Cambria Investment Management

About Cambria Investment Management

‍Cambria Investment Management is a team of investment professionals who serve individual investors, institutional investors, and registered investment advisors with a better investment experience practicing their belief that everyone should have access to fair and thoughtful investment solutions. 

Cambria Investment Management uses their rules-based systems to protect client assets against emotional decisions. Cambria Investment Management delivers a market-leading framework for good investing, preventing short-term impulses from derailing long-term gains.

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Goal: Convert high-value investment advisors to Cambria customers

Cambria Investment Management wanted to support their existing sales outreach with a more personalized channel so they could build more trust with their target customers. Handwritten cards were the ideal medium for delivering a personal experience to complement the existing sales campaigns that Cambria team was running.

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Solution: Personalized handwritten notes to build trust with investment advisors

Cambria Investments chose IgnitePOST managed services where our experts designed the strategy, setup approach, did execution, delivered analysis and optimized the performance of Cambria’s handwritten card campaigns. 

For this handwritten card campaign, IgnitePOST team worked closely with Clayton Wilson, the EVP of Divisional Investment Consulting at Cambria. Clayton supplied the IgnitePOST team with core messaging, provided feedback on the campaigns, and delivered the list of target prospects.

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Strategy: Send handwritten cards to advisors and connect them with Cambria

For their first campaign with handwritten cards, the Cambria Investment team set a goal to achieve a 20% average response rate and connect those investment advisors to an EVP at Cambria using call, text, or email.

IgnitePOST experts recommended testing 4 different cohorts sending 1106 handwritten cards across the cohorts. Using the cohort driven testing, the team iterated the card messaging and approach, thus improving the response rates in subsequent cohorts. 

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Approach: Surprise & delight individual advisors with branded handwritten notes

The handwritten card campaigns targeted known individuals in the financial industry. IgnitePOST experts agreed on a demographic for this outreach with the Cambria Investment team. The target was generally 50-70 year old male investment advisors who built their primary book of business in the 80s and 90s. The contact list focused on tier 3 cities.

The campaigns were kicked off with two cohorts of 50 people each, and grew with each cohort. Cohort 4 ended up with a total of 512 contacts.

IgnitePOST tracked the responses by using unique call-forwarding numbers through the service CallRail, as well as email information provided to us from the EVP at Cambria. 

Each cohort received a handwritten note, followed a short time after by an email sequence. As Cambria received a growing number of responses, the cohorts were expanded and IgnitePOST experts added more emails, increasing the sequence to ten emails total based on the performance of the individual email touchpoints. Emails were crafted to appeal to different personality types via different messaging and subject lines.

IgnitePOST experts continued to test different messaging and card fronts for the first 3 cohorts. Ultimately, based on response rates, email open rates, and conversion percentage IgnitePOST experts determined that Option 1 from Cohort 1 performed the best.

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Results and Analysis: Excellent response rates and conversions

Overall, the handwritten card campaigns for Cambria Investments delivered excellent response rates. IgnitePOST can confirm that after the production of this case study Cambria Investments saw an even greater number of responses originating from the campaigns. 

For each cohort, there was an initial wave of interest, which is to be expected. The initiation of the written note and the first email are a powerful combination. From there the response rate on each individual email goes down. Over time, Cambria Investments experienced very high combined response rates for meeting their goal. 

Cohort 1 yielded a response rate of at least 19.1%. Considering that not all responses were successfully attributed, the final response rate was even higher. For example, IgnitePOST customers often see that written notes yield interest, but the contact doesn’t reach out directly, and ends up in another part of the marketing/sales funnel. 

Cohort 1 Option 1 – Best performing message / card image: 19.10% response rate

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Cohort 2 currently shows a 13.9% response rate. Based on the trend data from Cohort 1, IgnitePOST experts expect this cohort to meet or surpass the performance of Cohort 1. 

The best performing message was very close to a high-converting email message Clayton reported to have tested and optimized over time. Thus, it’s no surprise that it did well as a note.

IgnitePOST and Cambria learned that the outside image for the best performing card came from an original graphic the team created based on a discovery with Clayton, the EVP of Cambria Investments. The graphic was titled “Some of the most honest guys in finance.”

Overall the operational metrics were great. Bad addresses were under 2%, which is better than what IgnitePOST experts generally see. Email bounce rate was even less, at under 1%. This clearly shows that the campaign was executed with high quality lists.

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Recommended Next Steps: Grow handwritten card + email sequence

At this point, Cambria Investments have a high-converting handwritten note & email sequence combination. It seems that the only limitation to delivering additional results is the provision of additional contacts.

There is likely value in having those folks who continue to open and click emails deep into the sequence specifically targeted with a phone call. Since now the Cambria team knows they’re interested, they may just need more personal contact.

IgnitePOST recommends that to improve performance further the email sequence should be expanded beyond 10 emails. Since so few people unsubscribed, and continued to open and click the emails, there’s no harm and only a one-time expense of time in crafting emails beyond #10.

IgnitePOST experience also recommends tracking passive interest from these campaigns – specifically website views. That was deemed too complex to track for this initial project, and the idea of creating a custom QR code was discarded based on the demographic of the contacts.

Since Cambria has a high-performing outreach approach dialed in, our recommendation is for the team to leverage this approach on a wider list of prospects.  IgnitePOST expects the same high response results to follow as long as the target list quality remains consistent.

Further, there is also an opportunity to continue tweaking and iterating on the current prospecting approach to look for ways the team can continue to improve.

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About IgnitePOST

IgnitePOST helps brands create magic moments for their customers. Our real pen and ink handwritten notes cut through the digital noise to surprise and delight customers exactly where they are in their shopping journeys.

Our intelligent software integrates with existing systems for easy set up and our robotics work at massive scale using ballpoint pens to give warmth to each note.

This software-hardware combination generates perfectly timed and crafted moments that drive customers to action as proven by our above industry average conversion rates.‍

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Contact

For more information, or if you have any questions, please contact us! We want to hear from you: hello@ignitepost.com