As a financial planner, you want to spend as much time as possible on revenue-generating activities that play to your strengths: helping people manage their money and achieve their big-picture financial goals.

That means spending less time on sourcing, nurturing, and onboarding potential clients.

Automation is your best friend here. Smart financial planners are leveraging automation technologies to build their sales pipelines and deliver better value for clients — while reducing the burden of repetitive, low-value tasks. That’s a huge deal, with 40% of white collar professionals spending more than one-third of their working days on jobs that could potentially be automated.

In this guide, we’ll explain email and LinkedIn automation use cases and workflows for financial planners, potentially saving you time and money.

Why Use Outreach Automation as a Financial Planner?

The whole reason anyone uses automation is to free them up from simple but time-consuming administrative tasks. The financial planning niche is no different. But let’s consider some of the specific ways outreach automation can help financial planners:

Win More Clients

Attracting new clients is a critical element of building a successful career as a financial planner.

But it’s also one of the most difficult and labor-intensive areas of your business. Not least because there’s so much competition out there, with approximately 330,000 personal financial planners and advisers in the US alone.

Outreach automation can be a key point of difference.

Without automation, you’ve got two options — generic but scalable or personalized but unscalable:

  • Generic but scalable: Send mass boilerplate emails to hundreds of prospects at once. Open, click-through, reply, and conversion rates for these emails tend to be extremely low because they’re not tailored to the recipient.

  • Personalized but unscalable: This approach requires writing unique emails for each individual prospect. These emails tend to convert well but take a huge amount of time to send.

Automation gives you the best of both worlds. 

You can create a standard template; add personalized elements based on prospect info, tags, and attributes; send at scale to thousands of prospects; schedule automated follow-up emails for a day or two down the line; and reach out through multiple platforms at the same time to boost response rates.

All of which helps you send engaging, compelling sales messages to way more prospects while spending less time on outreach.

It’s the perfect recipe for winning more new business.

Read more: 4 Outbound Prospecting Strategies to Win More Deals

Never Miss Another Follow-Up

Picture the scenario:

You’ve reached out to a potential prospect. They reply a few days later — but by that time you’re super busy and their response gets lost in your already-crowded email inbox.

When you eventually get back to them, their circumstances might have changed. Maybe they just lost interest, or perhaps they went out and found a different financial planner.

Either way, you’ve lost a potential customer.

Outreach automation reduces your chances of dropping the ball on those all-important follow-ups.

You can build automated sequences that chase up non-responders a couple days after your initial email. And if you’re scaling your outreach by sending from more than one inbox, using a platform like QuickMail keeps your replies in one place, ensuring you don’t miss the opportunity.

Read more: 10 Cold Email Follow Up Templates That Get Replies 

Deliver a Better Customer Experience

Automation isn’t just about scaling up your sales operation — it also helps financial planners deliver a superior customer experience, paving the way for improved retention and business growth.

For instance, consider client onboarding.

Rather than bombarding new clients with a bunch of important information and documents all at once, you can drip-feed them everything they need to know through multiple automated emails. And the whole process requires no manual involvement once you’ve set up your onboarding sequence, freeing you up to answer specific questions that aren’t covered by your onboarding material.

This sort of structured, user-friendly onboarding experience sets the tone for your ongoing client relationships, helping to:

  • Reduce client churn

  • Increase customer lifetime value

  • Transform clients into advocates for your business

What's Possible With Outreach Automation in QuickMail?

Okay, so we know that automating your outreach can help financial planners close more deals, improve the follow-up process, and onboard new clients more efficiently. But you’ll only enjoy the full benefits if you choose the right outreach automation platform: one designed to help you generate more leads and convert them into paying customers faster.

Sure, we’re biased, but we’re confident that QuickMail is the smart choice for most financial planners.

Let’s look at what you can achieve when you use QuickMail to power your outreach efforts:

Generate New Leads

Lead generation is about identifying potential clients — people who’d benefit from your financial planning expertise — then adding them to your sales pipeline and nurturing their interest until they’re (hopefully) ready to pay for your services.

Email and LinkedIn are two of the most effective lead gen channels. Why?

First up, let’s consider email: it delivers an average return on investment of $36 for every dollar spent, which is higher than any other channel. Once you’ve added someone to your email list, you can keep reaching out to them at no additional expense, making it highly effective for converting prospects into leads.

And then there’s LinkedIn. Two in five B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the single most effective channel for generating high-quality leads, so it’s no surprise that 89% use LinkedIn for lead generation.

Importantly, QuickMail lets you leverage both email and LinkedIn, helping you deliver a stronger return from your sales efforts.

Once you’ve identified a prospect, you can send them an introductory email, then follow up 20 minutes later with a connection request on LinkedIn. And because it’s all totally automated, you don’t even need to get involved until the all-important moment when a prospect responds to your campaign.

Read more: How To Generate Leads: Best Lead Gen Strategies and Tools 

Nurture Leads Toward Conversion

Generating leads is only part of the battle.

Once you’ve found someone who’d be a fantastic fit for your services and reached out to them via LinkedIn or email (or, ideally, both), it’s time to put in the hard yards to convince them that:

  • They need a financial planner now

  • You’re the best choice for their specific needs

In short, you need to invest some serious time and effort in lead nurturing, which is all about building trusting relationships with prospects and — ultimately — persuading them to convert.

Again, QuickMail’s email and LinkedIn capabilities are the ideal fit for financial planners looking to nurture leads more efficiently and effectively.

Use our platform to build omnichannel sequences combining multiple emails and LinkedIn steps — perfect for sharing case studies, testimonials, awards and accreditations, and anything else that demonstrates your expertise.

Respond To Form Fills

Not all lead generation is about outbound activities like cold email and LinkedIn messaging. 

For many financial planners, inbound also plays a key role in the process. A prospective client might land on your website after searching for financial planners on Google or seeing your ad on social media, then complete a contact form to request a quote or learn more about your service.

This is the time to strike while the iron’s hot, given that four in five prospects expect a reply to sales and marketing-related queries within just 10 minutes.

Of course, it’s near-impossible for financial planners to guarantee a response within such a short timeframe, especially when you might be targeting leads across different time zones.

Fortunately, QuickMail can help.

Use our platform to build an automated follow-up sequence for new form submissions, thanking the prospect for their enquiry and setting out your timeline to provide a more detailed reply.

For best results, build different follow-up messages for different types of enquiries so you can tailor your (automated) response to the prospect’s needs. For example, if their query is related to a looming tax deadline, you could share FAQ-style content about preparing a tax return.

Onboard New Customers

We’ve already noted the key role that onboarding plays in reducing your churn rate and, by extension, increasing the amount of money you earn from each client.

It can even help you convert more prospects, with 63% of customers saying the quality of a company’s onboarding process is a big factor in informing their buying decisions.

The best onboarding experiences keep clients engaged and eager to learn more. It’s easy to take this for granted: they’ve agreed to pay for your services, so surely they want to run through your onboarding process?

But your customers are busy.

Even though it’s in their best interests to consume everything you send them during the onboarding stage, it’s easy for them to get distracted. And if they don’t take everything in, they’re less likely to see the value of your service — which makes them more likely to look elsewhere.

That’s why your best bet is to share essential information in bite-sized chunks, leaving a day or two between each email.

QuickMail makes it quick and easy to build automated email sequences. You can even create different sequences for different types of clients — such as one for young professionals and another for retirees — to ensure the whole experience feels personalized to their needs.

Read more: Cold Email Personalization: The Complete Guide 

Campaign Ideas and Templates for Financial Planners

Finally, let’s dig into the types of email and LinkedIn sequences financial planners can use to generate more leads and sales.

Outreach for Lead Generation

This omnichannel cold outreach sequence relies on a unique QuickMail feature that helps our customers significantly increase open rates — the ability to set steps by the minute, either across one channel or multiple channels.

That means you can:

  • Send a connection request on LinkedIn, then follow up via email 20 minutes (or however long) later 

  • Send an email, then follow up 15 minutes later with an email reply in the same thread, making you look more human (and less automated)

Here’s an example of how you could use that feature to build a compelling cold outreach sequence: 

Step 1: LinkedIn Connection Request

Hi {{prospect.first_name}}, I see you work for {{company_name}}. As a financial planner, I’ve been working with a former colleague of yours, {{colleague_name}}, to help them achieve their retirement planning goals. Would you be interested to learn more?

Step 2: Follow-Up Email

Subject: Let’s talk financial planning?

Hi {{prospect.first_name}}, I just found you on LinkedIn!

Not sure if you're on that platform often, so thought I’d follow up here too.

I wanted to connect because I’ve been working with a former colleague of yours, {{colleague_name}}, to help them achieve their retirement planning goals by:

  • [Action 1]

  • [Action 2]

  • [Action 3]

If you’re interested in learning more, let’s arrange a 15-minute chat, let me know your availability.

Regards, 

[Your name]

Step 3: Calendar Link Email

Note: This step works best when the email is automatically sent minutes after the previous step — a feature that’s unique to QuickMail! It makes the outreach appear much more human and also helps the reply thread stand out in the recipient’s inbox.

Subject: RE: Let’s talk financial planning?

Apologies, forgot to add my calendar link! Here it is: [calendar link]

Outreach for Lead Nurturing

By this point, your prospect has been through your lead generation sequence, and they’ve already connected with you on LinkedIn. Now it’s time to strengthen your relationship with an engaging lead nurturing sequence:

Step 1: LinkedIn Message

Hi {{prospect.first_name}}, as you know, I help people like you prepare for retirement by helping you achieve your long-term financial goals.

Would you be interested in learning how I’ve helped other clients in similar roles to yours?

Step 2: Follow-Up Email

Subject: How I helped this {{job_title}} hit their savings goals

Hi {{prospect.first_name}},

Following up on my last LinkedIn message, thought I’d share a little about how I helped another {{job_title}} achieve their long-term financial goals.

Here’s what I did:

  • [Action 1]

  • [Action 2]

  • [Action 3]

Which has helped them achieve [financial goal].

Would you like to arrange a 15-minute chat to discuss your own savings goals?

Here’s my calendar link: [calendar link]

Regards,

[Your name]

Step 3: Second Email Follow-Up

Subject: RE: How I helped this {{job_title}} hit their savings goals

Hi {{prospect.first_name}},

Thought I’d share a wonderful review I received from the client I mentioned in my previous email:

[Client testimonial]

I’ve worked with lots of other {{job title}}s before, so I’d love the opportunity to help you hit your long-term financial goals.

Let me know if you’d like a 15-minute chat to talk about your goals, here’s my calendar link: [calendar link]

Regards,

[Your name]

Outreach for Customer Onboarding

You’ve found and engaged a prospect, nurtured them through emails and LinkedIn messages, and closed the deal. Now let’s look at an onboarding email sequence template to start your working relationship on the right foot:

Step 1: Initial Onboarding Email

Subject: [Your business name] onboarding pack

Hi {{customer.first_name}},

Thanks again for choosing me as your financial planner, I can’t wait to get started!

Before then, there’s some important steps we need to go through to ensure I deliver the best possible service for your unique needs.

The first step is for you to complete the attached questionnaire discussing your specific circumstances and financial goals. [Add attached questionnaire]

Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

[Your name]

Step 2: Follow-Up Onboarding Email

Subject: RE: [Your business name] onboarding pack

Hi {{customer.first_name}},

Just checking in to see how you’re getting on with the onboarding questionnaire I shared with you on [date of first email].

Do you have any questions? Anything you need my help with?

Regards,

[Your name]

Step 3: Second Follow-Up Onboarding Email

Subject: RE: [Your business name] onboarding pack

Hi {{customer.first_name}},

Thanks for sharing the questionnaire, it’ll help me provide the most personal financial planning advice and support based on your specific savings goals.

Our next step is to arrange our first proper meeting where we can discuss your plans in more detail, here’s a loose agenda:

  • [Agenda item #1]

  • [Agenda item #2]

  • [Agenda item #3]

Choose the best date and time for you using my calendar link: [calendar link]

Regards,

[Your name]

Outreach for Existing Customers

Email outreach doesn’t have to stop at the point when your new client onboarding process ends. 

You can also reach out to existing clients at key times of year — such as tax season — to ensure you’re still delivering the best service for their needs. This sort of proactivity can help reduce churn and build longer, higher-value client relationships.

Here’s a templated email sequence for existing customers you can use to inspire your own outreach:

Step 1: Initial Email

Subject: Reminder: Tax deadline

Hi {{customer.first_name}},

Remember, April 15 is Tax Day!

I’ve created this FAQ resource to help various other clients with their tax returns [link to resource]

Let me know if you’d like to book a separate session to discuss your return before deadline day. Slots fill up fast, but you can see my current availability here: [calendar link]

Regards,

[Your name]

Step 2: Follow-Up Email

Subject: RE: Reminder: Tax deadline

Hi {{customer.first_name}},

Just checking in once more before Tax Day to check if you have any questions about your return?

Book a slot using my calendar link if you’d like to discuss face to face: [calendar link]

Regards,

[Your name]

Why Financial Planners Use QuickMail for Outreach Automation

As a financial planner, your business depends on a reputation for reliability, superb service, and real results.

Our business is no different:

  • As outreach industry leaders for almost 10 years, we know what it takes to help people like you run robust, high-performing outreach campaigns.

  • We pride ourselves on exceptional service, with customers scoring us 9.2/.10 for quality of support (compared to an industry average of 8.5).

  • Our platform is easy to use and quick to get started, so anyone can start enjoying the benefits of email and LinkedIn automation.

Plus we enable our clients to achieve fantastic results — just check out our customer success stories.

Sounds good, right?

Sign up for your free QuickMail trial today!