If you’ve ever bought leads and felt frustrated by low response rates or slow conversions, you aren’t alone. Many financial advisors struggle to turn purchased leads into recurring revenue, often because critical steps between contact and close are being overlooked.
The good news is that with the right approaches to following up, nurturing prospects, and modifying your approach based on results, your investment can yield measurable and lasting returns.
Before you can start thinking about maximizing returns on purchased leads, you need to have confidence in your aggregator’s ability to share high-quality prospects. This post assumes that you’ve already done the work of vetting the provider; if you haven’t, review the questions financial advisors should ask lead aggregators.
The next step is to have realistic expectations of the total cost and timeline of the lead-buying process.
Aggregators often work on a cost-per-lead basis (CPL), meaning they get paid upon contact transmission and the process may stop there for them. For financial advisors on the buying side, this is the very beginning.
While the aggregator looks at CPL, financial advisors also need to be aware of cost per metrics that take longer to assess. Some of these can include cost per scheduled call, cost per attended call, and customer acquisition cost (CAC). Your firm may track payback periods or apply a unique ROI formula that includes the time advisors spend nurturing prospects before they convert.
Keeping these KPIs in sight throughout the lead-buying process is paramount. As some of the longer-term metrics shift, you may need to adjust the shorter-term ones to ensure that your revenue metrics are still working in your favor. You may also find that you have more room to scale.
Know that turning a prospect into a client takes time, and not everyone who completes a form or books an intro call is ready to convert that day. The most activity happens when the lead is fresh, but you’ll need to budget in time for ongoing check-ins.
With the basics out of the way, now is the time for strategy.
Speed is key. People are most engaged immediately after they’ve completed a form; the longer you wait to call, the higher the likelihood of reaching them at an inopportune time. And if you’re buying leads that are sold to multiple advisors, the higher the chances are that your competitors have already made contact.
If calling someone directly after you receive their information isn’t possible or if they didn’t answer, consistency and a multi-touch approach is the next best strategy. Use whatever means of contact are available to you to reach out and share your firm’s value proposition.
The three most common forms of contact are calls, emails, and texts. For each of these channels, have a multi-step cadence for keeping the conversation with your prospects going. These efforts should be focused on scheduling that first intro call; in the Nurture Your Leads section, we will go into depth on follow-ups with less of a push for immediate action.
Day 1: Call, email, and text your lead as quickly as possible to let them know you’ve received their information and are interested in working with them.
Day 2: Give them another call and ask about finding a good time to talk or to set up their initial meeting.
Days 3-7: Mix in texts and emails sharing more about your company and how you would be able to meet their needs. Try calling again.
Days 8-14: Communicate less frequently, focusing on the channels that have historically worked well for your firm.
The mix and frequency of channel messages should be tested to see what works best for you and your company. This may also vary by a contact’s characteristics – for example, your firm may find that potential investors with AUM of $2M+ prefer conducting business via text rather than email or that you get more responses overall from emails rather than phone calls.
If your initial follow-ups were unsuccessful, that doesn’t mean the window with a lead has closed. Rather than using a high-intensity approach to getting them to schedule, this is the time to add them to your ongoing engagement track.
A nurture sequence is intended to keep your brand top-of-mind without pushing for someone to become a client immediately. While that is the ultimate goal, this sequence should give a preview of the kind of value you can provide by giving useful content and sharing more about your company.
The length of the sequence can vary widely. Some financial advisors may have a nurture sequence that has only a few emails about their company and the benefits of working with an advisor. Others can have virtually endless rounds of content, aiming to build and maintain their brand awareness over months or even years.
Regardless of the length of your sequence, email is part of the strategy and there are several principles that apply.
Content should be educational and not overly salesy. Your nurture sequence should include calls to action, but the focus should stay on creating value for the person consuming the content.
Because value is the driving force, segmentation and personalization are important. Personalization means more than dynamically adding someone’s first name to the email subject line. It means looking into your data and seeing what matters most to your prospects.
Did they say that they were interested in a financial advisor who can help them strategize an exit plan for their business? Are they close to retirement and wondering how to keep growing their portfolio while making sure they have enough for the rest of their years? These are opportunities to segment your leads by goal and give them email content that matches.
If your company regularly creates content that would appeal to one or more of your segments, consider sending them emails when those articles or videos are posted.
Beyond live calls, your content is how prospects get to know you and your firm. Whatever you create, blog posts to recorded webinars, everything can be repurposed into a different marketing tactic. You can write a blog post about a webinar you hosted, send an email with the recording and/or link to the blog, and post it on social media.
It can be challenging to assess the immediate impact of content creation, but it is a crucial part of building your brand reputation. As this grows, scheduling calls and having potential clients self-select for your company will likely become easier.
The content you create can be sent out to existing paid leads who never closed and also be used to attract new business organically.
A nurture strategy can become complex very quickly. To keep things organized and efficient, automate as much as you can.
Say you have a batch of three emails for every main goal an investor has. Instead of tracking delivery manually, integrate your customer data with an email platform and set everything to run on its own. This will take some time and probably engineering support at the outset, but should be less work in the long run.
Apply similar workflows where you can, automating social posts when blogs go live and queuing up email responses to commonly asked questions.
Some financial advisors take a multi-step approach to introductions, starting with a quick call and then moving to a longer meeting to get into more specifics. Others move straight to the intro meeting.
In either approach, you will need to identify the people who are serious prospects versus the ones who might be less ready to become clients. From there, you can focus your efforts on the serious ones and possibly move the lower-intent prospects to a nurture sequence.
Asking questions like the following can help make a prospective client’s intents more clear:
If you’re noticing vague answers about goals or timelines, hesitation in scheduling any additional calls, or significant price sensitivity before fully explaining your services, this could indicate that the person is not the right fit or is not the right fit right now.
By filtering early, you avoid spending time chasing people who won’t convert and free up time to build rapport with the ones with real potential.
Prospective clients have options. Those with very high AUM have even more. Why would someone choose to work with you and your firm over anyone else?
Having a strong value proposition differentiates your business from that of competitors, and it also helps ensure that you work with investors whose values and priorities match your own. Get specific with what you do best and share positive results where possible.
As part of your pitch on the firm’s unique offerings, you should be prepared to address common objections, such as fees, timing, or trust. If they express concerns about fees, explain your structure transparently and position it against the value delivered. If they aren’t sure if they can trust you or your firm, emphasize your certifications, your fiduciary duty, and client-first approach.
Do you offer any complimentary services that provide real value and could help encourage someone to work with you? Things like portfolio reviews or retirement readiness checklists can create momentum and build trust without requiring immediate commitment.
After your initial proposal or consultation, don’t let the trail go cold. Set a clear next step and follow up within a specific time frame (e.g., "Let’s check in next Thursday to answer any final questions").
The more clearly and confidently you communicate your value — and make it easy to take the next step — the better your conversion rates will be.
While closing leads and having an influx of new clients is great, it is equally important to prioritize maintaining the relationships that you create. Long-term relationships keep generating revenue after the payback period is complete; if accounts are churning annually, you’ll be stuck in a constant cycle of buying leads without much to show for it.
You can use similar strategies to deepen relationships with existing clients as you would when nurturing prospects. Investors want to have touchpoints with their advisor and many find ongoing educational content useful.
As you produce content to nurture prospects or address market concerns, include your existing clients in those email blasts or webinar invitations. Have regularly scheduled calls and check in when there are periods of volatility.
Satisfied, long-term investor relationships are created when you consistently provide value and build trust over time. These clients may even become sources of referral traffic, thus expanding your business without paying for additional leads.
This thread has been woven throughout the post, but it’s worth stating outright: invest in technology that automates your workflow.
Some must-have tools include a CRM platform to keep track of customer data, an email automation platform, and scheduling software that automates bookings. There are businesses that can combine some or all of these functionalities.
Your CRM will feed into the email platform, which will help you segment and personalize your content for your prospective clients. Email marketing tools will allow you to automate much of this content, so you don’t need to manually send the same templated follow-up emails to everyone who comes into your pipeline. Finally, the calendar tool will allow people to self-serve. Embed it in your emails or have it on your website; you don’t need to personally manage those bookings for every lead.
To maximize ROI from purchased leads, financial advisors must be aware of what parts of the system are working well and which parts could use some extra attention. Note that most, if not all of the KPIs in the following sections can be influenced by larger economic changes and competitors entering or exiting the space
If you suspect that any metric may have been influenced by changes on the lead provider’s side, it’s worth having a conversation.
Outside of changes, it’s important to regularly share your KPIs with your lead generators anyway, especially the ones that they are being assessed on directly.
At Advisor.com there are things we can adjust about our process based on a partner’s feedback. We can make changes to the lead traffic, update our matching logic, or make recommendations about how to find success based on your particular needs.
Other providers may be able to take similar action. If you aren’t seeing what you want or if you are and want to scale up, your lead vendors need to know what metrics you’re seeing so that they can adjust appropriately.
Maximizing ROI from purchased leads isn’t just about buying names — it’s about building a system that turns those names into lasting client relationships. By qualifying your lead sources, following up quickly and consistently, engaging with prospects over time, and fine-tuning your conversion strategies, you can create a system designed for long-term success.
Remember to leverage technology to streamline your workflow and regularly review your KPIs to spot opportunities for improvement. And don’t hesitate to collaborate with your aggregators; sharing your feedback can help optimize results on both sides.
With a structured approach and ongoing refinement, every contact you purchase can become a real opportunity to grow your business.
