A financial adviser’s success revolves around the connections they make with their clients. Contact strategies are integral to this success as they help you maximise your existing client opportunities, build stronger connections and discover new ones. Here, I look at why financial advisors need a contact strategy.
What is a contact strategy?
In a nutshell, a contact strategy is a plan for how you get in touch with and communicate with your prospects and existing clients. The customer is the heart of your business and having a well-defined strategy in place supercharges your success rate with each new call or email.
There are many moving parts in a working contact strategy. When you factor in client contact information, notes, and appointments, this data all adds up. That’s why savvy marketers use customer relationship management (CRM) systems to help them save time on complex everyday tasks.
Developing a strong customer contact strategy
Taking the time to develop your contact strategy is an investment that can deliver rich rewards for your business. Contact strategies will differ from business to business but every successful contact strategy will revolve around five core principles:
Understanding your client
Contact strategy helps you identify what your existing and prospective clients need. By understanding them on a deeper level, you can deliver the communications that are most relevant and timely to them.
This knowledge can help you organise customers into specific groups such as:
Life stages – whether they’re a prospect or an existing client
Personas – representations of the different customer types your business services
Segments – broken down into demographic, location, product usage or other traits
Determining your objectives
Knowing what you want to gain from your contact strategy ensures you have the focus to plan, build and get measurable results.
Research from McKinsey found that of the brands customers purchased from, 70% were brands they considered during the initial phase of the decision-making process.
Examining each customers’ journey during their contact with your business can reveal potential roadblocks to conversion. This process will take time, but it can help you ensure your business is in that 70%.
Creating a visual map can help you better grasp how your potential clients interact with your business. As you map out the journey, be sure to consider whether they’re in the awareness, consideration and decision-making stages.
By mapping out their entire journey, you can:
-Understand what customers are thinking or feeling at each stage of the sales funnel
-Improve your client retention rate and customer lifetime value
-Identify what type of communication or content your customers need at each stage of their journey
-Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and understand if your website and other communications are meeting their needs
-Match specific contact types to your identified customer personas, life stages and segments
-This process is all about gaining insight and using this to improve the journey for your customers. Taking the time to review this each month or quarter can help you spot roadblocks and areas for improvement.
I hope you’ve found this post on Why Financial Advisors need a contact strategy useful.
If you’re a financial advisor looking for help, please feel free to get in touch here. Myself and my team are more than happy to help.
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