

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Phil: Between 9 and 10. 

Helen: Quite important, but right now, at Tribe, we're early stages, so it's between 3 to 4.

Jonathan: Between 8 to 9.

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2. When does email marketing make sense for FinTech B2B?

Phil:

Pro Tip: You could have the best-looking email in the world, if it's going to the wrong audience, it's a waste of time. Having the right data is the biggest priority.

Pro Tip #2: You need to understand, from day one, how to qualify leads. Whether it's a signup form or landing page, ensure you get the most info from the user so that you can send out personalised and relevant emails.

3. What are the best ways to gather data? 

Phil:
At Growth Gorilla, we start the customer journey by ensuring we have targeted landing pages from the start instead of just sending people to the homepage, where there's a lot of noise. 

Our best-performing strategy is sending paid traffic—through LinkedIn ads and social media platforms and it's been working well.

Helen:

We do a fair amount of content (podcast, regular blog, PR) plus PPC and paid social—so we get a lot of direct traffic to our site and collect data easily this way. 

We're putting into place a website chatbot to help us capture more data, and we also have in-person events scheduled to gather more qualitative data. 

Jonathan:

Our strategy is to ask the lead as little information as possible, not to bore them, and then pull out available data through public databases.

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4. How do you put together a strategy for email marketing?

Jonathan:

We start with the company's OKRs and objectives and then ask ourselves: 

• What are we trying to achieve? 
• What are the big numbers that are going to be important? 
• What are different initiatives we can start doing?

After each campaign, we look at the results:

• What worked, what didn't work? 
• What do we need to iterate for next month? 
• Do we need to try other channels? Etc.

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5. What does a nurture strategy look like for you? 

Phil:

Nurturing is huge for B2B, because not all leads are ready to become customers yet. 

We've got 3 pillars we go through when setting up an email strategy: marketing, transactional, and operational. You want to ensure you have a strategy in place for each, from standard automation, like welcome journeys, to newsletters. 

The secret to successfully nurturing leads, to me, is consistency. I'm also not a fan of hard selling, so I wouldn't hit users straight away with offers, but take it step by step, build rapport first, and be top of mind.

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6. How many emails are too much?

Helen:  

I get up to 20 emails daily from agencies trying to sell me something I can't tell what. It's annoying when you're not specific, don't relate to me, and don't take the time to understand the business first. So it's not really about the number but the quality and relevance of the message.

Pro Tip: Always ensure you've got that data and the answer to the question of what's in it for them when you send out an email. 

Pro Tip #2: Make sure you monitor and tweak your emails based on how each has performed.

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7. How can you cut through the noise with email marketing?

Jonathan:

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who gets a ridiculous number of emails. 

Pro Tip: It all boils down to what kind of value you bring to your audience. Give away free, relevant content. Your tribe will naturally build around you if you give them enough value without trying to sell them the first time they read something from you.
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8. How can you bring value to your audience through email marketing?

Phil:

To me, value means relevancy. 

Be relevant to the user you're targeting from the very start. If the content is relevant to me, I don't mind receiving 1020 emails from that same company weekly.

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Jonathan:

For me, marketing is about the limbic brain, a part of the brain involved in emotional responses. The data you collect should help you craft better marketing messages and emails that will trigger a positive emotional response from the brain. That's how you bring value.

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9. Are newsletters a good way of getting someone into the funnel? 

Phil: 

Yes, but you can go right, and you can go wrong, of course. 

A good example is a newsletter I received today from Freetrade. It's light-hearted, it gets across trade and investment information in a way that's easy to digest for someone who isn't necessarily a pro trader, and it's engaging. 

A bad example is sending out the same boring content weekly or monthly. Not making an effort with the subject lines—I'm not going to open an email called "Our latest newsletter."

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That's it, folks. These are Phil and other experts' top email marketing tips and tricks. Listen to the entire session hosted by The Fintech Marketing Hub here.

If you want to find out how Phil and Growth Gorilla can help you to achieve your CRM growth goals, get in touch with us today or download our free guide to CRM Marketing For Fintechs.

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