Email marketing for financial services, bought carefully

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How to select a provider for regulated email

1. Start with your own supervision requirements. Establish who must review and approve marketing communications in your firm, and what has to be retained and for how long, before you brief a vendor. The workflow requirement shapes the vendor choice more than creative does.
2. Test the approval workflow, not the templates. Ask to see how drafts move through review, how approvals are recorded, and how a sent version is archived. A vendor who can only demonstrate design tools has not worked in a supervised environment.
3. Check the commercial email basics. Accurate sender information, honest subject lines, a physical postal address, a working unsubscribe honoured promptly, and no misleading header data. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guidance sets these out for commercial messages.
4. Agree data handling in writing. Where client data lives, who can access it, how it is deleted, and what happens at the end of the contract. In financial services this is a security review, not a procurement formality.

What is different about this sector

Three things. First, supervision: marketing communications about regulated products typically require review and approval before they go out, and evidence that review happened. Second, claims: performance figures, comparisons and testimonials are governed, and the applicable rules depend on what you are and what you sell, which is a question for your compliance officer rather than your agency.

Third, retention: sent communications generally have to be archived and retrievable. A vendor whose platform cannot export a faithful record of what was sent, to whom and when, creates a problem that only appears at examination time, which is the worst moment to discover it.

The commercial email rules that apply to everyone

Alongside sector supervision, the general rules for commercial email apply. The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guidance requires that header information is not false or misleading, that subject lines reflect the content, that the message is identifiable as an advertisement, that it includes a valid physical postal address, that it explains how to opt out, and that opt-out requests are honoured promptly.

It also makes clear that a business remains responsible for messages sent on its behalf by another company. Outsourcing the sending does not outsource the liability, which is a good reason to read the vendor's list practices rather than take them on trust, and to refuse any proposal involving purchased or appended contact lists.

Comparing vendors on evidence

Ask for two things: a redacted example of an approval trail from a regulated client, and the name of the person who would run your account week to week. Those answers tell you more than any capability deck, because both are hard to fake and easy to produce if the vendor genuinely works this way.

On price, treat the retainer and the platform licence as separate lines and compare each. Many proposals blur them, which makes an expensive service look cheap and an expensive platform look like a service. Ask what the fee buys in hours, how many sends a month that covers, and what a campaign outside the plan costs.

Questions people actually ask

Can a marketing agency send emails on a financial firm's behalf?

Yes, within your supervision framework. The firm remains responsible for the communication and, under the FTC's CAN-SPAM guidance, for messages another company sends on its behalf. In practice that means approval before send, evidence of that approval, and archiving that your compliance function can retrieve later.

Are testimonials and performance figures allowed in financial emails?

It depends on your registration, your regulator and the product, and the rules have changed in recent years. This is a question to put to your compliance officer or counsel before briefing a vendor, not one to resolve from an agency's confidence. Any vendor who answers it definitively without knowing your registration status is a risk.

Should we buy or rent an email list?

No. Purchased and appended lists produce poor engagement, damage sending reputation and create consent problems you cannot document. Build the list through your own client relationships, events and website, and accept slower growth in exchange for a list you can defend and that actually opens.

What should this cost?

Retainers vary widely by send volume, approval overhead and how much content is produced from scratch, and many providers publish nothing. Compare the service fee and the platform licence separately, ask what the fee buys in hours and sends, and price the compliance workflow explicitly rather than assuming it is included.

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