10 Secrets of Selling Financial...
10 Secrets of Selling Financial Products & Services Online & In Print
1. Sell one thing, at one time, to one person
Ever been in a restaurant where the menu is so long, you really don’t know what to choose?
You’re experiencing ‘analysis paralysis’ and it is the mortal enemy of effective selling.
When you have a number of different products or services to promote, the obvious temptation is to try to ‘hedge your bets’ by shoe-horning them all into a single marketing message, in the hope that ‘something will stick’.
In fact, the reverse is usually true.
Overwhelming prospects with too many options is actually a very effective way of ensuring they don’t take any action at all.
If your message is confusing, the answer is always ‘no’.
And as far as the ‘…to one person’ bit goes, well…
Your market may have many different people in it, but when you try to ‘speak’ to it as an undifferentiated mass, your message will tend to fall flat.
Far better to speak clearly to your ‘bullseye’ potential client (or speaking distinctly to each clearly defined segment of your market), than watering down and compromising your message to the extent that it ends up appealing to no-one at all.
2. This variable SCREAMS
Why does one lead generation page convert less than 1% of visitors, while another converts 50% or more?
It’s certainly NOT about design, though that has a hand.
Few marketers really appreciate understand the importance of this, but:
When you get someone to your website, what influences them, way over and above anything else, are the WORDS you use…
And the ONE area that will make the greatest difference to your copy, and in turn make you the most money in direct proportion to the amount of effort you put into improving it:
Your HEADLINES.
Too often, people are concerned with ‘variables that whisper’ when it comes to performance, and don’t give sufficient time or attention to those handful of variables – like headlines – that SCREAM.
Online, a strong headline creates buying intent from the off…
While a weak one has your prospect clicking the ‘back’ button and getting the hell off your website in search of a competitor that seems more interesting or relevant.
You become a vague bad memory, if that.
John Caples is revered as one of the original masters of the art of direct response copywriting, and his research is particularly useful on the art of headlines.
Caples’ data on the headlines that worked best in display advertising over many years and the full spectrum of industry led him to conclude that ‘there are four important qualities a good headline may possess’:
1. Self-interest (‘by far the most important of these headline qualities’)
2. News
3. Curiosity
4. Quick, easy way
This is a simple checklist you can and should run through any time you write a headline.
Of course, these qualities aren’t mutually exclusive.
If you can speak to all of them in one headline, you have a probable winner on your hands.
But never forget the self-interest: ‘what’s in it for me?’ is the question first and foremost in any prospect’s mind… and they are DAMN impatient and DAMN suspicious!
3. Personal spokespeople sell better than faceless brands
So many smaller operations go out of their way to cultivate an image of the kind of corporate impersonality they believe is the hallmark of large corporations…
I’m talking switchboard numbers, ‘info@’ email addresses, and a total lack of information on the PEOPLE in or behind the organisation itself.
Well, guess what?
Potential clients HATE it!
It’s ironic, because the positive attributes implied for the customer in dealing with a smaller business – real expertise, personal service, genuine care, lack of bureaucracy – have NEVER been in greater demand!
Yes, customers need to feel that they’re dealing with credible entities with the resources to satisfy their requirements.
But witness how the world’s biggest financial institutions are bending over backwards right now to dissociate themselves from the deeply negative connotations of ‘big business’, and latching on to social media to ‘join the conversation’.
HSBC, the sixth largest public company in the world, tells us it’s the ‘world’s local bank’. Santander, with 4.3m current account holders in the UK, is ‘Simple, Personal and Fair’.
‘People buy from people’ is a truism. And it has never been more true than in the era of social media and the ‘net, where we can get a pretty good idea of almost any professional’s life story in two minutes.
Peter Hargreaves didn’t become a billionaire hiding behind a logo…
For years on the Hargreaves Lansdown website and in their paper newsletter, you’d see his face, and the face of key staff, all over the place, consistently.
Over time, that builds significant trust.
And I don’t care if you’re marketing to other businesses – people still want to know who they’re dealing with, and where the buck stops.
4. The most powerful persuasion lever of all?
Want the easiest way there is to bump up response?
Easy: structure your offers around deadlines (or some other kind of genuine, natural scarcity).
Deadlines are incredibly powerful for two main reasons.
The first is because human beings are such expert procrastinators.
The tragedy is that people can love you, love the sound of your offer, have all their objections satisfied, and still not buy!
Unless you give them a strong reason to act NOW, they’ll find a million and one ways to postpone the decision and never get round to it. A deadline forces the issue.
This is related to the second reason deadlines work.
It’s pure psychology – the fear of loss, which studies seem to suggest is actually a more powerful motivator than the potential for gain.
Don’t think deadlines can work in your business? Think again.
Amazon has a near-inexhaustible supply of everything, and everyone knows it. But, skilled marketers that they are, they crowbar in deadlines:
‘Want it today? Order it within 32 mins and choose Evening Delivery at checkout.’
…and the deadline’s close cousin, scarcity, at every opportunity:
‘Only 8 left in stock (more on the way)’.
Deadlines can work beautifully with extra incentives, too.
Could you offer a general extra incentive for waverers, and then a second with a deadline attached for those who respond quickly?
5. You are scarier than you can possibly imagine…
You almost certainly do not realise the appalling extent of this – but new prospects find you and your business TERRIFYING.
From an early age, almost every single one of us has been heavily conditioned to be extremely wary of anybody selling anything.
At the same time, as your prospects have progressed through life, they’ve regularly been buying things.
Many of those buying experiences have been good… still more mediocre… but many poor, and a handful absolutely appalling, which makes scepticism almost inevitable – increasingly so as individuals accumulate more life experience (read: get older).
To top it all off, you live in the age of distrust.
I don’t want to labour the point, but most marketers underestimate the mountain they have to climb just to get a chance, and it’s at least partly caused by things like:
Top politicians (expenses and other scandals)… celebrities (Savile and others)… newspapers (phone hacking)… the Catholic church (child abuse cover-ups)… the police (Stephen Lawrence, phone hacking)… financial institutions (the credit crunch, mis-selling, Woodford) and the regulators supposed to supervise them (incompetence)…
Scandal after scandal… outrage after outrage… all have sent public confidence in the people we ought to be able to trust plummeting to rock-bottom.
Even ‘household names’ don’t hold the automatic credibility they used to… and if you don’t have the luxury of a household name brand, your copy will have to work even harder.
To reiterate:
People ARE DEEPLY SCEPTICAL that you’re as good as you claim to be.
People ARE DEEPLY SCEPTICAL that you can be trusted to deliver.
People ARE DEEPLY SCEPTICAL that getting involved with you won’t turn into some kind of headache, one way or another.
Online, the trust issue is even more critical.
The problem is that any rogue can set up a decent looking website for next to nothing – and the world knows it!
Credibility indicators are your only antidote to all this scepticism – and if you want to reach full potential, you’ll need to assemble a small army of them for weaving into all your copy and promotions.
When we create copy, we begin with a proprietary checklist of 42 such credibility indicators.
6. Make the skeleton dance
'If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton...
...you may as well make it dance,' said George Bernard Shaw.
And this applies absolutely to your marketing…
You see, if all you do is talk about how great your service is, you can actually GENERATE scepticism.
Why?
‘Cos nothing in this world is perfect… and everyone knows it.
On the other hand, admit to a flaw… and it’s disarming.
You actually GAIN credibility for being honest…
And it makes the rest of your message that much MORE believable.
Simple example off the top of my head:
Instead of trying desperately to cover up the fact that you’re a small business, say, could you instead write:
‘We work closely with a limited number of clients, which means they get real attention from our best people.’
This way, you’ve turned a potential ‘flaw’ (your small size) into a benefit, by making your prospects fully aware of the upside of being small (greater attention and care).
Obvious caveat: ensure that the flaw you admit to isn’t a deal-breaker for your prospect.
And if you do have a flaw that’s a deal-breaker, can you re-engineer what you do to get rid of it?
7. Online, email is still king
I know, I know – you’ve been fed the big lie so often now you may have actually started to believe it:
‘Social media is where you should be focusing your efforts these days.’
Cobblers.
I won’t go into all the reasons in this short report why opt-in email is still THE online marketing channel… and you’re mad if you’re not aggressively building, and carefully nurturing, your own opt-in email ‘list’.
Instead, I’ll just share this from the DMA Marketer Email Tracker Report 2019:
“ROI from email marketing now stands at just over £42 for every pound spent; a rise of almost £10 since the previous study… Email remains the key strategic channel according to marketers (91% rated important)... Lifetime value (LTV) of each individual email address has also risen sharply by 33% year-on-year… LTV is perceived higher in B2C (£41) than B2B (£35).”
…and I’ll ask you one question:
If I took your business email away from you for a week without warning, what kind of palpitations would you be having?
Case closed.
8. Direct mail is out of fashion - and therefore a huge opportunity
Savvy stock market investors realise that the best time to buy into a sector is when it’s thoroughly out of fashion… because that’s when the bargains are to be had.
Well, the same ‘contrarian’ school of thought often works in marketing too.
Everyone is so focused today on social media and mobile apps that competition in your prospect’s good old-fashioned ‘snail mail’ has reduced considerably in recent years.
At the same time, recent DMA research found that:
79% of consumers respond to direct mail immediately
56% think printed marketing material is the most trustworthy of all marketing communications channels
48% of the UK have responded to a direct mail promotion in the last year
Of course, direct mail is not without outlay or risks… so ensure you invest time and/or money in the strongest possible copy and promotion.
9. Finance is only boring if you make it so
To read most financial marketing materials, you’d think there was a law against interesting, punchy content.
Look – I know there are compliance constraints.
And I know that clients want responsible people influencing where their money goes, not clowns.
I get it.
But what could be more exciting than the possibility of making money and moving towards financial freedom… more pride-inducing than supporting one’s family… or more terrifying than the risk of losing it all due to bad decision-making?
People tell themselves they make decisions rationally, but in fact they are guided primarily by emotion and use logical arguments to justify their decisions after the event.
If your marketing messages aren’t addressing the full gamut of emotions tied up in this incredibly rich subject matter, time to have a rethink.
10. Murderer! You killed my response…
Confession time: I’ve been scarred for life… by graphic designers.
Nice people… but they’re not aware of one thing
"If it's ugly as hell... it'll probably sell."
Professional online marketers, who spend all day testing and tweaking websites until they SELL, have used that phrase for years.
Fact is, many 'good-looking' websites, sales letters and brochures are dogs of the first order when it comes to PERFORMANCE…
The problem?
99.99% of web and graphic designers don't have a Scooby Doo about what drives response online…
Look – I’m not saying that the goal is to have an ugly website or sales piece.
Just that message trumps everything… and if the design of your sales pieces gets in the way of the message, then it’s actually a response ‘murderer’ to be eliminated ruthlessly.
Want help with your financial marketing?
We’ve been specializing in lead generation for the financial sector since 2006 with clients and experience encompassing Experian, Hargreaves Lansdown, Societe Generale, Direct Line, Legal & General, as well as dozens of smaller businesses.
Recently we’ve been:
* Helping a developer finance client raise £10 million and successfully complete 4 different projects with only £120k invested in ads
* Helping an investment product provider raise over £3m in its first year and establish a professional agency network of over 25
* Generating thousands of enquiries month for a brokerage which allowed them to grow from 4 staff to 30 staff in just 2 years.
Maybe we can help you in some way, too?
To explore the idea, please schedule a quick initial chat with us here.
We’ll let you know if we think we can help.
Or point you in the right direction, if we can’t.