Canright Communications

Content that connects

Collin Canright

Relationship Building with Social Media and Email Marketing

There a many different ways businesses can attract leads. Social media, in-person events, online events, advertising with billboards and print media, are just a few ways businesses can appeal to prospective customers. One method, however, stands out from all the rest because of its simplicity and effectiveness. Email marketing. 

Despite the rise of social media and the appeal of in-person events, email marketing has stood the test of time as one of the most effective and easiest ways to reach prospective leads and existing customers alike. When done correctly, email marketing can stir enthusiasm for your brand and serve as a way to inform customers and prospects of events, products, services, and other relevant news to your business. 

Because of its effectiveness and simplicity, email marketing is an essential part of any marketing plan, no matter the business size or industry. Sure, interacting with prospects and customers via social media channels can boost engagement and visits to your website, but as a lead generation tool, social media doesn’t stack up to what email marketing can do. Carefully crafted email marketing campaigns are a prized tool when attracting leads because they can be personalized with targeted messaging. 

When done correctly, email marketing can drive clicks to a particular landing page, allowing businesses to analyze results and deliverability rates via analytics. This data come in handy when you want to assemble an ad campaign. After all, successful digital advertising isn’t possible if you don’t have the correct email addresses on hand. 

Email Address Lists: Clean Them Up!

Email is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal when it comes to communicating with prospects. For it to truly be effective, though, it’s important to maintain clean email address lists. There are many platforms out there, like MailChimp and Salesforce, that allow businesses to build and edit email lists. Keeping these lists clean and updated ensures emails actually reach your targeted audience and reduces the likelihood of bouncebacks. Email bouncebacks happen when an email fails to be successfully sent to a chosen recipient. This is likely to happen if you have outdated or incorrect email addresses on file, which is why regular maintenance of email lists should be part of any email marketing plan. 

What Makes Up a Good Marketing Email?

While email marketing is often praised as a simple marketing tool, that doesn’t mean you can just slap on any phrase in a subject line and expect spectacular, groundbreaking results. Think of the content in your subject line as the hook. It should be attention-grabbing, catchy, and stand out from other emails in your prospect’s inbox without sounding spam-y. The body content is important as well and should contain targeted messaging directing the reader to a particular landing page, event, or whatever your campaign is advertising. For example, if you’re advertising an event, make sure the body content contains a sign-up link. 

It’s About Relationships

With the right messaging and engaging subject lines, email marketing allows businesses to build relationships with prospects and customers. It can track down leads and the data collected via analytics can be an important tool for advertising campaigns. Even though it’s been around for a while, email marketing is no less important than it was a decade ago. In fact, it may end up being one of your most effective and reliable marketing tools. 

New Horizons in Cryptocurrency

What’s on the horizon for cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies? It’s a question on a lot of people’s minds, and there’s a potential for more than a good profit margin for financial professionals who come to the right answers: a potential paradigm shift in payments, investing, and the way we use the internet itself could be on the line.

For its April talk, the Chicago Payments Forum consulted an expert on this subject – Lamont Black, a Ph.D. Associate Professor of Finance in the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University in Chicago. Black has become something of a regular fixture for a wide range of financial institutions in recent years, with a particular focus and expertise in all things crypto.

Black suggests that a real understanding of what’s next for crypto is built around an understanding of what cryptocurrency is – a more complicated question than it may seem at first blush. He suggests three major subject areas: cryptocurrency as money, as an asset, and as a platform for application development.

“The thing about crypto as it relates to money is that the original idea of Bitcoin was as digital currency, peer-to-peer electronic cash,” Black said. “I’d like to point out we’ve transitioned from physical cash to electronic payments, but it’s still heavily intermediated. What would it look like to have purely digital cash that is peer-to-peer?”

Some institutions have made leaps in this area – payments giants Visa and Mastercard are rolling out a program to support converting crypto into fiat currencies – but Bitcoin’s extreme volatility in particular still makes it a dicey prospect for wider adoption, and one that almost always relies on that intermediary step of conversion to a more common fiat currency like the U.S. Dollar.

But other concerns about crypto, or that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value? Increasingly less of a concern for financial professionals, suggests Black:

“I would argue no money has intrinsic value, so bitcoin being digital has no real bearing on value,” Black said. “The U.S. Dollar and the Fed… I think people are starting to have a few doubts about the dollar as it relates to inflation. You start showing pictures of the CPI index and inflation over the last 40 years, and you start to show, whoa, we are now 7.9% inflation. That’s going back all the way to the 1980s since we’ve seen numbers like that. Where is this headed? Could we wind up in stagflation?

“This is a great opportunity to raise questions about the central bank model. Central banks manage fiat currency, but there are times with monetary stimulus that some of that can start to get out of hand.”

An area of arguably more interest for financial institutions, in particular, is looking at cryptocurrencies as an asset class – and looking beyond bitcoin into Ethereum applications and NFTs.

“Understanding the technology in an Ethereum-based NFT, the asset itself is unique,” Black said. 

“It’s not just about cool pictures or fads, but a digital record of ownership. This whole wave we’re seeing of the creator economy using NFTs, using these digital platforms, to provide proof of ownership, is super interesting, and can be way more than just cryptocurrency.”

The potential for solving the problem of digital scarcity, and creating real ownership, would be a major feather in the cap for the creator economy, though major problems of fraud in the space will have to be addressed before that potential can truly be realized.

But perhaps the most potentially transformational aspects of cryptocurrency aren’t about crypto at all, but about the underlying blockchain technologies powered by currencies like Ethereum, with their programmable capabilities and the platforms they could empower.

“Even things like Metaverse and Web3, I think these are partly buzzwords, but also potentially watershed moments we’re seeing in our generation,” Black said. “As the economy digitizes, what does it look like to build these digitally native economies, like Second Life? This is not Facebook rebranding as Meta, this is Metaverse built on blockchain. Those are different things.”

And as Web3 continues to develop, Black argues that it could have effects far beyond the financial, and perhaps help us as a society reclaim that thing that seems almost entirely forgotten in an age of digital surveillance.

“We talk about how the internet is a system of data collection, data monetization, and the tech giants starting through personalized advertising are collecting information about you,” Black said. “I think the narrative around privacy used to be, ‘if you want privacy you must be a criminal.’ Privacy, in the national dialogue, is starting to emerge as something that we value. A lot of the internet is making money off of observing your behavior. If we can start to use that cryptographic technology to create a different system for browsing, for using decentralized applications using private keys, I think this could be a real paradigm shift where it’s no longer just transferring value through the internet, but how we use the internet.”

It’s a broad topic, but it’s not hard to see why it’s exciting so many professionals. As we continue to accelerate into a digital world – or maybe even a Metaversal world – the potential applications will only continue to balloon out. In many ways, today’s pioneers are still just scratching the surface.

How to Market Wealth and Capital-Markets Technology Innovations

The complexity and maturity of a technology help determine the content used to market and promote it. And as with any marketing and PR campaign, the audience you want to reach and the purpose you want to achieve come first.

At Canright, our wealth-technology marketing content focuses on solutions and the value they bring to clients. Take a look at these projects we completed over the summer to see how we presented software applications that solve long-standing business and technology problems.

Greater Transparency in Reporting as a Technology Marketing Advantage

A Northern Trust press release covers new analysis features for its Front Office Solutions portfolio reporting platform—and how they make alternative asset valuations more timely.
https://bit.ly/NT-FrontOffice

Enhanced User Experience and Deeper Data Analysis

Creating PR for large enterprises is a team effort. We contributed messaging to this one for a new Northern Trust Insurance Accounting and Analytics application, which expands legacy-based reporting functions by moving to the public cloud.
https://bit.ly/NT-InsuranceAccounting

Total Cost of Owning and Managing Options Market Data

A new service of the SpiderRock trading and risk platform provides institutional investors with a system to buy accurate options data tailored to specific trading use cases. This white paper focuses on best practices to give useful information to potential clients while showcasing the firm’s expertise and leadership in options market data.
https://bit.ly/SpiderRockOptionsDataOwnership

Increased Business Competitiveness and Software Developer Productivity

Emerging technology solutions entail the most risk and, as a result, often require more detailed explanation. This is especially true when selling to business executives and technology leaders in an enterprise market. We developed this brief to educate potential customers and internal stakeholders on what infrastructure-as-code can provide to software development teams.
https://bit.ly/CanrightTechBrief-Serverless

Our clients work with the technologies that are determining the shape of business, commerce, and finance. We help them market and sell their ideas, innovations, products, and solutions through clear communications.

Contact me at (312) 281-6262 or collin@canrightcommunications.com to see how we can help you.

The Art of Gracious Networking

Growing up, I remember wanting to learn how to be social. I was shy, but I wanted to engage with people, be seen and be heard, and have good manners, to boot.

So I started reading Emily Post, who was basically the bible of good manners at that time, and then later moved on to Judith Martin’s column called “Miss Manners” in the late 1970s. Any questions I had on etiquette—how to write a thank-you letter, how to be a courteous guest—I would do my best to follow their lead. When I found myself thinking about networking and the next blog I would write, I realized there are a few things that matter most to me when meeting new people. First and foremost, I believe all people deserve respect. It’s one of my core values, and it’s why I care so much about good manners—all those guides to good manners took the lead from a belief in respect for others.

Years later, and my manners have served me well. I’ve grown, and I’ve learned how to engage more meaningfully with people in social situations. One of my biggest takeaways is that a gracious, interested conversationalist always has a step up in social situations. I strive to engage in that way. My my beliefs come from within, I still seek advice from other sources. My own personal development has been boosted by the leadership work I do at the Wright Foundation, which I credit for helping me better engage with others, be myself when I approach new people and be curious about those that I meet.

I’m still trying to learn to be as gracious as I can be, so I’m always thrilled to hear about tips on engagement and manners from other networking aficionados. Here are a few tips I enjoyed about being gracious from around the Web:

Three Gracious Networking “Do’s”

1. Make a point to say goodbye. 
agree with what Tamsin Lejeune, founder of Ethical Fashion Forum, told Marie Claire Magazine: “Making as much as an effort with your ‘goodbye’ as with your ‘hello,’ means people remember you for all the right reasons. It’s also a great way to show that you’ve valued speaking to them…”

For starters, it’s good manners, and it’s another way to acknowledge the people that you met. Saying “goodbye” is a bigger a deal than most people realize. I also call it classy.

2. Be generous. I loved what former presidential advisor Christine Comaford had to say about networking. “I do a lot of favors for people, because I believe in ‘palm-up’ networking,” Comaford told Tim Ferris, which she describes as a “networking to give” philosophy. Networking is about offering what you can do for people, not first asking what people can do for you.

3. Embrace learning opportunities. It’s important to remember that most people, when asked, want to help others. That’s why I liked what Mindy Lockard wrote in a blog post called The Gracious Girl’s Guide to Networking:

“Some of the best networking happens because we ask others to teach us. So often we think that by networking, we have to sell ourselves as the experts. But let’s be honest, there is very little humility in that.”

None of us are going to be experts in everything, so why should we be afraid to ask for help or advice? You never know what lengths someone will go to help you. It’s assuming others want to help and have good will for you.

Turn Conference Visitors into Engaged Prospects

Once the conference is over, the zoom meeting ended or the booths packed away, what’s next? It’s time to follow up with the people you met and the contacts you collected.

Banks and FinTech firms often like to talk about the latest products, platform, app, and everything they do. Don’t do it. Business executives really don’t care.

Instead, make your marketing follow-up personal: include links to stories related to what you learned at the show about the industry and its future. You’ll find those stories in the conversations you had and presentations you heard at the conferences.

Here’s how one company strategically used content from its event in its ongoing marketing follow up. To build a reputation as a go-to source of FinTech knowledge in wealth management, Morningstar:

  • Commissioned us to write a follow-up article on one of its FinTech forums to summarize the key points on how FinTech delivers value.
  • Hired a videographer to produce a story on the event experience, from the street in Lower Manhattan up to the Morningstar’s World Trade Center 4 offices, where the event took place.
  • Included interviews with panelists and attendees to provide further insights.
  • Posted the event coverage on social media and asked panelists to share it.

Take a look at the result: Morningstar FinTech Forum video

Get a marketing boost from your conference or event. Call Collin Canright at (773) 426-7000 or email him at collin@canrightcommunications.com.