Welcome to 2017. Now pay attention. Every new year – at least since the dawn of social media – your email box, Facebook page or Twitter feed has filled up with annoyingly perky marketeers trying to get you to think about (or what we in the trade call ‘buy’) marketing services or content.
You may have seen such headlines as:
• 10 ways to make your content pop in 2017!
• Eight reasons advisers need to nail their content in 2017!
• Not got a content strategy In 2017? Your wife is going to leave you!
• Invest in content in 2017 and keep the terrifying darkness At bay temporarily! Aiiieeee! It’s coming for meee!
The last couple may have been made up.
The reason I mention this is that you may be tempted, with the advent of a new year, to consider making a new and special effort to redouble your communications efforts with your clients.
Because if communication is good, then more communication is better, right? The truth, of course, is usually the opposite where your services are concerned. Money is emotion, and when the firm who looks after your money gets in touch that spikes your emotion, and more times than not will freak you out.
Once you’re done being freaked out, you realise you can safely ignore what the firm says. Then all goes back to being right with the world and you will happily keep on ignoring communications from nothingy budget updates through to more important stuff like agreeing to rebalances and all that kind of thing.
Bulking up
The reason I mention this, apart from getting to write fake headlines which cheer me up as I sit waiting for my first delayed flight of the year, is that I’ve been looking at client reports and reporting tools recently, and also been reviewing how my business, the lang cat, communicates with clients.
Spurious research by some bunch of hopefuls suggests that the average worker will receive 140 emails per day, or twice that if you work for a life company. Email filters are getting smarter and smarter, with recent versions of Outlook offering two levels of auto-filtering.
Your bulk email with 10 Tips To Smarter Investing In 2017! will be caught by many of these filters unless your client has added you to a preferred senders list, which they haven’t.
Our mailing list has about 4,000 names on it, mainly made up of advisers and providers, but also perhaps 800 or 1,000 real people. I reckon a third of the emails we send get caught by filters, even though we use all the tricks to try and make sure they don’t. I mean, what’s wrong with these people? Don’t they want to meet Russian single ladies looking for love?!
As advisers, you have never had as many powerful tools at your disposal for sending out content. Your email client itself isn’t bad at it. You can use free tools like MailChimp, or pro/paid-for versions (we use SpudMail from Codepotato).
Perhaps, more importantly, you have the ability to trigger emails, reminders, prompts and more from the client portal elements of your back office system. You can build decent communication right into your daily workflow if you spend the time to get it right.
Less is more
With great power comes, you know, the other thing, and if I can set a theme for 2017 as a result of this ramble, it’s this. Just because you can build something, doesn’t mean you should.
Just because you have the tools to send out regular communications to clients, doesn’t mean that you should. Just because you can integrate a Reuters financial newsfeed into your homepage, doesn’t mean that you should. (It’s amazing how many firms do this, even ones who say they coach clients not to worry about the vagaries of the stockmarket.)
I think I have written here before about the functionality arms race on the systems advisers use. This race to say that system X does more things in more ways than system Y does more harm than good in exactly the way that advisers, or even personal finance blogs, sending out rubbish about what Japanese equities did last week, causes fatigue on the part of readers.
Plain and simple
You can help some of this with the demands you make of platforms, back office systems and the other packages you use.
It’s helpful to be specific. For example, an adviser we talked to recently about integrations between back offices and platforms said he wanted ‘two-way integration’. What he meant was that he wanted his staff to update, say, the client’s details in the back office and have this immediately and seamlessly (or as close as possible) appear in the platform.
This is at odds with what others want, which is the ability to fire trades or maintain model portfolios in the back office. You need to be clear on your terms.
I think this will be really important this year, as I sense already – and we’re only a few days into the year – a greater energy and hunger this year from proposition development teams in providers to get something new out there.
There has been so much grunge for these guys to deal with in terms of regulatory overhead and so on, that I think I can almost sense enthusiasm for trying to do something that people will like. Make sure to engage with your providers to drive that.
I am not sure we will see any massive technological changes that will really make a difference to your clients in 2017. I do think there is the chance that some of the mess that has hung around for far too long in terms of client reporting, integrations, data aggregation and so on will get sorted out.
Replatforming will continue to be a theme – with Cofunds moving over to Aegon’s instance of GBST’s platform and Old Mutual Wealth hopefully making some progress on its IFDS Bluedoor adoption.
I do think we will see a much more mature digital investing and digital advice landscape develop. The former will be led by Vanguard, who should put us all out of our misery soon, and maybe even by the time you read this. This company sweeps all before it in the US; it will be interesting to see if it can do it here.
We will also see more moves from the digital advice sector to try and team up with you as advisers and gain wider distribution through joint ventures and partnerships. I think assets in this sector might double or treble this year – albeit from a low base.
But whatever happens and whatever we do, it is incumbent on us all to ask two questions:
• Why do I care?
• Why do my clients care?
Let our watchword be ‘relevance’! Let us not do stuff just because it’s there or because everyone’s talking about it! Let’s use the kit – not be driven by it. Relevant content will always pop.
Mark Polson is principal of platform and specialist consultancy the lang cat
