What are your main challenges? If you said prospecting or marketing, you’re in good company. Most advisors say that reaching their target demographic is one of the toughest challenges they face.
Because we know you enjoy working with numbers, we’ve collected some of the most important statistics relating to digital marketing today. We’re not saying that a single strategy is the key to your success; rather, you should take a look at the overall trends here and put together a marketing strategy that uses them to your best advantage.
With regard to email marketing, consider the following research results:
- Using email to nurture leads can result in 50 percent sales-ready prospects (Forrester Research via Hubspot)
- Of those nurtured prospects, there is a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities, when compared to non-nurtured prospects (Hubspot)
- Personalized messages receive a 29 percent higher open rate and 41 percent more unique clicks (Experian)
The takeaway lesson: Nurturing leads one by one, in person or over the phone, can be tedious and time consuming. You can accomplish the same goal by using email marketing to get your prospects sales-ready before they ever walk through your office door. Remember to personalize the messages, addressing your contacts by name, and write friendly emails that your contacts will want to read.
What about your website? Unless you’re operating in the Stone Age, you have a website. But is it optimized for maximum results?
- Loading time is important: a one-second delay can reduce conversions by 7 percent (Kissmetrics)
- A load time of more than 3 seconds causes 40 percent of visitors to navigate away from your site. (Kissmetrics)
- Google now uses mobile friendliness as part of their ranking algorithm. If your website does not load smoothly on mobile devices, it can hurt your search ranking.
The takeaway lesson: While an attractive design is important, function is even more crucial to your website’s impact on prospects. De-clutter it to reduce load time, and make sure your site is mobile-friendly. Otherwise your search rankings will suffer.
Speaking of mobile connectivity, consumers are becoming increasingly reliant upon their mobile devices as opposed to laptop or desktop computers. Consider these stats:
- 40 percent of mobile searches are for local services – that means you, provider of financial services (Think With Google)
- About half of website visitors will abandon your site if it does not load properly on a mobile device (The Social Media Hat)
- 65 percent of all emails are opened on a mobile device (Venture Beat)
- Over 80 percent of survey respondents said they would delete an email if it didn’t load properly on their mobile device (Blue Hornet)
The takeaway lesson: No matter which digital marketing strategies you choose to pursue, make sure they’re mobile friendly! That might mean revamping your website or carefully selecting an email marketing program.
Of course, social media sites are already designed to be viewed on mobile devices. In the second part of this article, we’ll discuss statistics relating to the effectiveness of social media marketing.