Getting help to communicate with existing clients and prospects

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Maybe about once every year or two, we include an article in our newsletter that’s a bit of a sales pitch. This is one of those rare occasions! But it’s not without merit as it relates to a significant and important challenge for many financial advice firms, and that is staying in touch with existing clients and with prospects.

There is no good reason NOT to do it. After all, your existing clients deserve to hear from you regularly, and to be made aware of the range of financial planning services and product areas in which you deliver expertise every day. There is nothing more frustrating for a financial adviser than bumping into a “life assurance client”, only to be told they just arranged their pension elsewhere as the client wasn’t aware of the adviser’s expertise in this area. It is also an important demonstration of value as part-justification of your ongoing charge / trail commission. As we see in the UK, this is becoming a prominent challenge – being able to justify your ongoing charge.

It is also important for you to stay on the radar of prospective clients. They might have made an enquiry, and then drifted off as maybe the query wasn’t urgent for them, or they simply became distracted by other areas of life. You want to stay on their radar for when their query bubbles to the surface of their minds again.

We believe at StepChange that email is still probably the most effective way of communicating with clients. Social media of course has its place and its benefits, but email ensures you regularly get a presence in that place we all go to every day – their email inbox. This was the driver in setting up our Adviser Newsletter Service, and we are delighted to be sending out client newsletters for a wide range of advice firms across Ireland for well over a decade now.

Here’s how it works.

  1. The newsletter is a syndicated publication that goes out every 2 months. The same content is used for multiple advice firms, but it is sent under each individual brand. Whether you have additional content to add or not, you know your clients will be contacted at least 6 times a year with excellent quality content. Also, in 12 years of providing the service, we have never missed an issue deadline so you can rest assured of the consistency of delivery. This might be the biggest challenge for firms looking to do their newsletters themselves.
  2. Each newsletter contains 2 original articles that I write and also approx 5/6 links to interesting, relevant content that I find on the web that I think will be of interest to your clients.
  3. The newsletter is aimed at clients of financial planning firms, with content mainly about financial planning, and also covering pensions, investments & protection in a financial planning context. We don’t include articles about general insurance, mortgages or health insurance.
  4. The newsletter is fully customised for your business with your logo, brand colours, photo, contact details etc. The newsletter is seen as coming from you, not from us. You can also personalise the introduction to the newsletter yourself each month if you want.
  5. We provide you with the completed newsletter each time with the articles as in point 2 above and will send it out on your behalf if you so wish – you can choose whether or not to be completely “hands off”. However alternatively you can also add / change articles yourself if you want and send it out yourself – it’s very easy.
  6. There will also be a “flyer” added to your account for sending out one-off messages. This is something you can use yourself, with the help initially of our training. You might use this for “dressed up” emails about a company announcement or a budget update etc.
  7. The software that we use automatically manages your subscribers – removes unsubscribes, allows you to sub-segment if you wish etc. Adding new subscribers is very straightforward.
  8. You’ll have access to your analytics, which are great. They give great insight into the engagement of each individual with your newsletter – who is opening, clicking on content, what they are reading, sharing, liking etc.
  9. The maximum number of emails that can be sent is 120,000 per annum. That’s a lot of emails!
  10. For most participants (but as an optional extra), we also then take this content and each month add an article to your website and share the articles out to the LinkedIn connections of the key person in the business, increasing the reach of the content.

Would you like to find out more about our newsletter service? If so, please give me a call at 086 2519895 or email me.