Email Marketing for Financial Advisors (2025): Proven Strategies for List Growth

Key Takeaways

What’s the secret to email marketing for financial advisors? So many firms struggle, with few subscribers receiving or even opening their emails.

Yet, for other advice firms, it can be their most profitable marketing channel – with $36 ROI or more for every $1 spent.

As a marketer of 10 years in the finance world, I’ve seen the power of email marketing for financial advisors. However, it has many moving parts, and it can easily go wrong.

How can you be one of the successful few? Below, I’ll show you some proven strategies for growth that I’ve witnessed firsthand – and how to avoid some common mistakes.

Here’s what lies ahead:

• Cold tactics don’t work for advisers. High-volume, impersonal emails might work in other industries. However, for advisors, they pose scaling issues, regulatory risks and trust erosion.
• Referral-based lists are limited. Relying solely on referrals can quickly hit a ceiling. The numbers simply don’t scale, even with incentivised schemes.
• You need strategic entry points. Your email list will grow fastest when you build intentional pathways from where your ideal clients already are (LinkedIn, search, scorecards, etc.).
• Trust comes before the email address. Most prospective clients won’t hand over their email until you’ve given them enough “bond builders” — small, authentic gestures of value.
• Start personal, then scale. Direct, human interaction (like thoughtful LinkedIn DMs) is effective but time-intensive. Eventually, you’ll need automated systems and marketing assets that work behind the scenes.
• Create assets that compound. Evergreen content like YouTube videos, guides and scorecards can generate leads for months or even years with minimal extra effort.
• Think like a gardener, not a hunter. Email marketing is a long game. Nurture your list with care, and you’ll grow a pipeline of loyal clients (not just one-off inquiries).

Ready to turn your inbox into a growth engine? 

Dive into the full guide for real-world examples of financial advisor email marketing in 2025, along with step-by-step tactics to jump-start your campaigns.

The Reality of Advisor Email Marketing

Before unpacking the strategies, there’s an uncomfortable truth to email marketing for financial advisors, and it needs to be confronted at the outset.

Spray and Pray

Financial advisor email marketing doesn’t work like many other sectors.

Here’s an example. If you go on YouTube in 2025, you’ll see lots of thumbnails like this:

• “I deep-personalised 1,000 cold emails using this clever AI trick”
• “The new way of cold emailing in 2025”
• “How to write killer cold emails that guarantee responses”.

And so on. In short, it’s all about high-volume tactics. 

Get thousands of emails from a database somewhere, then “spray and pray”.

In a previous life, I worked in recruitment, and we did this all the time to get candidates placed at companies. It just felt gross.

It’s harder to do today, with data privacy so much stricter in 2025. For financial advisors, the bar is even higher with the additional regulatory barriers you face.

This is setting aside the potential brand damage from such email tactics. Is this really the strong foundation for a long-lasting, positive client-advisor relationship?

The Referral Constraint

So, to be clear. This email strategy is one that WILL NOT work for advisors.

It’s not sustainable, and the worst-case scenario is that these cold tactics get you into trouble.

So, what do you do? Because, on the other hand, your current contact list may be quite small.

This is partly down to an advisor’s business model. In the UK, for instance, 9 out of 10 have fewer than 5 advisors on the team. 

Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose each of those advisors has a “bank” of 100 clients. How much referral potential is there?

If we use the Dunbar Number, each of these clients might know around 600 people. So, that’s 6,000 people each advisor could possibly get referral clients from.

That might sound amazing. Until you confront human the realities:

• How many of these people are they in regular email contact with? 
• Out of those people, how many would they be comfortable recommending to an advisor?
• From that number, how many might actually be interested – or looking for help right now?

Referral Schemes in Context

As you can see,  the numbers start to shrink fast.

This largely explains why so many financial advisors are disappointed by the results of their referral schemes (e.g. in their monthly newsletter).

For instance, an advisor might say in their emails: “Refer us, and if it results in a new client, we’ll donate $50 to your charity of choice”. But few people take them up on it.

This isn’t your fault. It’s just the numbers.

Referral schemes are a nice feature to include in your client newsletter, and they sometimes work. However, if you are relying on this to open the floodgates for leads, you will probably be disappointed.

So, what other options are available in email marketing for financial advisors?

Entry Points & Bond Builders

Let’s assume you have your ideal client persona (ICP) in mind, and you’re ready to get more of these people onto your email list. Where do you start?

Entry Points

The first step is to list everywhere your ICP might find you, such as: 

• LLMs (large language models, like ChatGPT outputs).
• Traditional Google search
• Scorecards / online quizzes
• Website display ads
• LinkedIn comments, Likes, posts, connections and DMs (direct messages).
• Facebook groups
• Subreddit forums

And more. Don’t forget to consider your offline brand touchpoints, such as:

• Business cards
• Books (if you’ve published one)
• Event materials, such as flyers
• In-office collateral, like client brochures

With each of these possible “entry points”, think creatively about how you can make it easy and intuitive for your ICP to contact you by email.

For instance, on your business card, you could include a QR code that takes the recipient to a dedicated landing page which houses your “virtual business card”.

From here, they can click on your email link to instantly open their email client, ready to send you a message.

Bond Builders

This is a good start, but email marketing for financial advisors requires a further step.

All of us have cluttered inboxes in 2025, and nobody wants more than is necessary. I’m sure, as a financial advisor, you can relate.

So, your ICP needs a good reason to part with their email address. Unless they’re coming to you with a high degree of trust already built up, they’re not going to just give it to you.

For most of your target audience, it will take time to build up that trust. 

Take a look at this graphic:

Here, we have a spectrum. The left extreme shows zero trust in your brand by the ICP. The right shows full trust – i.e. they’re ready to buy, and only from you.

With email marketing for financial advisors, most ICPs will be somewhere on the left of the spectrum. It’s only when they start moving towards the middle when they might give you their email.

How to nudge ICPs

So, how do you move them in that direction?

The key is to offer regular, valuable tokens of trust in your interactions with them. 

At the beginning, you’re not pitching. You’re not talking shop at all.

Show them that you see them as a person, not a sale.

For financial advisors, your business is naturally highly relational. So, this often comes naturally to you. For instance, when connecting on LinkedIn, you could ask the ICP:

• “Thanks for connecting, John. Saw you recently started your own business. It was a big emotional jump when I did it. How are you finding being finally in charge of your own time?”

A question like this isn’t manipulative at all, but it is strategic:

• It makes you relatable (you went through the same thing).
• Communicates attentiveness (you took time to check out their profile and notice they started a new role).
• Acknowledges and labels their likely emotions as they start out on their own.
• Puts the focus on them by asking a genuine question.

This message is a Bond Builder. And, unless the ICP consciously resists it, this moves them naturally to the right.

Eventually, after enough valuable conversation, the opportunity might arise to invite them to talk over email – e.g. “Sounds like you’re thinking a lot about what to do. I recently put together a short guide on this topic – can I send it over to you? It might help you gain more clarity.”

High-Leverage Strategies

The aforementioned strategy is great. However, the drawback is that it is intensely manual.

You’ve got to regularly make LinkedIn connections, send DMs, respond to them and be present on the platform. This will only get you so far with your email list building.

To scale your efforts, you also need systems working for you in the background. 

This is why marketing assets are so important. For instance:

• High-ranking pages in Google Search, where website traffic can be directed to a downloadable resource (e.g. a whitepaper).
• A book you’ve written, which might include a QR code to a scorecard you’ve built (complete with email capture so they can see their results).
• YouTube videos that you’ve published on key topics of interest to your ICP. Here, some of the traffic could be directed to a free guide or group webinar.

These assets put email marketing for financial advisors into overdrive. They only need to be produced once, and they work for you whilst you sleep.

They could even compound over time. 

To give an example, last year I created a YouTube video for a hobby of mine, and it got a few hundred views. 

A year later, it suddenly shot up to 54,000 views, getting shown to nearly 500,000 people:

Moreover, assets like these can be reused – e.g. perfect raw material for social media posts.

Start Building

Hopefully, I’ve shown you that a financial advisor email list doesn’t just grow by itself.

Think of yourself like a gardner: you need to make a plan, put in the effort and plant seeds that may not sprout until months later.

When you harness email marketing with clarity, compliance and a human touch, you can turn casual messages into lasting relationships.

And those relationships drive growth far beyond a single campaign.

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Here are Some Practical Steps to Start With Your Financial Advisor Email Marketing:

• Refine your list-building strategy: Prioritise quality over quantity by offering targeted lead magnets to your ICP, and keep your list spotlessly maintained.
• Segment and personalise: Break your audience into meaningful groups, and tailor your messaging with details that make clients feel truly seen.
• Automate with authenticity: Use technology to scale your reach, but reserve the most sensitive touchpoints for your own voice.
• Prioritise compliance and trust: Make transparency and privacy non-negotiable in every email and in every process.
• Test, track and optimise: Treat every campaign as an experiment, regularly testing subject lines, send times and content based on real client feedback.

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Ready for Action?

Start by identifying one quick win. Maybe it’s launching a new lead magnet, or segmenting your list based on life stage. 

Sync your email platform with your CRM for seamless communication, and send a truly personalised message to your top clients this week. 

Commit to checking your analytics after every campaign, so you can build a smarter campaign with each new send.

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“In a world of noise, be the message they trust. Your next client relationship is only an email away. Make it count.”