Your team just launched an amazing market report, and you want to personally share it with all your clients. So, you write up a quick message and copy and paste it into individual emails, hoping you don’t forget to swap out the first name (been there, done that, am I right?). Or you want to personalize it more for select clients, pointing out a specific section of the report you know they’d be particularly interested in.
Either way, it all just takes way. too. long.
It’s time to minimize this operational inefficiency. Keep reading to learn how
Why you shouldn’t send personalized bulk emails from your own inbox
Stop what you’re doing. You shouldn’t be sending bulk emails from your own inbox in the first place! And sure, there are many ways to sort of automate sending personalized mass emails through your own inbox — whether you’re using Outlook or Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) — but here’s why that’s not a good idea either.
Requires technical know-how
The steps to set up mass emails via Outlook or Gmail can be complicated, requiring various tools and multiple mail merges. If you’re not technically savvy (what’s a mail merge?), it’s easy to miss something and make a mistake.
No data integrity
Speaking of mail merges: In order for the right info to populate the right areas of your email — like first name or other personalized info — you’ve got to have your data in order. Doing this yourself means manual input, which means a high likelihood of human error. What if you accidentally call someone the wrong name or, worse, share sensitive information to the wrong client?
Mass email limits
Did you know there are limits to how many people you can send an email to at the same time? The number of emails you can send and receive within a 24-hour time frame in Gmail is 500. The number of recipients is also limited to 500. And according to Microsoft, the limits for Outlook are similar: 5,000 recipients daily and 500 recipients per message.
No scheduling in advance
Whatever bulk email you’re sending with mail merges, you have to send it now. This can be inconvenient if you’re busy or unavailable during the time you actually want the email to be sent.
Difficult to scale for the whole team
So far, we’ve just been talking about one relationship manager trying to send emails to clients. What about the rest of the team? Trying to make sure everyone is up to speed and preventing errors would be a nightmare, making it…
Harder to control
Yep. Harder to control messaging. Harder to prevent mistakes. Harder to train your entire team. With no oversight on what people do in their inbox, everyone’s rogue.
Challenging to stay compliant
You know what else is harder to control? Compliance. So much so, it deserves its own section. Firms don’t want sales to send out non-complied content, so in many cases, the preference would be to use marketing-approved and compliant content.
But with everyone doing their own thing, it’s easy for sales to make alterations, and thus, rendering the content no longer complied.
On top of this, you have to ensure you’re compliant with email laws as well. This is challenging when you’re relying on sales to check if a client is unsubscribed before mass emailing them or share unsubscribes across disparate systems. Not only is this a legal risk, but it’s an email deliverability risk, too!
No client insights
Last but not least, sending bulk emails through your own inbox means there’s no way to tell if anyone has even clicked on what you’ve shared — let alone open the email in the first place. Are clients engaging? Do they care? Who knows.
Benefits of automating one-to-many communications
So, forget manually sending mass emails to clients. Marketing automation is the way to go — and here are the main reasons why.
Add some personalization
With marketing automation, you can personalize client emails with their relationship manager’s name in the “from name” and signoff so clients still get the perception that their relationship manager is personally reaching out to them.
You can also include the client’s name in the greeting and any dynamic content personalized by profile information, preferences, and more so the emails still have that tailored touch.
Save a lot of time
And you can scale this across your entire team so you only send once on behalf of sales. Collectively, this saves your business hours of time. Plus, there are no limits or wait times on how much you can send when. Meaning, you can send everything all at once.
Get client insights
Best of all, you’d know who’s engaging when and with what. Then, use that engagement data to trigger and power other communications or further personalize the client experience. Planning on resending that new market report? Now you’ll know which clients have already read it so you can exclude them from the reminder email.
How to automate personalized emails from a client’s relationship manager
To automate emails from a client’s relationship manager, you need tight sales and marketing alignment. The bonus: Once you’ve set up the foundation, it’s simple to automate personalized mass emails — much easier than navigating Outlook!
1. Sync your CRM to your ESP
Sync your CRM (client relationship management) tool to your ESP (email service provider). This is where that sales and marketing alignment comes in. You want to make sure you have the data you need in your CRM to power your email marketing efforts.
Then, create one email with personalized from name, from email address, and client name. Bonus points for setting up dynamic content via a thoughtful preference center.
2. Use a sales tool
In addition, you can use a sales tool which enables sales to create their own one-to-some campaigns themselves. The scale is smaller than using a marketing tool — sending to a group of 20 clients versus thousands — but you retain control without losing efficiency.
At StoneShot, we believe sales teams should be able to view and send prospect related activity from their primary sales platforms, so we created StoneShot for Sales which can be accessed directly in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. Easy!
3. Schedule your send
The last step? Just hit send and watch the engagement data roll in!
Automation is the answer
With marketing automation, minimize the operational inefficiency of manual mass emails and start easily personalizing emails from your clients’ relationship managers — without the messy chaos of sending directly from the inbox.
Ready to dive in? Check out StoneShot’s email marketing and marketing automation platform made just for investment managers and marketers like you. We’ve even got you covered with campaign management and strategy and consulting. You’ll get superior customer service with real people who care — not a faceless organization that treats you like a number. If you’re interested, let’s chat.
