Half of clients (52%) don’t open or read the majority of emails from their financial advisor, according to a new survey¹ by Life Stage Insights, a marketing technology company that empowers financial advisors to automate deep connections with prospects and clients. The top reason clients say they don’t read their financial advisor’s emails is that too many don’t address topics that are important to them.

“Email remains one of the most important ways for financial advisors to build their relationships with prospects and clients,” said Life Stage Insights CEO David Baxter, “especially since in-person meetings are less feasible during COVID-19. Email newsletters can be highly valuable to clients and help keep them informed in difficult market conditions.”

“However, advisors' emails often get lost in the crowd,” said Baxter. “Most people are overloaded with information. Breaking through the clutter and being highly relevant to prospects and clients is one of the biggest challenges advisors face.”

THE POWER OF HYPER-PERSONALIZATION

Increasingly, financial advisors are turning to new technologies to make their client engagement strategies much more impactful. One of the most significant innovations is “hyper-personalization”: delivering only the most relevant messages and solutions to address the unique needs and priorities of each client.

Recent research shows hyper-personalization works. 40 percent of executives report that their customer personalization systems have delivered strong results in maximizing sales and profits.² Studies show personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, lift revenues by 5 to 15 percent, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30 percent.³

A McKinsey study places the potential value of new personalization systems across all value chains in the financial services industry at over $450 billion.⁴

NEW LIFE FOCUSᵀᴹ CAMPAIGNS

“When we interviewed financial advisors, they told us they wanted better ways to connect with prospects and clients, but also wanted systems that would enable them to be more efficient with their time,” said Baxter. Time-use studies among financial advisors reveal they spend more time acquiring the next client than they do meeting with all their current clients combined.⁵

“We sought to create a hyper-personalization solution that is easy-to-use and enables advisors to connect with what is most important to each client. Our new Life Focusᵀᴹ marketing system leverages life stage data built through our discovery tools to deliver hyper-personalized outreach based on each client’s life events, stages, and priorities,” continued Baxter. “Advisors using our turnkey system can accelerate their client acquisition, deepen client relationships, and increase retention.”

Life Stage Insights’ Life Focusᵀᴹ system includes click-and-go hyper-personalized email campaigns, automated social media posts, custom branded landing pages, triggered emails, and hundreds of proprietary and curated articles to power targeted marketing.

THE FUTURE OF FINANCIAL ADVISOR MARKETING

Financial advisors will continue to benefit from rapid innovations in hyper-personalization in the coming years. By leveraging advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, new systems will deliver increasingly relevant messages and experiences to each client.

These new systems not only will empower advisors to better meet the unique needs of each client, but will also help foster client loyalty, trust, and retention.

“We are just at the beginning of the tech revolution in the financial advice industry,” said Baxter. “As innovations accelerate, technologies will help advisors provide even better solutions for more clients, a certain win for both advisors and the clients they serve.”

ABOUT LIFE STAGE INSIGHTS

Life Stage Insights (https://www.lifestageinsights.com) is a marketing technology system that enables financial advisors to automate their marketing and client engagement, accelerate prospecting and onboarding, deepen client loyalty, and increase word-of-mouth referrals.

The system includes a suite of both lead generation and discovery resources, which work together to uncover each contact’s top priorities and autocalibrate marketing campaigns to deliver the right messages to the right contacts based on life stage data.

References

1. Life Stage Insights, Client Priorities Pulse Survey, conducted September 22-23, 2020.

2. “The Path to Personalization,” Forbes, May 1, 2019

3. Matt Ariker, Jason Heller, Alejandro Diaz, and Jesko Perrey, “How marketers can personalize at scale,” Harvard Business Review, November 23, 2015.

4. McKinsey & Co., “A technology blueprint for personalization at scale,” May 20, 2019

5. Michael Kitces, “How Do Financial Advisors Actually Spend Their Time And The Limitations Of Productivity?,” Nerd’s Eye View, March 18, 20197