Meeting demand for increased contact

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

One result of client con­cerns about their invest­ments is a height­ened appetite for infor­ma­tion from their advi­sor. As a result, com­mu­ni­ca­tion that was fine a year ago is not typ­i­cally suf­fi­cient today. Even monthly let­ters are not enough in some cases​.As a gen­eral rule, advi­sors will be unable to meet the demand for more fre­quent con­tact sim­ply through more phone calls and meet­ings. In actual fact, given the length and dif­fi­culty of many con­ver­sa­tions, most advi­sors are strug­gling to main­tain the vol­ume of con­tact, let alone increase it.

As a result, the only solu­tion is to add more effi­cient meth­ods of com­mu­ni­cat­ing to the way you deal with clients.

Some advi­sors are offer­ing con­fer­ence calls or host­ing evening pre­sen­ta­tions. For most, how­ever, the sim­plest way to expand the level of con­tact is via email.

Email will not be the solu­tion for every client. While accep­tance of email among seniors has increased dra­mat­i­cally in the last few years, there will still be a few elderly clients for whom it won’t work. For most, how­ever, email­ing infor­ma­tion via can be a good sup­ple­ment to phone calls and meetings.

The first step is to update your data­base of client email addresses. You need to know whether peo­ple pre­fer to get emails at work or at home — or in the odd case they may say they aren’t inter­ested in get­ting emails at all.

Once that’s done, the most impor­tant deci­sion is what to send — and on this you have at least four choices.

First, you can use email to update clients on your own views. That can work, as long as the email con­tains sub­stan­tial infor­ma­tion. Recently, an advi­sor told me about send­ing “client com­fort let­ters” sup­plied by his head office in Decem­ber — and get­ting a neg­a­tive response from clients about the lack of meat in those letters.

Two other alter­na­tives are to attach infor­ma­tion sup­plied by your firm or by an out­side money man­ager. Both of these can be effec­tive, pro­vided that the con­tent is solid. The only down­side to these is that some skep­ti­cal clients may view your firm or an out­side money man­ager as hav­ing their own agenda.

As a result, in many cases the best alter­na­tive is to send a link to an arti­cle from a rec­og­nized, cred­i­ble pub­li­ca­tion. The rea­son that this works is that third party con­tent is seen as objec­tive and  the cred­i­bil­ity of the pub­li­ca­tion is trans­ferred to the infor­ma­tion being sent and also to the per­son send­ing it. That’s pre­cisely why last October’s War­ren Buf­fett opin­ion piece in the New York Times was so widely distributed.

There are lots of pub­li­ca­tions to choose from — the Wall Street Jour­nal, For­tune, Forbes, Busi­ness Week, the Econ­o­mist, the National Post and the Globe and Mail are all cred­i­ble sources of articles.

The good news is that send­ing links to arti­cles is fairly easy. Unlike mail­ing arti­cles them­selves, send­ing a link doesn’t typ­i­cally require per­mis­sion from the pub­li­ca­tion or a cost, since news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines gen­er­ate adver­tis­ing rev­enue when peo­ple read these articles.

Good arti­cles can be obtained from a vari­ety of sources, such as your head office or fund com­pany whole­salers. I also main­tain a sec­tion on this web­site titled “Links to use­ful articles.”

The email cover note to the arti­cle is crit­i­cal in putting your own stamp on the infor­ma­tion you’re send­ing. In a few sen­tences, explain why you’ve selected this arti­cle and what it is all about — don’t assume that clients will read the arti­cle you send unless you make a com­pelling case to spend the time.

Your final deci­sion relates to the fre­quency with which you send emails. This will vary by client — given today’s envi­ron­ment, you can send some­thing monthly or twice monthly, for some clients as often as weekly would be fine.

The right fre­quency will vary by client. One advi­sor tells clients that he can email them infor­ma­tion one, two or four times a month and asks them their pref­er­ence — and main­tains three dif­fer­ent email lists based on their answers.

Remem­ber, even the best crafted email and most com­pelling arti­cle are not a sub­sti­tute for per­sonal con­tact — but they can be an effec­tive sup­ple­ment to your exist­ing communication.

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit http://​www​.get​keep​clients​.com.

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Tags: Appetite, Choices, Client Concerns, Client Email, Comfort Letters, Contact, Conversations, Downside, Elderly Clients, Evening Presentations, Hosting, Investments, Money Manager, Negative Response, Odd Case, Phone Calls, Seniors, Those Letters
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