What better way to recover from football Sunday than to read the Monday roundup of the past week’s most engaging content? No matter how your team performed, everyone who reads this week’s insights will be a winner.
This week’s most clicked item talks about the oncoming retirement crisis in America, with some groups affected more than others. The week’s most shared content reviews ways to improve your digital marketing initiatives.
Most Clicked: African Americans are Facing a Retirement Crisis
As retirement draws nearer, African Americans are set to the feel the effects of the wealth gap in America, according to an article by Rodney Brooks of Next Avenue.
In the article, Brooks gave insights as to why there is such a huge gap in retirement preparation for African Americans compared to white Americans. These reasons include:
- The Retirement Savings Racial Disparity: By the time they reach their 60s, the wealth of white Americans is 11 times that of African Americans (about $1 million more). This wealth gap only continues to grow
- Financial Literacy: Historically, African Americans have not received the financial education that whites have. Only one in ten African Americans work with a financial professional, compared to one in four white Americans.
The chart below depicts the average family wealth in America by race from 1963-2013. As you can see, the gap in wealth between African Americans and white Americans is only getting larger:
source: urban.org
As senior living industry professionals, it would greatly benefit the long-term success of our business to see all people receiving additional financial education and access to the same level of professional financial planning services. This shouldn’t be limited to just older adults either – saving for retirement needs to start as early as possible.
While plenty of continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) offer financial planning services to residents and prospective residents, we recommend offering these same services to the entire family, including adult children and adult grandchildren. It is especially important to encourage minority families to take advantage of these services in an attempt to educate and help reduce the wealth gap among different races in future generations.
At Creating Results, we are in agreement with the idea put forth by Maya Rockeymoore, President of the Center for Global Policy Solutions in Washington D.C: “there needs to be a national campaign to encourage young African Americans to save and invest.”
And we believe that professionals in the senior living industry could be at the forefront of that campaign. A continued lack of action on our part will only worsen the retirement crisis in our country. Not only would this be a poor reflection of our ethics, but it would hurt our senior products and services in the long run.
Click here to read more about the factors contributing to the disparity in retirement preparation between African Americans and white Americans.
Most Shared: Integrating Your Print and Digital Marketing
Email marketing was a hot topic after last week’s All About Email Virtual Conference and Expo led by Joe Tertel, RiteAid’s Manager of E-Commerce and Email Marketing.
It’s no wonder there was a renewed interest in a presentation handout from Creating Results detailing the importance of integrating your company’s print and digital marketing efforts. The presentation was first given at the SMASH Senior Care Marketing Summit in 2014.
You can click on the image below to access the handout:
The Marriage of Print and Digital ROI by Creating Results
The presentation gave data, insights and actionable steps for leveraging print initiatives in digital marketing based on our national study, Social, Silver Surfers.
One of the key takeaways from the presentation was that print and digital marketing go hand-in-hand. As such, you should be finding ways to re-purpose the content in your print initiatives in order to leverage them with your email subscriber base.
The Fall 2017 North Hill courses and events catalog, produced by Creating Results.
For example, every year, we produce spring and fall events catalogs for our client North Hill as a direct mailing piece to prospects and people who may not be as familiar with the community. But we also re-purpose the contents of this piece into a series of emails promoting the catalog’s events to North Hill’s email subscribers.
By doing this, we are able to serve two purposes for two different audiences, while using the same content. For prospects in the beginning stages of the purchase journey, the direct mailing offers a chance to visit the community for the first time and learn more about their programs and events.
For prospects more familiar with North Hill, the emails are a nurturing tactic that keep North Hill top of mind and can move them into the consideration and desire phases of the purchase funnel, thus prompting a second or third visit to the community to learn more.
The email also offers increased opportunities for engagement, tracking metrics and sharing. While a prospect may have kept a direct mailing to themselves, all it takes is the click of a button for them to share an email with someone else who may be interested.
With email being the number one online activity for people over 50, according to Social, Silver Surfers, now is as good a time as any to re-evaluate your email marketing:
- Does it integrate print marketing initiatives?
- Are your lists segmented based on your prospects’ interests?
- Is messaging appropriate for where subscribers are in the purchase funnel?
Click here for the most up-to-date digital marketing insights from the newest Social, Silver Surfers, out this week!