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Practice Management > Building Your Business

Co-Branded Email Strategies That Drive Referrals

By Brandon Stuerke

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Last week I shared a strategy of providing co-branded monthly print newsletters for other professionals as a way of bringing tremendous marketing value to the relationship while at the same time giving you the exposure you need to the other professionals’ clients.

This week I’m going to share another strategy, which is a spinoff of the monthly newsletter, and that is the weekly co-branded email newsletter. This is another tool that I incorporate into every one of my strategic relationships.

Let’s face it: very few professionals today really put much effort into true email marketing or using email as a means to build their business with much consistency. Many still operate under the false assumption that since they work with the “senior” market that their prospects and clients don’t use email.

The truth is your senior clients and prospects are using email. In fact, a recent study showed that seniors are the fastest growing demographic of Internet users today. What’s more interesting though is what seniors do when online. The study looked at the top 10 online activities of seniors and how they kept busy when on the web. To the tune of 88.6 percent, checking personal email was by far and away the number one online activity among seniors.

With that in mind I decided in my practice, and believe you should too, to find a way to get into the inboxes of those I wished to build relationships and credibility with. In our firm we did this by offering to create, write, co-brand and send a weekly email newsletter on behalf of the CPA and other professionals I work with.

Another tool

This gives me yet another tool that I can bring to the relationship to provide value to the CPA, and one that no other advisor is offering to do for them. It also provides an additional touch from the CPA to their clients, which is a great way to help them continue to nurture existing client relationships and generate more referrals for their practice each year. 

The other reason this strategy is so powerful is that for you as the advisor it provides a platform within which you have a tremendous opportunity to gain exposure to the CPA’s clients and be positioned as an extension of the CPA’s team.

While you could approach email marketing like every other advisor and go buy an email list and blast away, the reality is you’re a Strategic Advisor, which means you understand that with that approach no one’s going to read your emails because their inboxes, like ours, are flooded with spam each day.

The key I’ve found in reaching any target group of potential clients is to get your message delivered through a source they already trust and look to for advice. Who better than their trusted CPA, enrolled agent or accountant? By helping this highly trusted group offer some additional value-added content to their client base you’ll give yourself the opportunity to begin building relationships with more of your ideal clients, and in a way that is much more strategic and cost effective.

This is just one of many strategies I’ve used to build my business through strategic alliances and it’s one I use to solve one of the biggest challenges with COI marketinggetting in front of the other professional’s clients. Not only does it get you in front of them, it does so in a consistent and ongoing manner that is in line with their expectations of how real relationships are built.

Now let’s get real for a minute. Are you going to take the time to learn how to build, design, write, produce and send weekly emails for other professionals each week? For most of you the answer is probably not. In my practice, though, I decided I couldn’t afford not to, given the amount of tremendous exposure it got me. So here’s another option. Find a local graphic designer that can help you create something that doesn’t look like it was built in Word, and find a local copywriter as well. In the end this will ensure it gets done and will free up your time to spend building relationships with the other professionals in your strategic network and tier clients. Good luck! And if there’s anything I can do to help you, drop me a comment below.

For more from Brandon Stuerke, see:

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