St. James’s Place

Client Story

At A Glance

43x

Increase in Leads

90%

Decrease in Cost Per Lead

Client Testimonial

Backstory

Backstory

Founded in 1992, St. James’ Place is a UK-based wealth management company that expanded to Asia in 2014.

With offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mainland China, it is one of the largest wealth management companies catering to high-net-worth individuals, families and business owners, across the local and expatriate communities in Asia.

St. James’ Place maintains a thorough understanding of their clients’ financial needs and aspirations and is committed to offering bespoke advice, covering insurance solutions, retirement planning, investment advice, and intergenerational wealth planning.

Challenge

Although St. James’ Place is a reputable company and had grown organically over
the years, they realized they weren’t generating the volume of leads they hoped
to. These were the three key challenges they were facing.

Relied on Traditional Lead Generation Methods

Being a heavily regulated company, St. James’ Place was too reliant on traditional methods for acquiring leads, with word-of-mouth referrals being a primary source. This meant that most of their leads came from existing clients and partners.

However, given their size and the fact that they were listed on the London Stock Exchange, they realized that if they wanted to grow rapidly, they couldn’t afford to solely rely on the referral business.

High Cost Per Lead and Low Conversion Rate

On recognizing that referral marketing wasn’t a feasible or scalable source of new leads, they decided to turn to digital.

They worked with a digital marketing agency for three months and ran a Google AdWords campaign to generate leads.

However, the results were not impressive – they spent USD 34,200 on the campaign which saw a high cost per conversion (USD 5,680), a conversion rate of only 0.1% and a handful of leads.

Unoptimized and Cluttered Landing Page Lacking Strategy

One of the reasons behind the dismal performance of the campaign was the landing page the visitors were directed to on clicking the search ad.

While the St. James’ Place team did the best they could, the landing page lacked strategy and a value proposition – it failed to communicate what was in it for potential clients.

The page was cluttered with an overload of information, had a generic offer (Contact us today) and lacked visual elements. This made it uninviting which resulted in visitors leaving the page without converting.

Due to these reasons, they decided to approach a specialized digital marketing agency. Enter Brew Interactive.

Solution

When we came on board, we were assigned the objective of driving new leads and fueling the sales pipeline.

The first thing we did was work closely with the St. James’ Place team to understand their business, solutions, audience, and challenges.

Being into financial services, it was extremely important for the company to educate prospects on the products and solutions they offer and build trust in order to push prospects down the sales funnel.

Hence, we strategized with the marketing team and came up with monthly and quarterly lead generation campaign ideas such as the Wealth Protection brochure, Asia Investment Conference and the UK Property Tax guide.

These were all ways to attract prospects and acquire new leads which were then passed over to their financial advisors to close.

1. Built an Improved Landing Page to Promote the Wealth Protection Brochure

The first change we made was to re-produce an optimized landing page.

Based on our experience with landing page creation, we revamped the copy to make it more action-oriented and used the kind of imagery that has worked in the past.

Considering the nature of the industry, we realized it would be more effective to acquire leads from an MQL standpoint. Due to this, we replaced the ‘Contact Us’ offer with ‘Download the Guide’ which gave prospects access to a complimentary brochure.

Through this, we wanted to pique prospects’ interests, educate them about what SJP offers and win their trust to nurture them along the sales cycle.

Apart from revamping the landing page, we ran ads across multiple channels, such as Facebook, Google and programmatic networks.

In order to ensure that the ads were served accurately to St James’s Place core audience of high networth individuals, we leveraged on third party data and location-based targeting.

2. Hosted the Asia Investment Conference

St. James’ Place would organize the Asia Investment Conference every year as a way of educating their clients, showing thought leadership and establishing their expertise.

They hosted the Asia Investment Conference in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai. This conference brought a panel of distinguished speakers from around the globe to discuss and share insights on Asia’s rapid growth and rising global influence.

We saw this event as an opportunity to acquire new, high-quality leads. Hence, we ran a campaign on Facebook and multiple other channels to promote the event and drive registrations.

The page ended with a strong call-to-action and simple form, encouraging users to register for the event.

3. Co-Produced and Launched the UK Property Tax Guide

Towards the end of the year with the tax season approaching, we decided to develop and launch the UK Property Tax guide. It was used to educate people living outside of the UK on the tax implications of owning, acquiring, renting or selling a UK property.

As St. James’ Place offers valuable tax-saving and investment opportunities advice, we thought it would be the perfect time to launch this guide as a lead magnet and acquire new leads.

Once again, we ran ads on multiple channels and optimized basis performance, to create awareness about the guide and get people to download it.

These ads were targeted to UK expats in Hong Kong and Singapore. On clicking the call-to-action button (Download), they were directed to a landing page.

This landing page enlisted what the UK Property Tax guide constituted of and ended with a download request form.

4. Used Salesforce Pardot

We introduced St. James’ Place to Pardot, a powerful B2B marketing automation tool by Salesforce.

It was used to streamline the lead generation and nurturing process which involved sending automated emails based on pre-defined triggers, qualifying leads and offering a personalized experience.

Here’s an example of a workflow we created to engage new leads. It was centered around welcoming new leads, delivering a personalized experience and familiarizing them about SJP and what it offers.

Pardot also proved to be beneficial in aligning the sales and marketing teams because the Salesforce CRM gave the teams access to customer insights and prospect activity history, enabling everyone to be on the same page and work towards a common goal.

We used the multi-touch attribution tracking feature which helped us get an overall view of how each of the campaigns are performing across the buying stages and accordingly decide how to optimize the marketing budget.

Results

Our strategy of designing optimized landing pages and running promotional ads turned out to be a huge success.

Owing to Facebook’s accurate targeting capabilities, it turned out to be one of the most effective channels and enabled us to appeal to the high network individuals we set out to reach.

So, in three months, we carried out three successful campaigns, resulting in a 43X increase in leads with an average cost per lead of USD 27.78 which marked a 90% drop in cost per lead.

Want similar results?
Get in touch to see how we can help.