Email Marketing Done Right: How Advisors Can Turn Subscribers Into Booked Calls

Watch "Email Marketing Done Right: How Advisors Can Turn Subscribers Into Booked Calls" on YouTube

Podcast feature on The Afternoon Advisor with Nate Hoskin, recorded 2026-07-18.

Patrick Di Cesare joins Nate Hoskin on The Afternoon Advisor to break down the permission-based email system that helps growth-focused RIAs book roughly 5 calls for every 100 subscribers, the three email categories that actually convert, and where AI helps (and hurts) advisor email marketing.

TL;DR: The 3 Biggest Takeaways

• Cold blasts don't work in wealth management. A permission-based funnel (lead magnet, opt-in, automated sequence) is the model that actually books calls.
• Every email should fall into one of three buckets: client success stories, pain points your niche loses sleep over, or common objections about hiring you.
• Expect roughly 5 booked calls per 100 subscribers over ~90 days. Send frequently for the first 10-14 days, then taper to 1-2x per week for 6-12 months.

Questions Answered in This Episode

Does cold email work for financial advisors?

No. Wealth management runs on trust, and prospects rarely respond to a stranger asking about their life savings. A permission-based funnel where prospects opt in for a lead magnet performs far better than any purchased list.

How many booked calls should an advisor expect from an email list?

A reasonable benchmark is roughly 5 booked calls for every 100 subscribers within about 90 days. Very high-net-worth niches may convert at a lower rate but with much higher lifetime value per client.

What should be in an advisor's email nurture sequence?

Three categories: client success stories that prove you've helped people like the reader, pain points that keep your niche up at night, and direct responses to the objections prospects raise about hiring an advisor.

Should financial advisors use AI to write their emails?

Use AI for ideation and to pull themes out of client conversations, but don't ship AI-written emails as-is. Generic AI copy makes you sound like every other advisor, and prospects can tell.

Full Transcript

Nate: This is The Afternoon Advisor, where we break down how certain advisors grow so fast it looks like cheating. I'm Nate Hoskin. I'm a financial planner, a digital marketing nerd, and I spend my days building and breaking growth systems in my own businesses and in yours.

Today, we're talking about how advisors can use email marketing to book five calls for every 100 email subscribers.

I'm joined by Patrick Di Cesare, founder of BFL Advisor Marketing. Patrick has built an audience of more than 600,000 people across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, and he grew his email list from zero to more than 22,000 subscribers. Today, he helps RIAs and financial advisors turn attention into booked calls through ROI-focused email systems.

Patrick, good afternoon.

Patrick: Good afternoon, man. Happy to be here.

Nate: Thanks so much for coming on. When we talk about email marketing, are we talking about cold email and sending thousands of messages, or something else?

Patrick: Not at all. I think that's a big mistake a lot of advisors make when they think about email marketing.

They say, "I have this giant list of people that I bought or found on ZoomInfo, and I'm just going to blast emails to them." There are a couple of problems with that. First, these people have no idea who you are. Wealth management is a trust-based industry.

I think about it from my own perspective. Would I respond to someone asking to take control of my life savings when I have no idea who they are? For me, the answer is no. I think the answer is probably no for most people.

When we say email marketing, we're talking about a permission-based funnel. You offer someone something useful for free, invite them to join your newsletter, or give them a lead magnet. Once they opt in, you deliver what they requested and start a prebuilt sequence of emails over the following weeks and months. The goal is what almost every advisor wants: qualified appointments on their calendar.

Nate: Before we get into the science of turning attention into intention and then into booked calls, advisors have many things they could do to grow their practices. Where does email marketing sit in their ROI stack? Is it the highest-ROI activity, the fifteenth priority, or somewhere in between?

Patrick: Any financial advisor will tell you referrals are usually the highest-ROI source of business. I'm thinking of a recent Kitces graphic that ranked different marketing activities. As I recall, email marketing fell somewhere in the middle.

The problem is that many advisors either don't use email at all, which leaves money on the table, or they do it poorly.

McKinsey & Company published a statistic suggesting a 40-to-1 difference in effectiveness between email and social media. Even putting the exact number aside, email is a low-risk, high-upside activity. When someone opts into your list, they're telling you they want to hear from you.

You can then send a planned sequence that includes client success stories, responses to common objections, and the pain points your ideal clients face. With the advisors we work with, those emails help move people toward booking a call.

Nate: I see that with social media marketing too. Attention matters, and I can drive hundreds of thousands of views in a month, but those views are still vanity metrics unless they turn into business results.

The connective tissue between attention and a booked call may partly be your website and the ways someone can interact with your firm digitally, but email is a large part of it, right?

Patrick: Yes, and there's another side to it. Your social media presence is rented land. If you're on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg owns the platform. If you're on X, Elon Musk owns the platform. Your email list is an asset you control.

You control the cadence and how often you reach people. With social media, you might have 1,000 followers, but only 100 or 200 may see a given post. It also won't always be the same 100 or 200 people.

Once someone joins your email list, you decide when to reach them. Instead of reaching 10% or 20% of your social followers, a good email list may generate open rates of 30% to 40%. That gives you a better way to stay in front of people after they've given you permission to contact them.

Nate: Walk us through how you get someone to give you that permission. What does that look like?

Patrick: I built my own email list by giving away useful assets. One was a budget template that someone created for me in Google Sheets. I made a video showing people how to use it and directed them to the link in my bio to sign up.

You can also use a tool like ManyChat and ask people to comment a specific word so you can send them the resource. That budget template generated thousands of opt-ins within a few weeks.

For an advisor, it may be a written lead magnet. You mention it in your videos, add calls to action to social posts, and direct people to a landing page. They enter their name and email address. The first email delivers the lead magnet, and the automated sequence follows from there.

Nate: I'm excited to get into that sequence. First, you mentioned that if someone sends the right emails, 100 subscribers could reasonably lead to five booked calls over 90 days. Is that right?

Patrick: Yes, that's a reasonable expectation.

The reality is that most people who opt in for something free are only looking for the free resource. Many will never become clients. But financial services is different from a software business. You don't need thousands of customers.

If a few people raise their hands and become qualified prospects, the campaign can be very profitable. If you gain 100 subscribers and five of them book calls within roughly 90 days, that's a strong result. It's also fairly typical of what we see with clients.

Nate: The advisory business is a place where a handful of new clients can make a major difference. You're not QuickBooks. You don't need tens of thousands of users for the economics to work. Five new clients can seriously move the needle at almost any stage of an advisory business.

Once people sign up and you have their email addresses, what do you send them? Walk me through the funnel from downloading the lead magnet to receiving the follow-up emails.

Patrick: You made an important point. You don't need tens of thousands of subscribers.

A lot of general marketing advice is written for ecommerce brands, course creators, and software companies. Those businesses aren't asking people to trust them with their life savings. Marketing for financial advisors needs to work differently.

The first thing I would include is client success stories. Those are your bread and butter because they show that you've helped people like the reader.

Tony Robbins recently talked about how your strongest marketing asset is proof that you've created value for real people. I would go as far as saying one good client success story can be worth $10,000 in ad spend.

Use client stories in your emails. Anonymize them when needed. If compliance permits it and the client agrees, you can use names.

The second category is pain points. A pain point is something that keeps your ideal client up at night.

Say you work with doctors. One of their biggest problems may be that they have no time to manage their finances. They're in the office, constantly seeing patients, and working from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. They don't have time to manage their investments, financial plan, and taxes.

Taxes are another major pain point across almost every advisor niche. Emails about taxes often produce higher open rates and engagement because taxes make people angry. A doctor earning several hundred thousand dollars in New York or California may feel like half of every additional dollar disappears to taxes. If you position yourself as someone who can help reduce that burden, they're more likely to pay attention.

The third category is addressing objections about working with you.

One of the most common objections is, "I can do this myself. I can watch a few YouTube videos, listen to some podcasts, and piece it together. I don't need to pay someone 1% each year to help with my financial plan."

One of the most successful emails I wrote for a client compared DIY financial planning to performing surgery yourself. If your spouse needed surgery, you wouldn't watch a few YouTube videos and try to fuse vertebrae together. You'd call a surgeon.

Comparing an advisor to a surgeon helps show the cost of getting major decisions wrong. It challenges the reader's belief that they can safely handle every part of the process alone.

Nate: That reminds me of one of my own emails. It says, "I understand that you want to do it yourself, but DIY investors can run into these 30 problems." Then I list 30 decision points.

You need to choose among thousands of investments, decide which accounts to use, optimize asset location, manage tax diversification, and handle all the other details that come with building and protecting wealth.

My favorite analogy is skiing. If you're going skiing for the first time, are you going to hire an instructor, or are you going to head down the mountain and hope you don't split your skull open? There's value in hiring an expert.

You also made a great point about people waiting to hire a trainer until they're already fit. Many people do the same thing with money. They wait until they have $2 million or $10 million before hiring an advisor. Then the advisor has to unwind years of mistakes instead of helping them while they're building wealth.

Patrick: That's another common objection: "Now isn't a good time." The natural response is, "When will it be a good time?"

You wouldn't wait until you're in shape to hire a trainer. Most people also shouldn't wait until they're multimillionaires to get financial guidance.

Listing those 30 things that could go wrong is effective too. Someone may have thought of five of them. When they see 30, they start thinking, "I didn't consider that. I didn't consider that either." It introduces reasonable doubt about doing everything alone and makes them more open to a conversation.

Nate: We have three main categories: client stories, objections, and pain points. How do you arrange those in the sequence, and how many emails should someone receive after downloading the lead magnet?

Patrick: The first email should always deliver the lead magnet. It should say, "Here's what you requested. Here's who I am. Here's what you can expect to receive from me." That sets expectations.

The second email will usually address a common objection. The third may be a client success story. Then we continue rotating among objections, client stories, and pain points.

For the first 10 to 14 days, we send emails fairly often because that's when a new subscriber is warmest and most likely to book a call. After those first two weeks, interest starts to cool, so we taper the sequence to once or twice per week.

Financial services requires trust. It can take many touch points before someone is willing to act. You need to send the right message at the right moment.

After roughly 90 days, five booked calls for every 100 subscribers is a reasonable benchmark. Some clients do better. Advisors working with very high-net-worth investors may see a lower conversion rate because those prospects need more trust before moving forward, but each opportunity may be worth far more. The result depends heavily on the niche.

Nate: We see the same thing with video. People often ask me, "Is it harder to attract a $5 million client than a $250,000 client?"

You will get fewer $5 million prospects than $250,000 prospects, but the campaign economics can still balance out. One campaign may produce greater volume, while the other produces fewer but much more valuable opportunities. Are you seeing something similar?

Patrick: Yes. I recently started working with an advisor whose niche is U.S. military service members. We've seen quite a few booked calls, but those prospects tend to have a lower net worth.

Another client only wants high-net-worth prospects. We've worked with him for a couple of months and have only seen a few calls, but those calls are much more valuable. As you said, it tends to balance out.

Nate: I can also see niche fit affecting the numbers. Is the advisor serving military clients also a veteran?

Patrick: Yes.

Nate: That shared experience can create a faster connection and potentially improve conversion rates. Some factors will shift the result, but it will generally take longer to attract a $5 million client than a $250,000 client.

I also think people underestimate the value of the long tail. Subscribers may be warmest during the first 14 days, but sometimes it simply isn't the right time. They may still remember you. If you can stay top of mind for several months, you have a better chance of being there when they're ready.

After the first 14 days, when you move to one or two emails per week, how long should that continue?

Patrick: We continue using the same three categories: pain points, client success stories, and objections.

Depending on the client, we've built sequences that last anywhere from six months to more than a year. Sometimes it just isn't the right time for a prospect.

Think about what often moves people to act in financial services. A child graduates from college. Someone gets older and realizes they need an estate plan. They go through a divorce or a death in the family. You never know when a life event will create urgency or when one of your emails will suddenly resonate.

The longer the sequence runs, the more opportunities you have to reach someone at the right time.

For someone starting out, I would build at least three months of emails. Six months to a year is even better. You only have to create the automated sequence once.

Don't rush it by asking AI to generate everything as quickly as possible. Take the time to build it properly. Then, when a prospect reaches the moment when your help becomes relevant, you're the person consistently appearing in their inbox.

Nate: That's one of the best parts of email marketing. Once the sequence is built, you don't have to hand-crank it. Every new subscriber can receive the same sequence.

But if you send everyone a bad email that you threw together in ChatGPT, you may get no results. What role should AI play in email marketing right now? How should advisors use it?

Patrick: AI is useful for ideation.

If you work with a niche, you should already understand many of their financial concerns. But you can still ask ChatGPT, "I work with NVIDIA executives," or, "I work with firefighters. What financial problems keep these people up at night?" It can give you a useful list of ideas. You can then decide which ones should become emails.

AI is also useful for reviewing client conversations and pulling out potential content ideas, pain points, objections, and stories.

Where I'm more skeptical is asking it to write the final emails by itself. In your Video New Year cohort earlier today, I showed an example of a ChatGPT-generated email. It was an obvious stock-market update that any advisor could have generated in three seconds. It was filled with em dashes and all the usual AI writing patterns.

Nate: The em dashes are such a giveaway.

Patrick: They are. At the very least, remove the obvious signs. But if you want results, do the work yourself or hire someone who understands strategy and your voice. Don't copy and paste AI-generated emails.

People can tell. The writing doesn't feel personal, and it usually doesn't convert.

Nate: The goal of content, email, video, or any other marketing is to separate yourself from all the noise people receive. If you add another generic AI-generated message, it won't make much difference.

A strong email should feel like one of the most useful things the reader received that day.

Patrick: Generic AI emails also make you sound like every other financial advisor. If anyone can generate the same stock-market update, why would someone choose you?

Nate: One way advisors are trying to separate themselves is through hyperpersonalization. They use AI to scrape information about a person and make cold or warm outreach look highly personalized. What do you think about that strategy?

Patrick: I can see some merit in it because the recipient may assume you looked at their LinkedIn profile and did the research manually. They may think, "This person put in the work to understand me."

But knowing what I know about AI tools, I'd be suspicious. I'd wonder how this person knew so much about me, especially if I never opted in for anything. I'd ask, "Who is this person, and where did they get my contact information?" It would make me uneasy.

Nate: I feel the same way. Personalizing a message with facts about me doesn't necessarily make me feel understood.

I have several websites, and one of my business pages includes a case study about me. I regularly receive AI-generated emails that say, "Hey Nate, I can't believe you helped Nate add $6 million in new AUM to his firm. If I could help you with X, would that be worth a conversation?"

Every time, I know exactly what happened. A human would have compared the names and caught the mistake. It's clearly automated.

People are becoming more familiar with these patterns as they receive more AI-generated outreach.

Patrick: Exactly. That makes it even more important to show that you've worked with people like the prospect and delivered meaningful results for them.

And "Nate, great job helping Nate" is hilarious.

Nate: It's a useful landmine in my digital presence because it helps me identify automated outreach. Most people won't have something that obvious. They'll receive personalization based on their college, employer, or job title.

I've found it far more effective when an email shows that the sender understands what I'm going through, not merely who I am.

I subscribe to several newsletters about building businesses. The ones I read most are written by people who understand the pain I'm experiencing as a business owner. I don't read them because they personalized the email with facts about me.

That reinforces your point about understanding your niche. The better you understand the prospect's problems, the better your emails and conversion rates will be.

Patrick: That's an important distinction. People don't necessarily want more information. They want to feel understood.

One of the worst pieces of advice in content and email marketing is, "Just provide value," or, "Just educate your audience." People don't follow financial advisors because they want to become experts in personal finance. They want help with their problems.

When you show that you understand them, that's when conversations start.

Nate: Many advisors get stuck in reporter mode. They find a piece of breaking news and turn it into a blog post, email, or video.

But did anyone need you to collect and repeat that information? Does forwarding a CNBC article make the reader feel like you understand them? Usually not.

Patrick: No. They can get that from CNBC or watch Jim Cramer for the latest market news.

News can work when it directly affects the people you serve. When the "Big Beautiful Bill" passed, everyone wanted to know, "How does this affect me?"

If you serve doctors, you could send an email titled, "Doctors: Here's How the New Tax Bill Affects You." Then explain the relevant provisions and invite readers to book a call to discuss how they may use those changes.

That can work because it translates major news into consequences for a specific audience. Weekly market movements are different. Most of them don't affect the client's daily decisions.

Generic market updates can also create a conflicting message. Advisors usually tell clients to stay the course and invest for the long term. Then the firm sends weekly emails about tariffs, China, or Taiwan Semiconductor as though the client should react to every development.

On one hand, you're saying, "Stay the course." On the other, you're treating short-term news as something that demands attention. Many firms don't realize they're sending mixed messages.

Nate: That goes back to what someone should feel while reading your emails.

Using your framework of addressing objections, pressing on pain points, and sharing client stories, the prospective client should think: "They understand my problem. They work with people like me. They've seen this before. Maybe the objection I had wasn't as logical as I thought. Maybe it came from fear, hesitation, or procrastination."

Does that sound right?

Patrick: You nailed it.

That's the biggest mistake many advisors make with email. They forget that the reader is supposed to feel something.

They assume that if they provide enough information, share enough news, or give away enough material, people will eventually view them as the source of truth. But you're building trust, and trust is a feeling.

It comes from repeatedly showing someone: "This person understands me. They work with people like me. They understand why I'm hesitating, and they can help me move past that hesitation."

Nate: Exactly.

Patrick: Many advisors and firms want their emails, websites, and content to showcase how smart they are. They may have an alphabet soup of certifications next to their name and know everything about backdoor Roth IRAs.

But when they write in financial jargon, people outside the industry don't know what they're talking about.

Another major mistake is writing at a level that's too difficult to read. As we discussed earlier, the average American reads at roughly a seventh-grade level. That doesn't mean people are stupid. It means that when they're reading online or scanning an email, they'll skip anything that takes too much effort to understand.

One free tool I use for almost everything I write is Hemingway Editor. You can paste your copy into it, and it will show the reading grade level, highlight difficult sentences, and identify words you may want to remove.

I aim for a fifth- to seventh-grade reading level. Alex Hormozi has suggested writing at a third-grade level, though that can become too simplistic. Somewhere between fifth and seventh grade is a good target for most advisor emails, content, and video scripts.

Removing filler and making the writing easy to understand can improve engagement and conversion.

Nate: Once you get down to a second- or third-grade level, the software can start making strange suggestions, like removing contractions. It may prefer "it is" over "it's," even though everyone understands the contraction.

The real goal is to frame the idea so the reader understands it immediately. They shouldn't have to reread a sentence to figure out what it means. They should get the point and move to the next thought.

Fifth to seventh grade feels like a good range.

Let's say an advisor wants to start email marketing today. They have no real experience beyond sending newsletters or occasional client emails. What checklist should they follow?

Patrick: First, create something useful to give away.

You can start with a newsletter. You've built a good-sized email list that way. But giving people a specific incentive will often improve conversion.

If you serve high-net-worth individuals, your lead magnet might be "10 Tax Mistakes That Cost High-Net-Worth Investors Long-Term Wealth." If you work with doctors, it might be "Tax Mistakes Doctors Make That Reduce Long-Term Wealth."

Create a simple PDF that people receive in exchange for their email address.

Then talk about it in your videos and social posts. Create a landing page on your website. The person enters their name and email address, receives the lead magnet in the first email, and then enters the automated sequence we've discussed.

Nate: I love it. That's very useful.

You also help advisors build these systems. The best advisors make intentional decisions about what they should do themselves and what they should delegate instead of assuming they must handle everything.

For advisors who decide to delegate, what does working with you look like?

Patrick: I start by sending them a questionnaire. I want to understand the advisor, the firm, and the clients they serve.

We identify the clients' pain points, the objections that repeatedly come up in prospect calls, and the client success stories that demonstrate the firm's value. It's the framework we've discussed throughout the episode.

From that questionnaire and one meeting, we can turn the information into an email sequence.

Instead of the advisor spending 24 to 48 hours writing the emails, we take that work off their plate.

We can also help with the lead magnet, including writing it, making it clear, and making it easy to understand. We help with landing pages and the rest of the funnel. The exact scope depends on what the firm needs.

After launch, we meet from time to time to review analytics and results. But the advisor's main job is to give me the information and expertise. I take it from there and build the system.

Nate: I'll include information in the show notes about how listeners can contact you.

I also recommend downloading Patrick's lead magnet, even if you don't plan to hire him. Look at it with a scientist's eye. Pay attention to what he does in his own email marketing and how the sequence works. Watch the system in action and take what you can from it.

Patrick: The lead magnet Nate is referring to is my email checklist for financial advisors. It covers many of the ideas we discussed today. It gives advisors a step-by-step list to review and highlights common mistakes to avoid.

Nate: Thanks for making it available for free.

That's the advantage of email marketing. You can provide value upfront and gain permission to see if there's more value you can add later.

Good afternoon, Patrick, and thanks for joining me.

Patrick: Thanks, man. I enjoyed it.

Read the full page at https://www.bfladvisormarketing.com/podcasts/email-marketing-for-financial-advisors.