If you’re a financial advisor, whether you know it or not, you’re in the middle of one of the most competitive games in town. The name of the game is to stay relevant, relatable and personalized and you’re competing with the likes of instant answers on Google, the CNBC ticker that’s running on many of your client’s TVs during the day, and the WSJ on the porch every morning. And just like a successful basketball or football coach, you’ll need a winning strategy.
Part of the challenge we face as advisors is helping to train our clients to think about investing and financial planning the way our firm thinks about it; not the way Jim Cramer talks about it all night on CNBC. That is to say, thinking about it with their specific goals in mind instead of the fads of today(looking at you bitcoin.) Whether you’re an income shop, a growth shop, or even if you focus on ETFs or Mutual Funds, the only way to ensure that your clients understand your philosophy on their financial future is to stay in front of them regularly. We often convince ourselves that our clients understand our thinking after signing up with us, but as is the case with most things in life, they’ll need to be exposed to our message hundreds of times before it fully resonates. And although you might never be on their TV screens each night, there are ways to stay in front of your clients each day.
And although many people already use email services to send out market updates or quarterly updates, we’ve been able to uniquely use Hubspot as a tool in our efforts to consistently communicate with our clients. While Hubspot offers a suite of solutions for anyone looking to interact via email, the two most valuable features for advisors and the ones we’ll focus on today are segmentation and the ability to build multiple workflows.
1. Segmentation: Maybe your book of business is similar to many within the space- you have 80% of your revenue coming from 20% of your clients. These are your top clients. Maybe you call them your “A” clients or “Tier 1.” You likely have one or two groups or tiers of clients after them. Each of these tiers has a similar set of needs in regards to wanting to stay up to date on their portfolio and the markets. But, the planning needs and end goals may be specific to each tier of clients. For example, your high net worth clients may need more information on estate planning, whereas, for the smaller clients, it may be useful to share budgeting and cash flow tips. Either way, Hubspot allows you to communicate with both groups effectively. By building out different lists of clients and prospects, you’re able to control the type of content that you send to each segment. This allows for personalized communication that shows each group the unique value proposition that you have for their particular situation.
2. Workflows: Workflows are great because they allow you to deliver relevant and relatable content automatically over long periods of time. For a workflow to be most effective, you’ll like need to spend time upfront putting together content or finding content from others. But, the upfront time pays enormous dividends in the longer term. With the right planning, you’re able to build an email cadence that spans from one month to two years worth of content. A workflow allows you to control the communication along the journey that a client takes beginning as a prospect and then as a client and ultimately converting into a top tier client. We’ve found that providing more updates and content in the early days help in both establishing our philosophy and laying a foundation for a lasting relationship. Another value of creating workflows is that it gives you the opportunity to see proactively see what are focused on and serve specific content based on actions. For example, if you send an email out focused on market volatility and a lot of your clients are clicking on that email, this may show you that your clients are anxious about short-term market fluctuations. If you’ve built out your workflow in an action-based way, these clicks could trigger another communication that has stats in it showing how the market runs in cycles and tends to rise over time. Ultimately, this allows you to proactively solve an issue before it becomes a more significant problem. Another example of a use case might be that you have a bunch of clients that own Coca-Cola and you want to help them continue to learn more about Coke. You can put them in your specific “Coke” cadence. This is fundamental to your goal of staying relevant and relatable. Also, it provides valuable information to your clients that they want to see. Lastly, it allows you to learn about what scares them, what interests them and what they don’t care about.
Staying relevant, relatable, and personalized is now the game you play whether you like it or not. The tools within Hubspot allow for you to do a better job of that with emails to clients and prospects. To remain relevant, we have to continually add value to our clients every day and show that value consistently to build a strong relationship.