How To Use Direct Mail Marketing For Your Financial Advisory Firm

5 Reasons Why Direct Mail Marketing Still Works in the Digital Age

Posted January 8, 2020 by Gabriel Lewit, Chief Executive Officer

In today’s digital world, marketing is often thought of as all digital based—and for good reason.

Social media has become a monster force in our daily lives, from tweets, to posts, to hashtags, and more. Email marketing is now considered one of the most widespread forms of marketing, ever. Texting to our smart phones is on the rise. And let’s not forget about search engine ads, social ad posts, Instagram “influencers” and those retargeting ads that follow you everywhere you go online.

As a financial or insurance professional, when you look at your marketing options, it’s no surprise that digital marketing seems to rule the roost.

But that doesn’t mean digital is still the most effective marketing method. What if there was a better way?

Enter direct mail marketing. Also known as “Snail Mail.”

Once the quintessential form of marketing to reach your target consumers, over the past decade direct mail has taken a back seat to digital marketing. Recently, however, it’s been seeing a resurgence like never before. Today we’ll focus on 5 reasons why direct mail marketing still works in the digital age—especially for financial professionals—and how you can easily implement direct mail marketing to your advantage.

The Challenges of Digital Marketing

Don’t get me wrong… digital marketing absolutely deserves a place in your marketing plan. But, based on some of the challenges that you face with digital marketing, it’s just not the holy grail that many financial advisors think it is.

Let’s look at some of the challenges with digital marketing for a financial professional:

  • Over-Saturation of Emails
    People are getting more emails each day than ever before. This has some unsurprising ramifications. Fewer opens, fewer clicks. That means fewer of your messages are being read than they used to be. For many in the financial industry, they are lucky if they have a 10% open rate on their emails. This is a problem if you’re counting on email marketing to drive your results, but 9 out of every 10 people you email to don’t read your message.
  • Increased Bombardment of Digital Ads
    Consumers are being bombarded by more and more ads. As every company flocks to place their ads on the limited real estate of a mobile phone screen, consumers are saying “enough!” People these days are getting good at simply zoning out ads as the scroll past them looking for the content that they want to engage with.
  • For Most Advisors, Limited Digital Marketing Effectiveness and ROI
    Most importantly, digital marketing activities such as social media and blogging has limited effectiveness. To be successful is a lot of work and frankly, a lot of time and money. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just challenging to do well.

Again, I want to reiterate, we encourage and believe in digital marketing. However, for most financial professionals, this should be considered more of an ancillary spoke on their marketing wheel as opposed to the primary marketing driver.

5 Reasons Why Direct Mail Still Works in the Digital Age

Direct mail, on the other hand, is a tried and true technique that has been used for hundreds of years. Today, it’s more effective than ever when used as part of a well-rounded marketing plan.

Let’s look at why direct mail is so effective in today’s digital age.

  1. It Can Reach a Wider Audience
    Direct mail can reach a greater audience. Take email, for example. Many people will give you their “fake email” address simply because they don’t want their real email account to get excess marketing messages. That means they aren’t going to be checking that fake email account and seeing your message. It’s like sending a postcard to someone’s summer house versus their primary residence. Not a good thing!

  2. It Will Be Seen or Read More Than Digital Marketing
    When you send the right type of mail—we recommend postcards and/or really high-quality newsletters in large envelopes—your message will nearly always be read. Compared to emails and their 10% open rate, imagine knowing that nearly 95% of your postcards or newsletters will be seen by your recipients. That’s a huge difference when it comes to your marketing.

  3. It Makes a Physical & Tangible Feeling
    There’s something… real… about holding a piece of mail. Perhaps that’s because it is, in fact, a real physical world object! Unconsciously this provides a tangible and meaningful impact that’s hard to quantify. Researchers have concluded that receiving physical mail means more to people than an email. For example, what typically carries more weight and meaning to you, receiving an “e-Card” from your family for the holidays, or a high-quality card in an classy envelope that you can then display on your dresser or shelves?

  4. It Can Generate a Greater Response from Your Call-to-Actions
    Ultimately, marketing is all about generating a good response to your call-to-actions. Due to the over-saturation of email and digital marketing, you’ve got to reach nearly 10x more people than with direct mail to generate a similar response. Additionally, people who reply online are often very flaky. Due to the intangibility of replying to something on the internet, it doesn’t seem as real of a commitment as it does when you RSVP or reply to something physically sent to you.

  5. It Can Make You Money
    There are dozens of ways to implement direct mail in your communications and marketing [See here for two of the best direct mail approaches for financial professionals]. The key is, when done correctly, direct mail can generate you a terrific return-on-investment (ROI) and results that are far greater than email and digital marketing.

How VFM Can Help You With Your Direct Mail

Vision Financial Marketing provides a world-class CRM and postcard marketing system, exclusively designed for financial professionals and advisors. Postcards—being one of the most effective forms of direct mail—are at the core of what we recommend.

We’ll provide you with a step-by-step approach to growing and expanding your business utilizing postcard marketing and direct mail as one of your core marketing activities. It’s easy, it’s cost-effective and it works.

If you’d like to talk to Vision Financial Marketing about how our platform can help you implement direct mail marketing into your business, click here to schedule a quick 15-minute demo.

We’ve helped hundreds of advisors to grow and better manage their practice, and we would love to help you too!

Until next time,


Gabriel Lewit

About the Author

Gabriel Lewit

Chief Executive Officer

With over 14 years of experience, Gabriel provides a powerful, specialized approach for sales development, marketing, practice management, technology and organization. While he focuses on helping advisors develop all elements of a successful business, his core passion lies in developing world-class marketing, branding and technology systems that can help advisors of all levels.