Your newsletter goes out on the first Tuesday of the month. It has a product update, a webinar invite, two blog posts and a note from your CEO under the subject line “November update”. By Thursday the open rate looks like last month’s and the most clicked link is unsubscribe.
A lot of fintechs are in the same place with email. It’s one of the few channels you own outright, yet it rarely gets much attention, because there’s always a launch, an event or a sales push that feels more urgent. The newsletter turns into a roundup of whatever happened that month and readers learn they can skip it.
Fintech email marketing works when every email has a job, goes to the right people and gives them a reason to open it. Here’s how to get there.
Give every email one job
Before you write anything, decide what the email is for. Booking demos, getting customers to use a new feature, filling a webinar and keeping prospects warm between sales calls are all good jobs. Trying to do all four in one send usually means none of them happen.
One email with one clear purpose is easier to write, easier to read and easier to measure. If you have four things to say this month, that might be four short emails to four different groups.
Split your list by who’s reading
A CFO, a head of payments and a compliance lead at the same bank want very different things from you. Customers and prospects want different things again. Sending all of them the same email guarantees most of it is irrelevant to most of them.
Start with a few simple segments:
- Customers and prospects
- Role, such as finance, operations, technology or compliance
- Where prospects are in the sales cycle
- Product or market, if you sell more than one thing
B2B email marketing for financial services has an extra layer, because you’re usually selling to a group of people at the same firm. Give each of them something useful for their part of the decision. We cover how those buying groups work in B2B fintech marketing.
Write subject lines that say what’s inside
“November update” and “Newsletter #14” give nobody a reason to open. Your subject line has one job, which is telling the reader what they’ll get and why it matters to them.
Name the specific thing. “What the APP fraud reimbursement rules mean for your onboarding flow” tells a payments lead exactly why they should open it. So does “Your Q3 usage report is ready”. Keep it short enough to read on a phone and use the preview text underneath to add the detail the subject line couldn’t fit.
Avoid anything that sounds like a sales pitch. Financial services readers are cautious by nature and quick to ignore anything that feels pushy.
Send something worth reading
Ask whether the email would still be useful if your company name wasn’t on it. Plain English explanations of regulatory changes, practical guides, benchmarks from your own data and answers to questions your sales team hears every week all pass that test. A list of your latest press releases usually doesn’t.
Send it from a real person, such as a founder, an expert or the account manager the customer already knows. Write it the way that person talks. A named person with a point of view sounds like they’re talking to you, which is hard to manage when a brand is announcing five things at once.
Keep it short. Give one main idea enough room to be useful and link to the longer version on your site for anyone who wants more.
Make the next step obvious
Every email needs one clear call to action that matches its job. If the job is booking demos, the button books a demo. If it’s getting customers to try a feature, the button takes them straight to it.
Five links of equal weight split attention and make it harder to tell what worked. Pick the one action you want and make it easy to find.
Bring compliance in early
Email marketing for financial services sits under a few sets of rules at once. In the UK, marketing emails to individuals come under PECR and UK GDPR, so you need the right consent and an easy way to opt out. Anything that promotes a financial product is also a financial promotion and has to be fair, clear and not misleading.
None of that has to slow you down if compliance helps build your templates, approved phrases and disclaimers at the start. Then each send only needs a quick check. We go into more detail on working with compliance teams in our guide to financial services marketing.
Measure what moves the business
Open rates are less reliable than they used to be, because Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection loads emails in the background and counts many of them as opened whether anyone read them or not. Treat opens as a rough signal and look harder at what people do next.
Clicks, replies, demos booked, features adopted and meetings that sales can trace back to an email all tell you far more. For prospects, watch which emails move people closer to a conversation. For customers, watch whether email changes how they use your product.
Common fintech email marketing mistakes
These come up across the industry, usually because email gets squeezed in around bigger projects:
- Sending one newsletter to everyone on the list
- Subject lines that describe the email’s format instead of its content
- Cramming every update into one send
- Leaving compliance review until the day before it goes out
- Judging success on open rates alone
Each one is fixable with a bit of planning and most of that planning only has to happen once.
Want emails your customers look forward to?
Fintech Content writes newsletters, nurture sequences and customer emails for fintechs and financial services firms, in plain English and with compliance in mind from the first draft. If you’d like help turning your email programme into something people open and act on, our content writing service is a good place to start.